FAQ - Google Masterclass - don't even think about starting a Google thread until you have read this

[ElectronPlumber]

Hi there fellow Warriors! I've written a FAQ for all the questions about when a site is deindexed or sunk in rankings. The current FAQ points to an article on Deindexing and is missing all the little details that people in this situation really need to know.

PLEASE COMMENT below with opinions or suggestions or improvements or new information!

I'll be happy to help analyze your site if you post it in this thread. but do not send me PMs asking me to analyze your de-indexed sites! My mailbox has been flooded.

Every day there seems to be 5-10 posts about how someones site was dropped from Google, was banned from Google, was deindexed from Google, received a Google slap, etc. Call it what you will, but to see your traffic suddenly drop is scary to say the least.

Usually they are scared and confused and make a post looking for answers where the same questions get asked over and over and over.

I'm starting this thread to collect all the common wisdom and advice for those poor folks who have seen their site disappear and what they can expect.

First, let's clarify some terms here:

1. Deindexed - When your domain is completely removed from Google. Also known as Banned.
2. Penalized - When your domain still exists but none of your pages can be found through very direct search queries. Also known as Sent To Hell and Sandboxed.
3. Sunk - Your domain wasn't Deindexed or Penalized, but the traffic you were getting from Google suddenly drops dramatically. Keywords you used to rank well for (#1-5) are now ranking poorly (#5-50+).

How To Figure Out The Extent Of The Damage

Check With Google's WebMaster Tools

Go to webmaster.google.com. If you haven't setup an account and claimed your site, do it. Google will tell you exactly if there are any technical issues with your site here that may be causing your issues.

How To Tell If You Were Deindexed

Do a "site:yourdomain.com" search in Google, where "yourdomain.com" is your domain. For example, I would type the following exactly into a search box, without the quotes: "site:electronplumber.com".
The pages that come back are all the pages Google has in their database for your site. People call this your INDEXED PAGES. If your site doesn't show and you get this message "Your search - site:electronplumber.com - did not match any documents." you've been deindexed. Note that ANY typo or mistake will cause you to lose a lot of sleep over nothing. If all my pages are at blog.electronplumber.com or a sub-folder like electronplumber.com/blog, you need to do a site: search there. Check them all before you panic.

Don't forget that Google's main aim is to provide quality content and the best results for searchers. Typically a complete deindexing occurs from one of these things:

• Major Navigation Problems - This happens far more often than people realize in the IM world. Your pop-up opt-in or script that keeps people from using their back button to leave your site correctly WILL get your site deindexed by Google.
• Duplicate Content - Eventually a site that features ONLY duplicate content from shopping sources such as Amazon or Shopzilla will be deindexed.
• Offline For Too Long - Your site was offline multiple times for long enough for Google to deem it 100% no longer active. Google does NOT want sites in it's results that don't exist anymore. You may not have noticed your site ever being down, but if your server reboots at the same time Google tries to crawl it and a line goes down to your hosting provider the next time Google tries to crawl it, your site could get temporarily declared dead. This happens far more often than people think. It may take days or weeks to become reindexed. Only time will tell here.
• Technical Difficulties - Your site is blocked for indexing by a robots.txt file. Most people don't realize that some automatic Wordpress installs have a setting to not allow search engines to find your site.
• Manual Action - Your site received a manual review by a Google Search Quality Engineer and was found in serious violation of the Google Webmaster guidelines and includes a great many things you could have done wrong.
• Malware Links - If you use autoblogging content on your site, you could be hosting links to malware or virus sites without knowing it. Go through each link on your site and make sure none of them link to sites that Google reports as hosting malware.
• Too Fast A Rise - Your giant link building scheme worked and your site shot to the top of the search results for a new site for a monitored keyword For example, too many links to a new site with too little content. Note that I have never seen a site that was deindexed for backlinks alone without a Google Engineer looking at your site. Not one. It's far more likely that your link building worked too well, which caused your site to rise in the SERPS, which caused your site to appear on a Google Quality Engineers manual review report, or caused your longer term competition to report your site to Google as spam.

As a general rule, if the ONLY redeeming value for your site is to earn YOU money while providing no value to your visitor, there is a good chance Google will eventually deindex you. YOU may think that your awesome site layout helps people find products faster or looks better, but if you copied all the descriptions for products right from Amazon, you haven't added value in Google's eyes.

How To Tell If You Were Penalized

If your site passes the index test above but is not showing up for searches, you might have been Penalized. Do a "yourdomain.com" and a "www.yourdomain.com" search in Google, not including the quotes. Does your site appear at the top for at least one of those? Any site that hasn't been hit with a Google penalty should appear as the first results for an exact match search.
If your site doesn't appear, you may have been Penalized by a Google Search Quality Engineer. If your site has violated the Google Webmaster guidelines but still has some redeeming value, your site may be marked in the Google Search system with a penalty to all it's rankings for some period of time. If this happens to you, take a long hard look at your site. The main reasons for being Penalized are:

• Linking To Bad Neighborhoods - Linking OUT to bad sites such as gambling, porn, hacks, torrents, and the like are seen as bad for your site.
• Buying links - Tons of debate on if buying links can hurt your site. Most people say the worst that can happen here is you don't get credit for the bought links. If not, then I could buy links to my competition report them to Google and have them penalized. If your site obviously only has paid backlinks though, that might get you into trouble.
• Selling links - Being caught selling links will definitely hurt your site.
• Engaging in linking schemes - Basically trying to hide buying or selling links by using three way trades and such.
• Sneaky Redirects - Attempting to redirect visitors but not search engine robots.
• Hiding Content - Serving different links or content to search robots than human visitors.
• Unnatural Linking Pattern - Your backlinks triggered some algorithmic flag known only to Google. Typically due to keyword stuffing. This is by far the most common cause of algorithmic Google penalties. If more than 90% of your links are for a few highly targeted keywords, you'll hit this.

