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Ouch, Google just slapped me

by monopuff
12 replies
So I noticed I was not getting much google traffic to a niche site for the past few days and decided to do a few searches.

Ouch.. near dead last the same keywords that sent traffic to my site as early as 4 days ago...

I'm trying to figure what the problem is, and I may have narrowed it down to keyword oversaturation...

one issue with wordpress having 5-10 articles for example on the front page is certain keywords , or even affiliate links might appear to oversaturate a page.

Also say I have a domain name with my keyword in it, then I have categories with my keyword and an article with my keyword in its title
I have something like, for example orange smoothies
hxxp:/orangesmoothies dot com/orange-smoothie-recipes/top10-orange-smoothie-recipes

will google see this as spamming a keyword ?

Also I recently added rel="nofollow" to some affiliate links, but that was before the g' slap .. so I don't know how effective that was

I know this isn't the end of the world .. hopefully I can make some changes and appease the google gods..

Has anyone had experience with something like this? Thanks
#google #ouch #slapped
  • Profile picture of the author jasonl70
    are you talking adwords? if so, what's your quality score? when i've been slapped, it's always just made my kw's inactive and jacked up the minimum bid to activate them.

    if it's organic, it could just be normal fluctuations of the google dance.. happens to me a lot.. you're thoughts regarding kw 'spamming' might be on target, though.. is this a rather new site?
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  • Profile picture of the author monopuff
    Yea this is organic .. I've read about google changing its algorithms a lot.. I'm going to try the /%postname/ suggestion from above for starters..

    This is a relatively new site, only a few months old
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  • Profile picture of the author Derek Pankaew
    Monopuff,

    You may be suffering from what's called the "Google Sandbox." This is when new websites mysteriously disappear from Google for no apparent reason. There's nothing you can do about it except wait it out. Takes about 9 months to a year for a new site to be immune to the sandbox.
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  • Profile picture of the author Newbie2IM
    Banned
    [DELETED]
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeWords
      how old is the site/domain?
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  • Profile picture of the author Derek Pankaew
    No, the sandbox definitely exists.

    You can try to climb out by getting massive backlinks.
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  • Profile picture of the author captivereef
    i have a 4 year old mortgage site that bounces up and down all the time and has for years. Sometimes i get 500 per day for months then it drops to 100 and slowly climbs back up.

    I just keep doing white hat stuff i know works and let what gonna happen happen! IT should come back if everything is legit!
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  • Profile picture of the author monopuff
    Thanks for the good feedback, the domain is only about 2 months old .. I was surprised at how well/quickly my keywords were ranking honestly .. I do everything white hat, my main traffic is currently through social networks predominantly, and about 10% google until recently .. I know these things take time if you're not wanting to buy traffic..

    so I'll keep chugging along..
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeWords
      normal bouncing for 2 month old site. It will settle in down in the next few months.
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  • Profile picture of the author SeanIM
    Make sure you've upgraded to the latest version of wordpress...I had a RE blog unknowingly hacked/injected...I only found out by using google's external keyword tool after dropping completely off of the 1st page of google...turns out it was returning a TON of suggestions for pharmacy terms...it was nuts. Anyways within 10min after upgrading I checked the external keyword tool again and it saw/returned all the normal RE terms I had been focused on.
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  • Profile picture of the author captivereef
    write some 300 word articles for ezinearticles, get some link juice and direct traffic from the articles.
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    • Profile picture of the author jonoman1
      The best thing to do in your situation (in my humble opinion) is to begin slowly building backlinks to your site from high quality websites and keep adding content. It will take some patience, but it's the only way I have seen to get out of Google's sandbox.
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  • Profile picture of the author monopuff
    Thanks again for all the feedback.. I just upgraded to wordpress 2.7.1 , a just in case thing per seanIM's suggestion.

    I think this is a good opportunity to practice contacting other webmasters in my niche to trade links.

    I just made a a squidoo lens, I'll write several articles for ezine as well.
    We'll see how it goes in the next few days, this might be the motivation I needed to move the site to the next level (a sale ?? lol)
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