Advice Needed: Rankings Drop for 4 Sites (page 1 to page 6 for all keywords)

Are your sites a duplicate of the original one? I mean same design/layout ..? If yes, then you have to redesign it.

Are you doing more backlinking activities on it? If not, then you have to double time doing good quality link building for your sites

A LOT of dance happens the last 2-3 weeks or so, so i would suggest you to wait a bit. And continue what you are doing.

One of my websites was deindexed a week ago with no (apparent to me) reason and today one inner page appeared.

wait ...

What are some common things between the sites?

- backlink strategy?
- same spun articles used?

We're these different from the blogs that were unaffected?

- Are they interlinked in any way?
- Any noindex metatags added to certain pages? (did page count fall?)
- were the links you build 3 months ago still valid?

Looks like the only common point is the theme..
Is there anything else?

Checked your site. It is definitely a manual review penalty.

I have a lot of sites being penalized with the same pattern. It is most probably a -50 penalty. The easiest way to check is to do a search "mydomain.com" + keywords. If you are not ranking on top, then it is probably a penalty.

Mine was probably flagged due to social bookmarking blast or it could be lack of anchor diversity. If google system sense something wrong (unatural linking) they will flag your site and a manual review will be taken. It is hard to say when they will come to check your site (maybe depends on the age of your domain and how serious it was?), I have sites done the same link building, and one was penalized in a month and another takes 2 months.

How do I know? I have statscounter installed and before my sites were penalized, I've seen visits from Google India.

It is great that you have whois protect, but using Google analytic might be the cause of mass penalized. I have over 10 sites in one account with no Google analytic, no Adsense but all of them has been penalized at the same time. The only thing I can think of is that I don't use whois protect. So, don't use Google analytic and make sure it is whois protect if you are hosting in the same account.

Why would your site be penalized? Probably flagged by Google due to your link building activity. Someone could have report your site as spam, but I don't think this is the case though.

The same thing happened to my website (which is around 9 months old, too) between yesterday and today. I didn't do anything attention-causing, either. I guess what we are going to do is just "wait".

1. That means you are still doing link building for other 2 sites? As I already mentioned, I have sites that stopped link building for 2 months (not 3 months though) but still gotten a manual review & penalized 2 months later, but some as fast as 1 month. Google system might automatically queue up sites for manual review based on the seriousness of violation. Nobody knows how Google flag a site and I'm just guessing based on my experience. But if your sites have been flagged, they will come to you sooner or latter.

Again already mentioned and just guessing, maybe just one of your sites have been flagged. But Google employees decided to check all your sites with the same analytic account and penalized them all together.

3. They don't care about your content. They penalized you because of your link building activities.

A. Different period of time
B. No. Although I heard manual penalty is time based? None of my sites come back in 6 months though.
C. Nothing. Try to appeal but failed.
D. You could try to appeal, but I'm not going to suggest anything here. You'll find more information about appealing by searching on the web.

Thanks again carljohn.

Anyone else had the same experience or can offer any suggestions or advice?

Is this a classic case of what people refer to as the Google Slap?

Thanks,

Steven

as carljon has mentioned, there's a posibilty your site has been manually reviewed and penalised.

Google has algorithms designed to get the best sites to the top, but when they do get to the top, they have to be reviewed with a human eye in order to make sure the site has quality. This is the reason the review panel exists and is the reason some sites go from page one to page 10 without warning...

"so how do i know what these Google manual review raters ( as they're called) are looking, for....how can I please them?"

There's a confidential 125-paged "Google Quality Rater's HandBook" you can go through. The last blog i saw sharing this download link , was apparently contacted by Google and asked to stop linking from the document

I found this one instead ( i downloaded it, scanned against my Malware, Trojan and AntiVirus before opening , so far it looked ok) . I suggest you do the same:
Google Quality Raters Handbook (Confidential).pdf ( about 2.22MB in size)

other than that, best to wait if your site will bounce back . If it doesn't, make a new blog post (unique, on-paged optimised) following the "intent and usefullness" criteria as per Google Rater's HandBook. Do NOT ping from your blog (disable Wp pinging). Let the bots find your link from third parties....

wow. that's why I love WarriorForum.. so many awesomely experienced and helpful Warriors!!

