Google Dropped my $40k/year page

[matthewd]

Hey Warriors,

I'm looking for anyone that has had some experience with my
situation to offer insights to what happened to them.

My situation is that I had a page ranking really high for a few
keyphrases that brought in about $40k/year for me as an affiliate.

On October 1st, the sales for that page dried up and so last night
after a few days of no sales, I decided to investigate it. It turns out
that my page not only has dropped in rank, it actually appears to be
unindexed now.

Obviously, I am familiar with this happening, but to new sites, not old ones.

This is an older domain with a page that is a year and a half old and has
held the top ranking position for around a year now.

Has anyone ever seen this happen to one of their older sites?

If so, was it totally removed for good or is still the Google Dance?

Hopefully, I am jumping the gun and it is simply Google doing their
normal stuff... just a little thrown off since I haven't seen this on an
older, more powerful site before.

[Ben Roy]

So if you do a search for site:YOURSITE.COM you get no results? That's not the 'dance', that's more serious. Are you doing anything on the page that violates their guidelines? It doesn't matter how long it's been out there, if you're breaking the rules they can delist you at any time.

[Allen Graves]

Were you cloaking your affiliate links?

[matthewd]

Ben -

My site is still indexed... it's just that one single page that is not.

I still have high rankings for other pages that have always had
high rankings, but that one single page has dropped from their index.

Allen -

I send my affiliates links to a redirect.

It's set up as: www.mydomain.com/goto/affiliateproduct

[Jerry Mcvictor]

Hi Ben,

My guess is it'll be back in about a week. If you don't have a Google webmaster account you might want to open one and submit a sitemap.

[Fernando Veloso]

Matthew

Same thing happened to a site of mine, 3 years ranking #1-#2 for a credit repair keyword.

October 28th last year it went bananas to page 4.

Since then i hammered links, new content, you name it.

Till now ranks 4th page.

So i cannot tell you what to do but you're not alone.

[LB]

If you're ranking for a competitive term...never underestimate competitors reporting you to Google complaining about the site quality.

It's practically a rule in many niches.

[madison_avenue]

For a highly competitive keyword always expect to have a human from google to check your page for quality at some point. Make sure to enough good content on the page to pass the human test. It does not have to be masses of content just enough to be credible, while at the same time making your sales pitch.

[RGallowitz]

I suggest you build a very small linkwheel to that one page and see what happens.

Quick question, have you done ANY seo to that page in the past 2 weeks?

Usually when you touch an old page, Google will do a reshuffle.
Like the old saying goes hey, "if it aint broke, don't fix it"


Regards
Reinhardt

[ed41143]

Google has been doing a lot of Google slapping lately, actually since about April from what I can tell and anyone of us who markets the kinds of products and using the methods that we use are suceptible at any given time.

We got slapped a month or two ago and had to change things completely and still have not gotten back to where we were, but it also makes you think about alternatives to Google, as they really need to be slapped back by us too, or they will just continue to strong arm everyone into fitting into their mold.

Well, good luck anyway, as $40,000 is a hard hit to take.
Ed

[Richard Odell]

How hard have you been promoting this site?

Seems to me that you may have been pushing the envelope a little too far?

Tell us a little more about your recent marketing tactics...

...then we can give you a bit more guidance.

-Rich

[l23bc]

had the google dance on one of my hubpages but i have been removed from the first page then placed 8 from the first page i think it may because it was a review site for clickbank with commericial links or because i used uniques traffic to page

[Mark Hess]

I had a similar thing happen to one of my pages. I hit it with backlinks and nothing happened after a month, it was still deindexed. Without knowing much information it sounds like someone may have reported your site to Google.

What I ended up doing, was running an Adwords campaign using the page (this may also help Google reindex the page itself). I already had all of the stats including the conversion rate of the page. Although it cut into my profit, I knew that I would make money off the keyword. In some niches, Adwords traffic converts better than SEO traffic.

[Richard Odell]

Originally Posted by RGallowitz

Usually when you touch an old page, Google will do a reshuffle.
Like the old saying goes hey, "if it aint broke, don't fix it"

I feel that Reinhardt - may just have it?

How do you feel about this?