Many people call this being Sandboxed, but there is much debate over exactly what Sandboxing is that I don't want to get into here. Check the Wikipedia page on the Sandbox Effect in the Resources section below. Your only option here is to fix whatever you think Google caught you doing (you'll have to guess unfortunately) and either wait it out for a few months and hope it comes back, or submit your site to Google for Reconsideration.

How To Tell If You Were Sunk

If you weren't Deindexed and weren't Penalized but your site's traffic from Google keyword searches has dropped dramatically, your site might have Sunk.
There is no manual action by Google, no removal from the index. But keywords you were previously ranking well for are no longer ranking well. There are MANY reasons why your site may have sunk in the Google rankings, but some of the most frequent are:

• Site Redesign - Internal links count and a site redesign may have removed what Google considers to be "aged" links, to the determent of your rankings
• Link Shaping - So you read an article that says using "nofollow" on internal links is a good idea? You know what? It's NOT. Using "nofollow" on links doesn't cause them to save their link juice, it pours that juice down the sink instead. Don't use "nofollow" except as a way to discourage comment spam.
• Technical Errors - Setting your robots.txt by accident to prevent indexing on some inner pages can have a VERY negative effect on your rankings
• Loss of Backlinks - If you rely on a few high value backlinks that suddenly disappear, your rank will drop.
• Loss of Backlink Value - I once had a site of mine linked in an article on the NPR All Tech Considered blog, a PR 7 page. They only update once every few weeks, so for about three months while the article stayed on the front page I had a VERY powerful backlink. My search traffic to that site increased about 25%. Then three months later after the article dropped off the front page, my search traffic dropped back down again. And on the flip side, one of my bigger sites started as a Wordpress.com free site. After a year I wised up and transferred it to my own hosted domain, paying Wordpress.com $12 to redirect everything from my old site to my new site. The next year I decided not to pay the $12 again since I was no longer getting traffic from the redirects. A few weeks later, my search traffic dropped close to 50%! It was no longer getting credit for those nice aged backlinks that were previously redirected. I coughed up the $12 and a few days later my traffic went back to normal.
• Lack of Backlink Growth - If you have been doing lots of backlink building and then suddenly drop off.
• Lack of Fresh Content - Google loves updates and fresh content gives your entire site a boost. Some people call this QDF or "Query Deserves Freshness"
• Competition - Someone is now outranking you.
• Google Update - Like the famed "Google Farmer Update", sometimes Google just changes their algorithm and you can get hit.
• Too Much Duplicate Content, Not Enough Links - I've seen this happen to many autoblog sites. After a few hundred articles without enough backlinks, you'll trigger some math formula where Google gets wise and you'll see search traffic plummet across the board.
• Outbound Link Junk - Too many outbound links can dilute any internal links you have. As a general rule, never have more than 5-10% outbound links on one page unless they're to one of your own sites. Don't increase your internal links to hit this percentage though!
• Penalized - Anything from the Penalized or Deindexed list above can cause your site to Sink instead of a harsher penalty if you are lucky.
• Loss of Honeymoon Effect - Google actually gives every new site a chance to be discovered. For the first few months your new site with new content will get a boost in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Positions) to give it a chance of being discovered and becoming popular, even when it has no links. When this effect goes away, your rankings will drop.
• Slow Site - Google takes into account site speed and loading times for their algorithms. If you are on a shared server, make sure your sites is optimized for speed as much as possible.
• Site Dilution - Too Much Content, Not Enough Backlink Power - Say when you first start your site, you have 10 posts and you make 10 backlinks. If you add 100 more posts and make 100 backlinks from the same 5 article directories, Google won't see those as 100 backlinks. The algorithm will see them as 10 good links and 90 lower value duplicate backlinks from the same domains and IPs. Now you have 110 articles sharing the same link power from your home page instead of 10 articles and everything drops in the SERPS. As you add fresh content, you have to create fresh DIVERSE backlinks to support that content.

People Talk About The Sandbox. Is My Site In The Sandbox?

You will hear people claim that your new site is in something called the Google Sandbox. The theory is that a new site that has too many backlinks created will get put in a box by Google for 6-12 months and not appear high up in the search results.

Matt Cutts, head of the Quality Team at Google has stated publicly that there IS NO GOOGLE SANDBOX, but there are parts of the Google algorithm that may lead people to believe that such a thing exists.

Google wants a quality experience for visitors of its search engine. People like new and fresh content. Putting new sites that go viral "in a sandbox" is NOT in Google's best interest.

The most likely explanation for The Sandbox effect is this:

1. New unique content site gets created and gets a giant fresh content bonus (called QDF or Query Deserves Freshness) since everything is brand new.
2. User builds tons of keyword stuffed spammy low quality backlinks to said new site. The link profile for that site looks unnatural to the algorithm. The Google algorithm very likely then IGNORES these low quality links for new sites.
3. A month or two later, the site is Sunk to the depths of the search rankings once it loses its QDF bonus and only has ignored backlinks. Site owner thinks they have been sandboxed and stops building links, which makes the problem worse.