I hope your issue gets resolved soon!

Do keep us posted!!

The common thread here is (I believe) the same adsense account on all of your sites. Something triggered a manual review of one and the rest got dragged in together.

The site you list looks like a made for affiliate site, which manual reviews will kill. (We have two of the 'leapforce' Google manual reviewers on staff so we're familiar with their approaches)

My suggestion is to new sites, rewrite the content, and pray that these happen to bounce back. If you want to become an authority site and not a MFA site then you need to design it as such. But if you make MFA-style sites, manual reviews will always get you.

Hi Snap1976, I had this exact same thing happen to me at the beginning of February. About 30 of sites, all containing Adsense, got slapped and lost about 50 spots in the ranking (-50 penalty). My conclusion is that I was manually reviewed, didn't pass the inspection and the reviewer then just mass penalized the rest of my sites with the same Adsense ID. I also had these sites in ANalytics and the Webmaster Tools. The only sites spared where the ones containing no Adsense, for example, ones monetized by Amazon or CPA.

Some of the slapped sites were 5 pagers and others were authority type sites with 80+ pages. My guess is some of the authority sites weren't really looked at but because the site being reviewed was deemed poor and not up to Google's standards, they just figured the rest were.

Moving forward, I've pretty much given up on all these sites and am deciding which ones I want to redo, but improve upon. I also will NOT be using Analytics or Webmaster Tools and am even limiting my exposure to Adsense.

It's been about 3 weeks and not one has shown any signs of improvement, but nor have I tried to really build links or improve the content. Let me know if you have other questions about my experience.

Your site got Panda'd.

You may want to take a look at the articles you have in this page:
http://accountingcertificateprograms.org/otherarticles/

Now look at some of the articles you've got here:
More Contents |

Clearly, it's a link farm AKA "blog network" that links out to other websites. Even with the nofollow tag you've got on them it's still linking out to shady niche sites like "payday loan"

Here's where it comes full circle:
Some of your content is copied from other sites

Your site got Panda'd.

Did you check you Webmster Tools? Did you get "the letter" from Google being discussed over here ? The thing that stuck out from me was when you said;

"For the other two sites, linkbuilding has been continuing steadily. Not much automated linkbuilding, mostly manual through my group of VAs. I have a good spread of links from EDU pages, high PR blog Comments, social bookmarks, Web 2.0 properties, press releases, article networks and high PR forum profiles."

Perhaps there is a crackdown on networks and spun content.

I had one of my sites get up to Google's first page for a very competitive keyword, then it dropped all the way down to page 12. I think the site had a manual review done on it. It had 10 pages of unique content, all articles at least 1000 words. One of my articles is 7500 words, so the site isn't thin on content. All of the content was written by me; none of it was scraped, spun or copied. The site was gone for about a week and then it popped back onto page 1.

If your content is good and unique, it will probably pop back up soon. Maybe you should add a little more content and see what happens?

so you are running an autoblog on your site. Do you know how Google feels about autoblogs with shady external links? If I were you, I would demand a refund from the guy who sold you the WSO. It's clearly a bigger scam than Matt Laclaire.

The sites weren't manually penalized, they were penalized with the algo. I took a look at the site and in less than 10 minutes I found more than 5 things that led to your ranking drop. The autoblog was 1 of many things that caused the dip.