-Rich

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by Allen Graves

Were you cloaking your affiliate links?

Could this be my problem?

I have a 5 year old site that gets loads of traffic from Yahoo and Bing but nothing from Google. It is indexed ok but it's all a million miles down in the serps.

I cloak all my links through a php script, mainly so that I can track the click throughs. Is this why Google doesn't like me?

Steve

[mlongley]

I would first check google webmaster tools, then resubmit a sitemap. Check to make sure that your internal link structure has not changed, also check your site for duplicate content. Then check the backlinks to the page. Also might want to see if it is a temporary issue. It might be back in a few days. I have had that happen on several sites.

[SurviveUnemployment]

What's this about cloaking affiliate links hurting you in the SERPs? If you have a "nofollow" tag on the link and the php page that redirects is not in the sitemap AND you restrict it in robots.txt, then it's none of Google's business. I don't see how they can punish you for having pages on your site that you explicitly tell them not to index, and I'm pretty sure they don't punish for that.

[Richard Odell]

Originally Posted by howdo-i

Could this be my problem?

I have a 5 year old site that gets loads of traffic from Yahoo and Bing but nothing from Google. It is indexed ok but it's all a million miles down in the serps.

I cloak all my links through a php script, mainly so that I can track the click throughs. Is this why Google doesn't like me?

Steve

Gotta tell you something - I have a site that doesn't show up at all in page rank - but it now sits on page two of Google #1.

Put it up as an experiment - just to see what it would do?

I pushed it too hard through a package of back-links that are readily available on this forum. At the same time I used a tactic of back-linking that is totally different from the norm, but which is fully in line with what Google expects?

Result is - that Google seems to be in a dilemma...

...conflicting data.

White hat - Grey hat - it's waiting for my next move...

Guess what? I now what it wants....so...that it is exactly what I will give it. No dilemma, no confusion, just something honest that is in a precise direction.

Its all it asks...nothing more....

-Rich

[matthewd]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

For those of you asking about my marketing
tactics for it, I have not done anything too extreme.

I use Angela's backlinks and I am also a member of Linkvana.

This method has been working quite well for me for a while
now and on several of my sites too, so I wouldn't think
that is the issue... but maybe.

As far as Adwords goes, I haven't ever been able to make
much for this from Adwords... it made great money on fairly
low traffic from SEO, but couldn't do it on Adwords.

Originally Posted by LB

If you're ranking for a competitive term...never underestimate competitors reporting you to Google complaining about the site quality.

It's practically a rule in many niches.

I have never dealt with something like that before... pretty amazed that
people would do it actually. Is there a way to check that/clear it w/
Google? I doubt it considering how little they care about other stuff.

Originally Posted by RGallowitz

Quick question, have you done ANY seo to that page in the past 2 weeks?

I have constant link building going to the page... a few links/day.

[Allen Graves]

Originally Posted by SurviveUnemployment

What's this about cloaking affiliate links hurting you in the SERPs? If you have a "nofollow" tag on the link and the php page that redirects is not in the sitemap AND you restrict it in robots.txt, then it's none of Google's business. I don't see how they can punish you for having pages on your site that you explicitly tell them not to index, and I'm pretty sure they don't punish for that.

I don't think anyone said it would hurt you.

Cloaking is what you WANT to do. It is the affiliate link that Google doesn't like anymore.

(i.e. www.whatever.com?aid=1432&tid=blah)

If you were using that format, I would have said that was your problem, but you seem to be using an appropriate alternative.

Allen

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by Allen Graves

I don't think anyone said it would hurt you.

Cloaking is what you WANT to do. It is the affiliate link that Google doesn't like anymore.

(i.e. www.whatever.com?aid=1432&tid=blah)

If you were using that format, I would have said that was your problem, but you seem to be using an appropriate alternative.

Allen

Hmmm my links look similar but use my domain rather than a 3rd party domain e.g. www.whatever.com?aid=1432&tid=blah

If this is the problem then I have a lot of work to do to remove the question mark while retaining the ability to track clicks.

Steve

[Zach Booker]

Depending on the PR and age, as you've seen from the posts above, this isn't uncommon at all.