If Google was to penalize a site for having too many backlinks, anyone could take a competitors site out of the search results by spamming hundreds of thousands of low quality backlinks at it. The general consensus among SEO experts is that Google will ignore those low quality backlinks, not penalize you for them. However, others swear that you can disrupt a competitors rankings with link spam if that competitor's link profile is weak to begin with.

The lessons here?

1. Make sure your backlinks look natural (links to words like "here" and "this site" and full URLs like "http://www.examplesite.com/article1"
2. Make sure you create enough high quality links to any new site to counteract these effects.

Should I Resubmit My Site For Reconsideration?

Do NOT submit your site for Reconsideration unless you have identified what is wrong first and fixed it. You are basically asking for a Google Quality Engineer to come take a manual look at your site. Have you ever bought any links? Sold any links? Is your site keyword stuffed? Is your site mostly to earn you affiliate commissions? I'd guess 95% of the people on this forum do not really want a Google engineer taking a manual look at their site. A reconsideration request is like asking for an IRS audit without being 100% sure you are owed money. It will just end badly. If anyone with an affiliate site would like to share an example of a successful reconsideration request with us, I'd love to hear it. There is a first time for everything.

If you have received a manual action, you can usually tell. Use the Google toolbar and check if your PageRank is N/A or is grayed out. Check the Google Webmaster report for your site.

If you have been penalized/deindexed/sunk because the Google algorithm had an issue with your site, asking for reconsideration is just asking for trouble. Google will NEVER tell you what is wrong with your site and will just get you a manual review that will end badly. Figure it out using the lists above, fix it, then wait a few weeks before even considering submitting a reconsideration request.

References:
Google Basics - Webmaster Tools Help - Google

Webmaster guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Webmaster Tools Help - Google

Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help - Google

Link schemes - Webmaster Tools Help - Google

Paid links - Webmaster Tools Help - Google

Requesting reconsideration of your site - Webmaster Tools Help

Wikipedia: Sandbox Effect

Query Deserves Freshness and Other Temporal Tales | Search News Central

If you find this FAQ useful, please click the THANKS Button -------------------------------------VVVVV

[ElectronPlumber]

This one post reserved for future additions that go over the single post length. Please still comment, just making sure this has enough space for the future.

[Mly2000]

( if deemed unhelpful, i will remove electron, just pm me if you dont like the post)

Looking through the google webmaster help section, i looked up the robots.txt error. Google states that alot of times this is not an error, and that if you set it up, it probably does not need fixing. Now i am no expert so if this needs to be corrected by a more experienced person, please do, i do not want to give any unhelpful or false information.

Google says if you set it up yourself, they will respect it and continue to look for other problems that might cause you to get de-indexed

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by Mly2000

( if deemed unhelpful, i will remove electron, just pm me if you dont like the post)

Looking through the google webmaster help section, i looked up the robots.txt error. Google states that alot of times this is not an error, and that if you set it up, it probably does not need fixing. Now i am no expert so if this needs to be corrected by a more experienced person, please do, i do not want to give any unhelpful or false information.

Google says if you set it up yourself, they will respect it and continue to look for other problems that might cause you to get de-indexed

That's a great point Mly2000. What I think they mean in the Google Webmaster Help is that Google will respect the settings you put in robots.txt no matter what, even if it hurts you!

For example, some hosts install Wordpress with the Privacy setting that says "I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors" since they assume you want a private blog by default.

This puts the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Which means, don't allow any search engines to index this entire site! If you do this by mistake, you'll see your site disappear from the Google index.

[Mly2000]

seems i have some fixing to do.... now to find out how to remove that...

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by ElectronPlumber

Deindexed - When your domain is completely removed from Google. Also known as Sandboxed.

That's not true. What people believe to be a sandbox, is getting burried
in the SERPs, not deindexed.

There is no sandbox.

Here is the official warrior forum FAQ:

What's the sandbox?

The disappointment webmasters feel when Google's stupid algorithms don't appreciate their site. It can't be them so it must be Google's fault.

These are in the FAQ sticky above this part of the forum.

Paul

[georgewoodman]

Thanks Electron, I'm going through a "suddenly dumped site" problem at the moment and thought I had a penalty of some kind. Did your penalty check and it seems ok.
However I used some penalty check software and it reckons I have a "-30" penalty so I am hoping you are right. Many thanks

George

P.S. what do you think the -30 means ?

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by paulgl

That's not true. What people believe to be a sandbox, is getting burried
in the SERPs, not deindexed.

There is no sandbox.

Here is the official warrior forum FAQ:



These are in the FAQ sticky above this part of the forum.

Paul

Good catch. I'll move the "also known as Sandboxed" to the Sunk section.

[JamesPenn]

This is HUGELY useful.

Thanks very much. I used to have one site that got traffic from incredibly competitive keywords but now SE traffic is non-existent.

It's very useful to understand the hows and whys it happens.

James

[InTheMaking]

Electron, is there a chance sites getting sunk will ever jump back up?

I think my sites could have jumped down because I stopped backlinking once I reached the #1-4 spot.

[galisgos]

Do you think duplicate content means exactly the same? I've been through some of my articles and the format for some is exactly the same - in some cases the first introductory paragraph is very similar due to the nature of the articles.
The names of the articles are pretty similar as well, imagine something like this (keywords are example) these articles:
Iphone overview and stats
Review: Iphone1
Review: Iphone2
Review: Iphone3
Review: Iphone4

I've been checking google and only the top article survived. The other 4 have totally bombed. They previously were on the first page. Now, they are not even in the top 200 (they are still indexed) and this is for a very specific keywords, a lot of irrelevant stuff is being returned over these specifc articles!

