Why & How Did My Site Disappear From Google?!

Discussion in 'SEO' started by natekapi, Feb 5, 2007.

  1. #1
    Can anyone tell me why and how one of my sites (txtdrop dot com) disappeared from Google either today, or this past weekend??? It used to rank like #7 or #8 for free text messaging and now its nowhere to be found!!!?? WTF!!!?

    Did I screw something up, like possibly my robots.txt or something?? Any help here is appreciated!!!
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  2. rochow

    rochow Notable Member

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    #2
    Banned maybe?
     
    rochow, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  3. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #3
    What would I have done to get it banned though? I didn't really change anything recently.
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  4. hp420vc

    hp420vc Peon

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    #4
    Like your rankings disappeared or its has completely gone from google?
    If its gone, then you're in trouble
     
    hp420vc, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  5. darrens

    darrens Peon

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    #5
    well your not banned because i still see a pr5 on your site.

    What have you done to the site in the past few weeks? any major changes?
    also when did you notice the drop?
     
    darrens, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  6. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #6
    I just noticed the drop today. Looking at my analytics stats it looks like this happened in the past 48 hours. The only thing I have done in the past week is add the link to the ringtone site on there and I added a link to another one of my affiliate sites.

    I disallowed all my links, which redirect to affiliate sites and such, in my robots.txt, but that was a few weeks ago. I just checked Google sitemaps and didnt see anything in there either! Last crawl was the 29th.
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  7. thegypsy

    thegypsy Peon

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    #7
    U sure have a lot of Dupe content on the .net don't U?
     
    thegypsy, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  8. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #8
    The .net is an additional option for users having problems with the .com. The .net has also been around for a while so I dont think that would have anything to do with it.
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  9. lorien1973

    lorien1973 Notable Member

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    #9
    I agree. It looks like a dupe content problem. Identical content on .com and .net is not a good thing. Pick a domain and stick with it.
     
    lorien1973, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  10. thegypsy

    thegypsy Peon

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    #10
    dOOd.. just cause it hasn't been a problem doesn't mean it ISN'T the problem. Do a 'site:' command on both.. almost identical...

    strap on the outbound footer links ( how trusted are those sites BTW?) which is where a great deal of SPAM is (see page segmentation studies) and U have all the makings for some problems....
     
    thegypsy, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  11. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #11
    Well all the sites in the footers are mine....I dont do ANYTHING blackhat or even grey area, so I dont see why Google wouldn't trust my domains.

    So basically at this point, can someone tell me how the hell I get my site back into the search results?
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  12. lorien1973

    lorien1973 Notable Member

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    #12
    didn't everyone already say it? remove the duplicate content; remove the sitewide footers. Those are 2 good first steps.
     
    lorien1973, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  13. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #13
    Ok, well I thought people said that is why it may have been removed, but I didnt know that fixing those would get it back in. I didnt even know if it was possible to get it back in at this point. I've NEVER had anything like this happen so I really dont know WTF I'm doing.

    While the .com and .net look the same, the little bit of content on the site is exactly a word for word copy. If you read the text on the page its almost completely different, since one is for domestic texts with a MySpace add on, and the other is for international texts with a few tips.
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  14. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #14
    Would submitting this site to a dozen or so directoris in the past couple weeks have any adverse effects like this? Thats the only other thing that I've been doing in the past few weeks.
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  15. lorien1973

    lorien1973 Notable Member

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    #15
    I hate to be a repetitive robot - but you should fix the obvious problems. Duplicate content on duplicate domains hitting duplicate keywords with duplicate sitewides across each one. Do you think google doesn't notice?
     
    lorien1973, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  16. m0rtal

    m0rtal Well-Known Member

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    #16
    Not from my experience...
     
    m0rtal, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  17. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #17
    Sorry but the sites weren't meant to be duplicates! They were meant to compliment each other. On the .net only the links were similar. The small amount of content, only had two sentances that were similar. I'm working on making changes right now, please take a look and let me know if you think those will help.

    Should I run sitemaps on my sites now that I have them changed in hopes of getting them recrawled ASAP?
     
    natekapi, Feb 5, 2007 IP
  18. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #18
    Nice!! I just found my site...its on page 74 out of 75 for the term free text messaging now! It used to be #6!!...

    Sweet....
     
    natekapi, Feb 6, 2007 IP
  19. birujiano

    birujiano Peon

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    #19
    You must be very careful with bad practices
     
    birujiano, Feb 6, 2007 IP
  20. natekapi

    natekapi Peon

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    #20
    Hey I just wanted to update this thread and let everyone know that after about 3 weeks, my site is now back to where it used to be! It's actually jumped up about 3 or 4 spots in the SERPS and is ranked #3 for a lot of search terms!

    I'm really not sure what the issue was, but I did a lot of tweaking to txtdrop.com and .net in an attempt to fix things, if it was in fact a duplicate content issue or an issue with the affiliate links.

    Thanks for your help on the issue guys! This whole situation kinda sucked, but it was a very useful learning experience!
     
    natekapi, Feb 25, 2007 IP