Hello Steven....The Panda algorithm is not normally based on a single page. Several pages will need to be disapproved before all of them drop in ranking.I don't think your homepage is of low quality but it could have been affected by the other pages that are.You'll have to get rid of these pages..... As Michael has pointed out, I'd start with this one. http://accountingcertificateprograms.org/otherarticles/ As per Panda algo, this page is regarded as an "empty" content. Nothing is worse than pages that just link to other pages. With empty content, Panda will penalize a whole site. Also, you choose to have adsense ( and analytics?) so make sure your content isn’t automated. That's not to say that autoblogs don't work even after the Panda update. BUT you see, i don't use adsense, analytics or any of those webmaster tools Mage users to this date continue to profit from such blogs.

Lastly, work out how many of your pages are of low quality and high-quality pages that are linking externally to low quality sites. Remove these links but if you prefer that you must link to some sites, then link to high authority like WikiPedia. Replace the low quality pages @ a ratio of 1:5, at least . Meaning, for every 1 crappy page, create 5 qualityones to compensate. What you're doing here is you're attempting to reduce the percentage of low quality pages by replacing them with quality pages. That may sound expensive if you're paying $12 per unique article. An alternative is curation.Curation is ethical. Curation is Google friendly and Panda LOVES it.

Does having the same adsense account and google analytics in all your sites a problem?

As we all of you know that Google recently update Google Panda 3.3. There are various things we should more focus on.

1. Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm
2. Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity
3. Cinderella Story or "Honeymoon" Effect
4. Malware or Hacking
5. Penalty
6. Canonicalization Problems
7. Broken links
8. Server Problems
9. robots.txt Issues
10. Duplicate Content

Hi Steven,

I noticed that before you deleted the autoblog content, the content was duplicated across your domain due to the tags each article was assigned. Whilst this probably isn't the cause of your ranking drops, it's not going to help you either.

In the instance of having multiple copies of the same article on your own website, you need to add a canonical tag to the one you deem most important or the one you want to rank for a given keyword. A canonical tag basically tells the search engine that THIS is the page you want to be ranked - complications of not doing this include your pagerank being distributed unevenly across the multiple URL's, which in turn, can affect that articles ranking ability.

Just a heads up!

I suggest re-optimize your site, do onpage again and place your keywords properly and resubmit it to search engine.

In this case there are other issues. But alot of people have seen these drops starting in late january.

I don't think it's Panda 3.3. Panda isn't the cause of every shift. Since the reputed description is to come up with a core of trusted sites and build from that data.

I think it looks like a link velocity related algorythmic filter somewhat age related. I had three sites hit. I had built links to them heavily the first part of last year and really slacked off after.

Looking at numerous sites around anchor text is still propping up most competitive rankings . If google decided to stop using it it'd be a class 9 serp shakeup effecting sites going back forever, which it wasn't.
Also google hasn't been using anchor text for a few years, it's like their entire algo was heavy anchor text as far back as I can remember.

It may be a 6-12 month purgatory but I'm 80-85% the rankings will bounce back for most of the effected sites unless there are clear issues like duplicate content.

our site was doing the dance appearing and disappearing but now for certain keywords its nowhere to been seen in the Google results?

Get high quality contextual backlinks and you'll be back to top in no time

For me you should be able to get the sites back up, just build some more links and they should pick back up (especially the ones you had not been building links for).

There have been a lot of algorithmic changes over this month and I think march will be a time for sites to settle and start to recover.

I would also remove anything google, like analytics as using this is giving them information about your site and stats so remove these IMO.

Hope you get them back up there just keep on building!!

"Here are the spam flags that you will use:

Not Spam: If you do not believe that a page is spam, you should assign a Not Spam flag.

Maybe Spam: If you find a page to be “spammy”, but you don’t feel comfortable saying that the page is definitely spam, you should assign a Maybe Spam flag.

Spam: If you believe that a page has been designed using the deceptive web design techniques described in these guidelines, you should assign a Spam flag.

When unsure which flag to use, remember to ask yourself these questions:

Does the page provide the user with a good search experience?
Does the page contain original content that would be helpful to users?
Do you think the page should be included in a set of search results?
Is the page designed for users? Is there a human element to the page?
If you removed the PPC ads and copied text from the page, is there anything helpful left? If you answer “yes” to these questions, the page is probably not spam."