Is it worth re-writing the other articles a little or is that it for them?

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by georgewoodman

Thanks Electron, I'm going through a "suddenly dumped site" problem at the moment and thought I had a penalty of some kind. Did your penalty check and it seems ok.
However I used some penalty check software and it reckons I have a "-30" penalty so I am hoping you are right. Many thanks

George

P.S. what do you think the -30 means ?

Goerge, I don't know that penalty check software you are talking about so I can't be sure what the -30 means. What did you use?

It probably means that if every site has 100 "points" from Google to help it rise in the search results, yours only get 70 or something. You could still get something on page one, but it will take 30% more links or effort or something.

If the site in your sig is what you are talking about, I can see why you might have dropped.

1) You are using a link buying exchange that might have gotten you flagged. I'm talking about your "resources" pages.

2) You have some shady links to car insurance quotes in your footer that Google probably views as paid links.

I'd bet if you removed both of those you'd see your rankings come back in a month or so, maybe sooner.

Originally Posted by InTheMaking

Electron, is there a chance sites getting sunk will ever jump back up?

I think my sites could have jumped down because I stopped backlinking once I reached the #1-4 spot.

Absolutely! If your site has sunk down due to lack of fresh content or no new backlinks, get back at it!

It doesn't take as many backlinks to stay in the top spot as it takes to get your there in the first place. I usually cut back to 50% of my link building when I hit the top and see what happens. If it sticks for a few weeks, go down to 25%, etc.

[hbsjcd3]

Originally Posted by ElectronPlumber

Goerge, I don't know that penalty check software you are talking about so I can't be sure what the -30 means. What did you use?

It probably means that if every site has 100 "points" from Google to help it rise in the search results, yours only get 70 or something. You could still get something on page one, but it will take 30% more links or effort or something.

If the site in your sig is what you are talking about, I can see why you might have dropped.

1) You are using a link buying exchange that might have gotten you flagged. I'm talking about your "resources" pages.

2) You have some shady links to car insurance quotes in your footer that Google probably views as paid links.

I'd bet if you removed both of those you'd see your rankings come back in a month or so, maybe sooner.



Absolutely! If your site has sunk down due to lack of fresh content or no new backlinks, get back at it!

It doesn't take as many backlinks to stay in the top spot as it takes to get your there in the first place. I usually cut back to 50% of my link building when I hit the top and see what happens. If it sticks for a few weeks, go down to 25%, etc.

I think he is talking about this website:
Lilengine.com | Google Penalty Checker Tool

[TBInternetMarketing]

What a great post. I wonder if this should be made into a sticky,because you're right, you do see these kind of questions 5 times a day. Thanks

[massivemarketing]

Agreed this is a great post! I was about to ask a few questions but thank god I found this. I have a question that I hope others can help answer.

I have a lot of clients asking for web design and marketing work and a lot of times cross sell SEO and hosting. Right now I am hosted with a VPS with 2 static IP addresses. We have many clients hosted with us under the same IP addresses and many of them are #1 for various keywords. Everything we've done so far has been conservative but we have one project which will requires aggressive article marketing back linking. For this project we will generate 33,000 backlinks a month through article marketing and will host this through our VPS.

If this site get penalized or deindexed. Will it have a domino effect and take all out websites? If so, would getting additional IP addresses help? I've heard the term c-class IP's too. Will that help?

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by massivemarketing

Agreed this is a great post! I was about to ask a few questions but thank god I found this. I have a question that I hope others can help answer.

I have a lot of clients asking for web design and marketing work and a lot of times cross sell SEO and hosting. Right now I am hosted with a VPS with 2 static IP addresses. We have many clients hosted with us under the same IP addresses and many of them are #1 for various keywords. Everything we've done so far has been conservative but we have one project which will requires aggressive article marketing back linking. For this project we will generate 33,000 backlinks a month through article marketing and will host this through our VPS.

If this site get penalized or deindexed. Will it have a domino effect and take all out websites? If so, would getting additional IP addresses help? I've heard the term c-class IP's too. Will that help?

There is MUCH debate on what happens to shared IPs for SEO. The general consensus is that you will not get dinged for sharing the same IP as a site that Google has penalized. Think about the millions of domains on shared hosting plans at GoDaddy and Hostgator and the like that share the same IP as 1000-2000 others.

Another general consensus is that Google might think less of links that come from the same IP. So if you were hosting two sites on the same IP address and linked from one to the other, Google might see that as a "fake" link and not give you credit for it in their algorithm.

There are hints and rumors that Google Quality Engineers can be a very vindictive bunch and when they find one site that violates their terms, will whack all the sites they can find from that owner. How far will they go to find you? Tough to say. If they can tell that all the domains on one IP are registered to one person or share the same Google Analytics or Adsense account, they might just smack them all.

So where does that leave you? If you are being well paid by the clients you should certainly take ALL steps possible to protect their SEO investment. Talk to your hosting provider and get an IP address just for the new client. Register the domain in their name, not yours. Make a new Google Analytics and Webmaster account unrelated to your others.

[crowly]

Hi ElectronPlumber,

Here is one for you - my site bluewidgets.info when put in Google search like that - bluewidgets.info will not show up. It says " Showing results for bluewidgets.net. Search instead for bluewidgets.info. " When I do the search with quotes it shows in the first 3 spots. Site was ranking ( homepage ) on 3rd page and when out top 1000 . Funny thing is that an inner page is still ranking for the same keyword on 5th page.