There was just a discussion the other day on another forum about sending Google a letter about your site being dropped. Although that's kind of a last resort thing it does work in terms of getting your site back. (PM me for the thread and any help you need.)

Google won't take the time to check out your site and make sure it's legit. If it's reported they'll, sometimes, simply demote it.

If I were you i'd get the whole page quality social bookmarked a few hundred times.

After a week see if it pops up - it will - and then see where it's ranking. If it appears like you have ground to gain then get a proper link wheel made and watched it shoot to a few spots above where you were previously.

Good luck and just shoot me a PM if you need any help,

Zach

[trapp120]

Google has always railed against one thing - poor content and will do whatever they can to efficiently stop it. It's something anyone with success has already faced over the years. It's not 2001 - and nothing is easy.

As of the last few months Google has refined their ability to identify poorer sites and you are DEFINITELY not alone. I wish it was easy to identify the specific reasons that a site was flagged, but it's more than that - sometimes it's manually adjusted (as was the case with one of my sites) for various reasons relating to TOS or Competitors complaints.

I would love to be able to offer the best advice on getting it back and keeping the listing, but you're better off rolling with it anyway. A site generating income with organic rankings can make people incredibly lazy. This will get you back in the lab and making twice as much.

I will say, the one thing I've learned in the last seven years of marketing is to never count on one stream, and to work towards but never rely on organic listings.

[MemberWing]

My suggestion is to do proper cloaking of all links on your site and then bribe Google with adwords for a little while.
Buying Adwords is like paying the piper.
Proper cloaking means hiding your aff. links with no-followed redirects to your own site + *never* redirecting search engines and spiders to affiliate links.
Anything less than that is asking for trouble.

Gleb

[warmlikecoffee]

I hope you figure it out and get back in, thats a tough loss.

[Mike Hill]

Another guy on this forum was in a similar situation and he was slapped for 365 days and then after that it came back up... so clean up your site and wait...

Mike Hill

[Lukas]

Originally Posted by MemberWing

My suggestion is to do proper cloaking of all links on your site and then bribe Google with adwords for a little while.
Buying Adwords is like paying the piper.
Proper cloaking means hiding your aff. links with no-followed redirects to your own site + *never* redirecting search engines and spiders to affiliate links.
Anything less than that is asking for trouble.

Gleb

So, if I have a site that has good organic listings it is not advised to put a textlink to a redirect php script to a clickbank product on-topic product?

what if I just put it on 1 page?

[Pat Jackson]

Originally Posted by MemberWing

Proper cloaking means hiding your aff. links with no-followed redirects to your own site + *never* redirecting search engines and spiders to affiliate links.

How important is this?

I have always used a basic html redirect, but it's not nofollow. It's like this;

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Refresh"
content="1; URL=AFF LINK" target="_blank">
<title>TITLE</title>
</head>
<body>
<br />
</body>
</html>

[derekwong28]

I would get more backlinks to that page and then wait and see. It is likely to come up again if it is a technical issue. It won't if it was removed by Google on purpose after a manual review.

Sometimes, people purposefully put totally unrelated content on a high ranking domain e.g. a gambling page on a highly established edu site. Google take a dim view of this and will either de-index the page or the whole site altogether if caught.

[WareTime]

Originally Posted by MemberWing

My suggestion is to do proper cloaking of all links on your site and then bribe Google with adwords for a little while.
Buying Adwords is like paying the piper.
Proper cloaking means hiding your aff. links with no-followed redirects to your own site + *never* redirecting search engines and spiders to affiliate links.
Anything less than that is asking for trouble.

Gleb

Does an htaccess 301 redirect qualify as proper cloacking? Would a url shortener?

[cagliostro]

Originally Posted by LB

If you're ranking for a competitive term...never underestimate competitors reporting you to Google complaining about the site quality.

It's practically a rule in many niches.

Excuse me to jump in, but how do you do that in Google ? I mean what is the contact for it ?

I have been trying to find it for months.

[Solidsnake]

I had the same exact problem before and I realized I did something wrong (duplicate content)... Wair for 8 to 10 days and see if your rank will get back to normal..

