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I think I accidentally sunk my own website

by Corinna
15 replies
  • SEO
    • |
On 28th of Oct my website was completely sunk and I have virtually zero visitors from google. I checked the position of my keywords with the firefox rankchecker tool and they all, without exception, had completely lost their ranking, which they had for at least a year before.

I think I have an idea why I was sunk. I am writing a column for a very big website and my articles get very high page ranks, get copied by other websites and they all give me high page rank, high quality back links. My website should do better and better and not get sunk...

I think my fault was that I was publishing my own articles on my own website AFTER I had them placed on the big website. Obviously, google must be thinking that I scrape these articles from this big website and have had no new unique content for almost a year.

I have now deleted all the 'offending articles' and google has noticed this. How long may it take until my website comes back?

My plan is that from now on I first put the article on my website, then, a week later, once google has crawled my site and noticed the article, I will submit it to the big website with a backlink to the original article - as google advices in webmaster guidelines.

Feel free to comment. But please don't tell me how stupid I am because I am telling this myself already
#accidentally #sunk #website
  • Profile picture of the author areoo
    You are not stupid. Its good you are making mistakes now and not on your bigger projects. So yeah now you know you are most probably far away from making the same mistakes.
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  • Profile picture of the author Anton543
    Never publish your own articles on other sites before you do on yours. Google will obviously think the article belongs to the site where it was indexed first.
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    • Profile picture of the author goindeep
      Originally Posted by Anton543 View Post

      Never publish your own articles on other sites before you do on yours. Google will obviously think the article belongs to the site where it was indexed first.
      True and obvious.

      Why would you do this? Lol
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      • Profile picture of the author Corinna
        You are not meant to laugh either!!! I do know that it was stupid.

        Why did I do it? Because I don't think like a business person. The big website demanded unique articles and I did not think it through.
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  • Profile picture of the author amiramin
    remove those articles from your website and begin from the start
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  • Profile picture of the author kohorn
    Hi Corinna
    you are not stupid at all. I made the same mistake and I think you found the reason a lot faster than I did.
    The issue is going to be to ensure that if you are working to an editorial deadline for the big site, you write your articles at least 10 days earlier so they can be crawled in your site. I often did not have that luxury as i was effectively writing to order with often only a couple of days notice.
    It would be great to know how long it takes you for your ranking to get back to normal.
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      If they demand unique articles, why not give them that and write other articles for your own site. If they give you good links in return then it's definitely worth it. More so if they find out that the articles are not unique and hosted on your own site as well they might cancel the relationship with you.
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      • Profile picture of the author Matt.Lake
        Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

        More so if they find out that the articles are not unique and hosted on your own site as well they might cancel the relationship with you.
        Yeh that would be the main thing you'd want to check.
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        • Profile picture of the author Corinna
          thanks guys,
          yep, the site was making me really good money. I would hate to have to start over.

          My question is - do you think I was sunk because I appeared to scrape articles? Is that enough for google to sink me?

          It was two articles a months for the entire 2012 - that was all new content I had and of course to goolgle it must have appeared that I had no new unique content myself.

          Anybody has any ideas how long it may take to get back into the position I was before? It's now 3 weeks since I deleted the articles.
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      • Profile picture of the author Carl Brown
        Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

        If they demand unique articles, why not give them that and write other articles for your own site. If they give you good links in return then it's definitely worth it. More so if they find out that the articles are not unique and hosted on your own site as well they might cancel the relationship with you.
        That's what I'm not getting. If you're writing unique articles for someone else, they sure can't appear on yours first.
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        • Profile picture of the author Corinna
          denutza: we are talking 11 articles


          age of my website: 2 years
          backlinks according to google analytics: 1600
          pages 75

          backlink methods: article syndication to article sites and guest blogging.

          I manually achieved maybe 100 to 200 backlinks. All the other 1400 backlinks come from other sites copying my articles with the links in it.

          I am worried that some of these sites who copied my articles are dodgy - but how would I know? They are not pornographic or anything.
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  • Profile picture of the author tjaysen70
    Ask yourself this question, Is this site that you sunk, is it making you any money? If not, then move on and start over.
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  • Profile picture of the author Danny Woolard
    I really have my doubts on that being the cause. If you search this forum on the subject many feel there is no penalty for syndicating content..Especially only two articles.

    What else can you tell us about the site? # of pages, age, backlink methods?
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Writing unique articles for article directories, you might as well be writing them a check. :rolleyes:

    Unless your getting a good amount of direct traffic from those articles you post on the external sites, your wasting your time.
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    • Profile picture of the author Corinna
      I actually get a lot of traffic from this big website - traffic that actually translates into sales and I also get paid for these articles - not a lot, though.

      All I want to know at this point - will my site come back? Just checked my keywords in firefox rankchecker - they are all still completely disappeared in google. They are still there on good positions in yahoo and bing.
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