Any ideas?

Thanks

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by crowly

Hi ElectronPlumber,

Here is one for you - my site bluewidgets.info when put in Google search like that - bluewidgets.info will not show up. It says " Showing results for bluewidgets.net. Search instead for bluewidgets.info. " When I do the search with quotes it shows in the first 3 spots. Site was ranking ( homepage ) on 3rd page and when out top 1000 . Funny thing is that an inner page is still ranking for the same keyword on 5th page.


Any ideas?

Thanks

That's the Google algorithm saying that there is much more highly ranked site than yours with a similar spelling. It's as if you searched for "air conditoner", Google will try to correct it for you.

Once you make a name for your site in it's own right with backlinks, you'll see that effect go away.

You are no longer ranking most likely since your site no longer has the honeymoon bonus being applied to it. Google gives a new site a sort of honeymoon period where it gets higher rankings so that people can find it and have a chance to link to it. It's considered NEW content for a while, and Google loves new content. After a month or two without getting good backlinks, your site loses it's honeymoon bonus and will drop. Your site can keep this honeymoon bonus for longer by constantly adding new unique content to it.

[JamesPenn]

I have a quick question regarding one of my niche sites performance.

I made a new post the other day and within minutes it was indexed in Google and on page 4 for the keyword I was targeting. The following day I was getting a fair bit of traffic direct to this blog post.

The next day the traffic stopped and when I went to Google and typed in www.myblog.com/post-name - it was nowhere to be found.

Now when I search the URL in Google it is there but if I highlight a paragraph from my content and search it, it doesn't get found.

This omission from the search results is a one off - it hasn't happened to any of my other pages.

The only explanation I can think of is that I added an Aweber web form at the end of the post using the javascript webform. I don't normally do this. Would this cause an issue with ranking?

James

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by JamesPenn

I have a quick question regarding one of my niche sites performance.

I made a new post the other day and within minutes it was indexed in Google and on page 4 for the keyword I was targeting. The following day I was getting a fair bit of traffic direct to this blog post.

The next day the traffic stopped and when I went to Google and typed in www.myblog.com/post-name - it was nowhere to be found.

Now when I search the URL in Google it is there but if I highlight a paragraph from my content and search it, it doesn't get found.

This omission from the search results is a one off - it hasn't happened to any of my other pages.

The only explanation I can think of is that I added an Aweber web form at the end of the post using the javascript webform. I don't normally do this. Would this cause an issue with ranking?

James

That's a tricky question to answer without looking at the actual site or page. Feel free to drop it in a private message if you want me to take a look.

A page issue with the javascript could certainly prevent Google from crawling that page, as well as any sort of mistake or typo in your robots.txt file as well.

You should certainly check the Google Webmaster results for that site and see if any errors appear in their crawl logs for that page.

Another possibility is that the page has gone over some Google algorithm threshold for things like keyword stuffing, linking out to a known bad site, or duplicate content.

It could be that the page has gone into Google's "supplemental" index due to any of the reasons listed here: Supplemental Result - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'd remove whatever your did right before it dropped off (the awber opt in) and see if that fixes itself in a few weeks. Also, give it some backlinks and see if it comes back.

What happens if you just take a sentence off that page, put it in quotes and search for it, does your page come up?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by JamesPenn

I have a quick question regarding one of my niche sites performance.

I made a new post the other day and within minutes it was indexed in Google and on page 4 for the keyword I was targeting. The following day I was getting a fair bit of traffic direct to this blog post.

The next day the traffic stopped and when I went to Google and typed in www.myblog.com/post-name - it was nowhere to be found.

Now when I search the URL in Google it is there but if I highlight a paragraph from my content and search it, it doesn't get found.

This omission from the search results is a one off - it hasn't happened to any of my other pages.

The only explanation I can think of is that I added an Aweber web form at the end of the post using the javascript webform. I don't normally do this. Would this cause an issue with ranking?

James

Hi James,


This sounds like the typical results you might see from QDF (Query Deserves Freshness), Google's freshness factor. Once this temporary boost wears off, your page will sink in the rankings to it's truly earned rank.

Since different keywords will have different levels of competition, how far and fast your page's rank fluctuates will vary based on that competition.

There are other possibilities, like someone scraping your content and outranking you with duplicate content. But most of the time it's just QDF.

[JamesPenn]

Thanks everyone for your help so far.

What the hell, I'll just share the page:

Top 10 Best Oils For Hair Growth | Natural Oils For Hair Growth | Essential Oils For Hair Growth (opt-in form now removed)

The keyword it was on page 4 for was "best oils for hair growth".

The post lists the top 10 oils, and then as I write an article on one specific oil, I update the original top 10 list with a hyperlink to the specific article.

If you search "Top 10 Best Oils For Hair Growth" then you'll see (or at least I'm seeing) that one of my specific articles about coconut oil is ranked in the top position. My page is nowhere to be seen.

Any ideas why?

James

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by JamesPenn

Thanks everyone for your help so far.

What the hell, I'll just share the page:

Top 10 Best Oils For Hair Growth | Natural Oils For Hair Growth | Essential Oils For Hair Growth (opt-in form now removed)

The keyword it was on page 4 for was "best oils for hair growth".

The post lists the top 10 oils, and then as I write an article on one specific oil, I update the original top 10 list with a hyperlink to the specific article.

If you search "Top 10 Best Oils For Hair Growth" then you'll see (or at least I'm seeing) that one of my specific articles about coconut oil is ranked in the top position. My page is nowhere to be seen.

Any ideas why?