[lansing]

Originally Posted by cagliostro

Excuse me to jump in, but how do you do that in Google ? I mean what is the contact for it ?

I have been trying to find it for months.

On any Google search results page, scroll down to the bottom. In the second-to-last line of links, click:

Dissatisfied? Help us improve

then fill in the form and click Send.

[MemberWing]

No it is not. 301 is just a type of redirect, named "permanent" redirect.
Proper powerful cloaking means:

• No direct affiliate links exists on page, only redirects are, such as: YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting
• On page link YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting marked as rel="nofollow"
• YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting - redirects visitors to your messy affiliate link: www.SOME-HOSTING.com/?affid=5&blah=123 (301 or 302 redirect)
• YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting - at your discretion (this would be black hat-ish) automatically redirects search engines to non-affiliate "innocent" destinations that are different from your affiliate link.
• You have ability to turn it on or off to have your page manually approved by search engine PPC team.

Gleb

Originally Posted by WareTime

Does an htaccess 301 redirect qualify as proper cloacking? Would a url shortener?

[munstersg01]

I have one site that has a similar problem, I tired providing it with more quality backlinks etc and nothing happened. It is still indexed but not rank.

It has been for 6 months and I couldn't figure out why.

[howdo-i]

Originally Posted by munstersg01

I have one site that has a similar problem, I tired providing it with more quality backlinks etc and nothing happened. It is still indexed but not rank.

It has been for 6 months and I couldn't figure out why.

Mine has been like that for over a year despite hundreds of backlinks.

Steve

[seobro]

Typical g-google. I still have a page that I built back in the early 90's and has a lot of links and is position one for a very competitive search term. A few years back, I tried to fix a poor spelling choice (off by one letter) think wee instead of we.

WELL, google went nuts, so my rank dropped like a rock. I was getting very little traffic. OK so I put the page back the way it was and guess what, I shot back up to position one in no time flat. In fact, checked today and it is still position one. Google loves old, I mean ancient content.

Google is like having a crazy girl fiend, that hears voices. She is totally unstable and you have to keep saying - yes dear.

[jschop]

As it’s a $40k site, clearly this issue is one you will be looking resolve quickly. Whilst I know that people are suggesting more link building, which I myself concur with, I do think that an email to Google would not go amiss. As there’s so much at stake, I’m sure you will look to explore every feasible avenue in order for you to be reinstated at the top of the rankings.
Good luck!

[WareTime]

Originally Posted by MemberWing

No it is not. 301 is just a type of redirect, named "permanent" redirect.
Proper powerful cloaking means:

• No direct affiliate links exists on page, only redirects are, such as: YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting
• On page link YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting marked as rel="nofollow"
• YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting - redirects visitors to your messy affiliate link: www.SOME-HOSTING.com/?affid=5&blah=123 (301 or 302 redirect)
• YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting - at your discretion (this would be black hat-ish) automatically redirects search engines to non-affiliate "innocent" destinations that are different from your affiliate link.
• You have ability to turn it on or off to have your page manually approved by search engine PPC team.

Gleb

Forgive my ignorance or pesistance. I don't see how these two would differ

"YOUR-SITE.com/best/hosting - redirects visitors to your messy affiliate link: www.SOME-HOSTING.com/?affid=5&blah=123 (301 or 302 redirect)"

VS.

mysite/best/hosting

and in .htaccess resides
redirect 301 /best/hosting http://affiliate

As long as I nofollow the /best/hosting in the pages I use the link, that would accomplish the same, no?

[Obama]

One test to make is to create a new page with similar content and redirect all the backlinks to that page. As one theory says that it is a page that is penalized, not its backlinks. And fortunately it seems that only a page of yours was penalized, not the entire site.

On the other hand, what happened to your page might be one bad backlink that killed it, and in that case this will probably not help. You can also look at all your most recent links and see if something looks like it could be the reason.

[adalf]

oh this sounds horrible, I'd hate to see this happen to anyone. I'd build some fresh links like others have suggested. Did you make any changes to the page in question? Did you add any links or anything else?

[ppcpimp]

I wouldn't under estimate a competitor sabotaging you. And there is no way to get it cleared up as we all know Google could care less.