James

Everything looks completely fine on that page. It has to have something to do with the opt-in you had on there. Is that the only page you put the opt-in code on? I'd be super wary of putting it anywhere else.

Make some external backlinks to it and I'd bet you see it pop back up in the next few weeks.

[bluecanaria]

Anybody knows what the -30 means in tools.seomoves.org/penaltychecker?

[thebitbotdotcom]

Ahh yes...the Honeymoon effect...I know it well...and now it has a name..

[bluecanaria]

hmm my site is 10 months old...

[dburk]

Originally Posted by bluecanaria

Anybody knows what the -30 means in tools.seomoves.org/penaltychecker?

It's Voodoo SEO, you have to believe in the curse... err... penalty for it to have any power over you.

[JamesPenn]

A quick update on my issue...

The page is back in the rankings and is on page one (at least when I search) for one of my main keyphrases that gets 2.4k searches per month. Good stuff!

Thanks to everyone who helped with my issue.

James

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by bluecanaria

hmm my site is 10 months old...

It means that site did some unknown analysis and determined that all things being equal you should rank higher that you actually do. It probably just does a site: search and a direct URL search. If that don't show up as #1 for one of those, it shows you that -30 and that likely have a penalty.

[bluecanaria]

Thanks for answering.

My site is #1 on a direct URL or site: search, but seems to be gone to google hell or something...

It was ranking #5 at best for my main keyword, and appears to be in the sandbox or something now.. So what do I do? keep on building links and add new content? This is what i have been doing all week.

[jewel3000]

Thanks @ElectronPlumber - this is awesome & comprehensive.

So far, my pages have only benefited from Panda. Hopefully I won't do anything to muck-up things. I will definitely bookmark this page, just in case!

[dungdenvn]

nice post, thank you a lot for this. It's may save my site

[Mgriff]

I am curious what you mean about "Site Redesign". I bought a PR 4 aged domain a few months back and redesigned the site using wordpress.

I started getting tons of traffic from my keywords, then rankings totally sunk and have been that way for over 2 weeks now. According to your guidelines, my site has Sunk.

I add about 1 unique blog post every day for the past 2 months and I have some good links coming from top article directories, High PR link networks, press releases, link wheels and .EDU backlinks.

The site is not dancing at all. By that I mean the rankings have not temporarily come back to the first page at all.

Do you think this is just the google dance and my site will come back if I just keep adding unique content and backlinks? Any other thoughts?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by Mgriff

I am curious what you mean about "Site Redesign". I bought a PR 4 aged domain a few months back and redesigned the site using wordpress.

I started getting tons of traffic from my keywords, then rankings totally sunk and have been that way for over 2 weeks now. According to your guidelines, my site has Sunk.

I add about 1 unique blog post every day for the past 2 months and I have some good links coming from top article directories, High PR link networks, press releases, link wheels and .EDU backlinks.

The site is not dancing at all. By that I mean the rankings have not temporarily come back to the first page at all.

Do you think this is just the google dance and my site will come back if I just keep adding unique content and backlinks? Any other thoughts?

Hi ,

This sounds like yet another case of QDF. Please see my post above:http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...ml#post3682620

[Moneyerr]

Your post is very much useful.
Thanks. It's very useful to understand the hows and whys it happens.

[Katejon]

Thanks to Electron Plumber. Shall investigate and leave no stone unturned.

Can't tell if I am now twice as far down the rankings because of panda or the 'honeymoon effect' - which I have never heard of before!
But the weird thing is that sites now above me have much lower link 'profiles' - are new, not even got keywords on the site and title and some not even selling similar things (bizarre) and I was doing OK. I'm fairly new to this so still tying to work out what I can!
I think my main crime maybe was to write decent articles which then got syndicated (not under my control)

[aaronngoh]

My site parlorguitars.net used to rank number 1 in google for the keyword parlor guitars

Recently I cannot find it on the first page

When I do google search for sitearlorguitars.net and parlorguitars.net, I can find the site

I really do not know what to do to get myself back on the 1st page of google?

Any advice would be great

[blend]

Fantastic thread, thanks for taking the time to write it

[pixelpusher]

Originally Posted by ElectronPlumber

There are hints and rumors that Google Quality Engineers can be a very vindictive bunch and when they find one site that violates their terms, will whack all the sites they can find from that owner. How far will they go to find you? Tough to say. If they can tell that all the domains on one IP are registered to one person or share the same Google Analytics or Adsense account, they might just smack them all.

This is certainly not a rumor. Two days ago, google basically just destroyed my online income. They must have found a few of my sites that they didn't like, and de-indexed as many of mine as they could find, which was maybe around 20 sites.

What I don't understand is this: Why can't they at least send a warning of some kind, or just throw the sites in the supposed 'sandbox'...frick, even tell me to take my site offline until I correct the problems. Anything, just don't de-index all of my sites without notice or warning, or any understanding of why they did.

I think the problem is they're too arrogant or too lazy to care, they just get high on their power and say, "hmmm...don't like you....gone....gone....gone" and when you try to get an honest answer as to what to change, you get a link to a bunch of non-specific outlines of what they consider questionable. I don't want questionable, I want black and white.

Yes, I build affiliate sites, and yes I work on them every day to try to make them better. I have people emailing me or posting comments every single day with questions, and I go out and try to research and find answers, or direct them to someone that can help them. I have polls on my sites, forums, original articles, relevant videos put up only because they are useful to visitors, have never bought links or traffic, don't do anything black-hat, and keep the sites looking clean and professional...I am also a graphic designer.

Many of these sites have been up for years, and I'm sick and tired of worrying every day that someone at G will look at one of my sites, and although they have passed other reviews for years, someone there had a bad day, and decided to take it out on me.

After going through a year and a half of unemployment, being cut back to part time for months, going through a bankruptcy because of it, my mom just passing away after a long battle from a stroke 4 years ago and contracting mrsa and e-coli and hundreds of thousands in hospital bills, my brother with MS, and my dad with pagett's disease...I don't think anyone there understands how much for the worse they can change people's lives. Or again, they simply don't care.

I'm sorry to play the 'poor me' card, but I'm just so tired of them ruling the planet. Yes I'm ranting, but I was just at the point of having a full time income, which was reduced overnight by 75% or more. I would have done anything, made any changes, jumped through their golden hoops just to keep my sites from being completely removed from their search engine without a hint of notice.

This is a very good post however...I hope no one has to go through what I've experienced.

-Will

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by pixelpusher

This is certainly not a rumor. Two days ago, google basically just destroyed my online income. They must have found a few of my sites that they didn't like, and de-indexed as many of mine as they could find, which was maybe around 20 sites.
...
This is a very good post however...I hope no one has to go through what I've experienced.

-Will

Will, would you mind posting or PMing me some of the sites that were deindexed? What was the common thread linking all the sites together? Was it Adsense or Analytics, all on the same server or anything like that.

Would be nice if some good could come out of your loss here by trying to understand how other people can prevent it.

[pixelpusher]

If you could send a PM with your email, I'd be happy to reply. I REALLY need to start posting more on here! haha

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by pixelpusher

If you could send a PM with your email, I'd be happy to reply. I REALLY need to start posting more on here! haha

Ok, PM sent. Can you at least speculate on what the common thread was between all the sites that were deindexed? We're they linked together by an Adsense account or Analytics account?

[dburk]

Originally Posted by pixelpusher

This is certainly not a rumor. Two days ago, google basically just destroyed my online income. They must have found a few of my sites that they didn't like, and de-indexed as many of mine as they could find, which was maybe around 20 sites.

What I don't understand is this: Why can't they at least send a warning of some kind, or just throw the sites in the supposed 'sandbox'...frick, even tell me to take my site offline until I correct the problems. Anything, just don't de-index all of my sites without notice or warning, or any understanding of why they did.

I think the problem is they're too arrogant or too lazy to care, they just get high on their power and say, "hmmm...don't like you....gone....gone....gone" and when you try to get an honest answer as to what to change, you get a link to a bunch of non-specific outlines of what they consider questionable. I don't want questionable, I want black and white.

Yes, I build affiliate sites, and yes I work on them every day to try to make them better. I have people emailing me or posting comments every single day with questions, and I go out and try to research and find answers, or direct them to someone that can help them. I have polls on my sites, forums, original articles, relevant videos put up only because they are useful to visitors, have never bought links or traffic, don't do anything black-hat, and keep the sites looking clean and professional...I am also a graphic designer.

Many of these sites have been up for years, and I'm sick and tired of worrying every day that someone at G will look at one of my sites, and although they have passed other reviews for years, someone there had a bad day, and decided to take it out on me.

After going through a year and a half of unemployment, being cut back to part time for months, going through a bankruptcy because of it, my mom just passing away after a long battle from a stroke 4 years ago and contracting mrsa and e-coli and hundreds of thousands in hospital bills, my brother with MS, and my dad with pagett's disease...I don't think anyone there understands how much for the worse they can change people's lives. Or again, they simply don't care.

I'm sorry to play the 'poor me' card, but I'm just so tired of them ruling the planet. Yes I'm ranting, but I was just at the point of having a full time income, which was reduced overnight by 75% or more. I would have done anything, made any changes, jumped through their golden hoops just to keep my sites from being completely removed from their search engine without a hint of notice.

This is a very good post however...I hope no one has to go through what I've experienced.

-Will

Hi Will,

Google does not de-index websites unless they are violating the published Webmaster Guidelines.

The good news is that if you remove the offensive content you can get your websites re-indexed. I recommend that you study the guidelines and fix what is wrong with your websites. It's all about providing a quality user experience, do your part if you want to be included in Google's index.

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi Will,

Google does not de-index websites unless they are violating the published Webmaster Guidelines.

The good news is that if you remove the offensive content you can get your websites re-indexed. I recommend that you study the guidelines and fix what is wrong with your websites. It's all about providing a quality user experience, do your part if you want to be included in Google's index.

Thanks Don, I've always thought the same thing. That Google treats each site by itself and won't deindex good sites based on something an owner did on another site. But yet I keep seeing these posts on WF saying "Google Deindexed 40 of my sites" where people claim that they did something bad on a couple of sites, yet all their sites were deindexed.

I have yet to see any definitive proof of a good site that was deindexed by association. The one time someone showed me the "good" site that was deindexed, it was an eBay scraper site made with BANS which is no shocker.

It's far more likely that there is something bannable about all 40 sites or a technical problem on their server like a bad robots.txt or a virus when someone claims Google 40 sites deindexed because of one bad site.

If anyone has an example otherwise, I'd love to see it.

[MarkSveik]

Thanks! I was in panic mode for a few days, but now I think I know what happened.

My problems are most likely the redesign (took away some internal links from one of my pages to my home page), and the lack of fresh content.

[ElectronPlumber]

Originally Posted by MarkSveik

Thanks! I was in panic mode for a few days, but now I think I know what happened.

My problems are most likely the redesign (took away some internal links from one of my pages to my home page), and the lack of fresh content.

Yeah, for most people it's a redesign issue that causes it. I typically tell people to completely undo the last set of changes you made to your site if your ranking sinks and see if it comes back.

[hbsjcd3]

Hi There ElectronPlumber,
Thanks for your critique of my site : Reverse Phone Lookup | Top Rated Services Reviewed And Critiqued and thanks for alerting me as to the possible reason for being de-indexed by big G. when you commented on my thread: HELP Someone!! My site was de-indexed from G this morning


Well, I am still de-indexed by G after I filed a reconsideration request. What I did? Well I removed all the articles and pages on my site ( about 220 pages) that you said I was keyword stuffing. My site now has about 12 pages, and I made sure there is no keyword stuffing left and it all has unique content ( copyscape passed) .

And this morning I get then boilerplated email response from Google:

Dear site owner or webmaster of Reverse Phone Lookup | Top Rated Services Reviewed And Critiqued,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider Reverse Phone Lookup | Top Rated Services Reviewed And Critiqued for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from Reverse Phone Lookup | Top Rated Services Reviewed And Critiqued may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.

If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/to...deration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team
================================================== ===

I am ready to jump off a bridge as I am clueless at what else I need to do!!! Can you take a look once again and let me what should I do?

[ElectronPlumber]

hbsjcd3 - The site looks much better now, but still has some issues. I don't work for Google, but if you fix these you stand a much better chance.

1. You have serious navigation issues. You can't get back to your homepage from most of your other pages. You need to link your header image to your homepage at the very least. Also, your footer links for Terms, Privacy and About should appear on every page.
2. You have what might appear to Google to be a paid link in your footer. The XMLSitemap one.
3. You need to disclose on your About or Terms page that you receive compensation from affiliate sales from the sites you reviewed.
4. The blurb at the top of your homepage stinks of BS. You've received thousands of customer testimonials for your site and professional feedback? If that's true, provide some backup, otherwise it's hurting you. This one: "Reverse phone lookup consumers depend on our unbiased reviews to provide information they need to make the right decision. Therefore, we've become the consumer guide of choice, thanks to the help of thousands of consumer testimonials and professional feedback from hundreds of private detective and investigation firms."

That's all I can find for stuff Google might have issues with. However if you are asking for a manual review again, it might help to try to spice your site up with stuff Google likes such as some industry news or more links to other legitimate phone lookup resources on the web.

Also, you linked your site 4 times in that one post there, which stinks of spam and might get your post removed from WF if anyone happens to report it. I'd suggest you go back and edit it.

[hbsjcd3]

Originally Posted by ElectronPlumber

hbsjcd3 - The site looks much better now, but still has some issues. I don't work for Google, but if you fix these you stand a much better chance.

1. You have serious navigation issues. You can't get back to your homepage from most of your other pages. You need to link your header image to your homepage at the very least. Also, your footer links for Terms, Privacy and About should appear on every page.
2. You have what might appear to Google to be a paid link in your footer. The XMLSitemap one.
3. You need to disclose on your About or Terms page that you receive compensation from affiliate sales from the sites you reviewed.
4. The blurb at the top of your homepage stinks of BS. You've received thousands of customer testimonials for your site and professional feedback? If that's true, provide some backup, otherwise it's hurting you. This one: "Reverse phone lookup consumers depend on our unbiased reviews to provide information they need to make the right decision. Therefore, we've become the consumer guide of choice, thanks to the help of thousands of consumer testimonials and professional feedback from hundreds of private detective and investigation firms."

That's all I can find for stuff Google might have issues with. However if you are asking for a manual review again, it might help to try to spice your site up with stuff Google likes such as some industry news or more links to other legitimate phone lookup resources on the web.

Also, you linked your site 4 times in that one post there, which stinks of spam and might get your post removed from WF if anyone happens to report it. I'd suggest you go back and edit it.

Thanks, I will make those changes. What post are you talking about that was linked 4 times?

[hbsjcd3]

Originally Posted by ElectronPlumber

hbsjcd3 - The site looks much better now, but still has some issues. I don't work for Google, but if you fix these you stand a much better chance.

1. You have serious navigation issues. You can't get back to your homepage from most of your other pages. You need to link your header image to your homepage at the very least. Also, your footer links for Terms, Privacy and About should appear on every page.
2. You have what might appear to Google to be a paid link in your footer. The XMLSitemap one.
3. You need to disclose on your About or Terms page that you receive compensation from affiliate sales from the sites you reviewed.
4. The blurb at the top of your homepage stinks of BS. You've received thousands of customer testimonials for your site and professional feedback? If that's true, provide some backup, otherwise it's hurting you. This one: "Reverse phone lookup consumers depend on our unbiased reviews to provide information they need to make the right decision. Therefore, we've become the consumer guide of choice, thanks to the help of thousands of consumer testimonials and professional feedback from hundreds of private detective and investigation firms."

That's all I can find for stuff Google might have issues with. However if you are asking for a manual review again, it might help to try to spice your site up with stuff Google likes such as some industry news or more links to other legitimate phone lookup resources on the web.

Also, you linked your site 4 times in that one post there, which stinks of spam and might get your post removed from WF if anyone happens to report it. I'd suggest you go back and edit it.

Ok,

I have made the suggests you recommended and added some more content and outbound looks to trusted sources in the index page. I know... Its not pretty, but I basically want to get within their guidelines, then once my site gets re-indexed I will work on aesthetics.
what do you think?