Directly From Horses Mouth...See the Guide Shared in this thread....

Check out the latest update from Google and you will know why it has effected your site, its not just yours many have seen steep falls in rankings
Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February


Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February - Inside Search

Hey Snap1976

Well I have just joined Warrior Forum and this is my first reply and I read this whole thread. My take on this situation is, whatever happened has happened and you should find yourself more motivated to start it over again.

- Try to make your website more fresh with some top quality content to attract visitors and a cool theme.
- I know its good to write lengthy content but you can start over with 500 words to 800 words content with quality. No need to write everything, just simple pointers which are easy to grab in one look. (Just one of the suggestion)
- Write few guest posts on other sites (Squidoo, Hubs etc.) and link them together.
- Do 10 bookmarks daily and add network to your bookmarking profiles.
- Build your network on social media profiles and run your content there and ask for opinions, polls and reviews.
- Create communities and groups, add people, run discussions and attract people to your website.
- Create a video of yourself describing subject related to your website and upload it on Youtube.
You can do so so much with your websites, that Google can't even think of putting you down. If you will go for quality then you don't have to find visitors, people will find your website.

PS: Running a website is like running a Government. You should know how to handle the flow of people from your different properties.

Rest of these intellectual people already suggested important measures and reasons.
Best of luck!!

If you need some more help you can pm me.

Folks,
I just read through these comments, have had a similar experience (which I will detail in a minute) and see that everything said is conjecture. People are giving advice and others taking that advice while it is all GUESSING! We don't know why his site got slapped and the actions he took may have nothing to do with getting slapped or solving the issue.

I have 50 or so sites in my analytics/webmaster/adsense account. Google sent me a message in webmaster tools that 2 of the sites had un-natural linking (message below) with a link in the message for "reconsideration." I responded to them via that link.

Interestingly, these 2 sites that were singled out have had no degradation in rank or traffic yet others have. I have two other sites, Retirement Income and Retirement Blog. The first got hammered while the second is doing fine. I use the same linking activities on all sites. All content is original by me. There is no possible way to explain the inconsistency. It could be that google programmers and reviewers don't know what they are dong and much of the slapping is arbitrary. I could jump to the conclusion that the slap was because of this or that, but I have no evidence of any reason. I think we would all best serve one another with fact rather than opinio and when we dont have facts, clearly state "this is my best GUESS."

Bob



Dear site owner or webmaster of ,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Hi Everyone,

As the OP I will now post the outcome of this whole saga.

So a few days after my site lost it's rankings (all pages dropped in rankings by 30-50 positions across the board - e.g. most pages on page one of Google dropping to page 5) I received a message from Google in my Webmaster account and it read the below.

You should note the subtle difference between the note posted below and the other messages many other warriors have been receiving. The note posted below refers to "bad" links on my site linking out to other sites AS OPPOSED to the other messages warriors have been receiving which is about unnatural links pointing to their site.

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.accountingcertificateprograms.org/,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include selling links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team


This message absolutely confirms the advice provided by some of the other warriors on page one of this thread that the culprit of my rankings drop was the 5MMM technique used (e.g. create an autoblog with a keyword in the wider niche to keep the site fresh).

So I have deleted the UAW plugin, deleted all the pages and continued to do only some manual high PR link building.

After the above actions and a thoughtfully written email to Google, I submitted my request for reconsideration. I received a response from Google yesterday and they have reinstated my rankings.

This has occurred across all 4 of my sites that were penalized. Yes, you read that right! I have successfully gotten my site back into the index and ranking again. The rankings have dropped slightly but in the most part the site is back up in the Google SERPs.

This experience has taught me:

1. That you need to understand well Google's guidelines and play by all the rules.
2. Do not just buy a WSO and blindly follow the advice of so called gurus. What works for them may not work for you or their techniques may be outdated or flawed.
3. Do not participate in black hat linkbuilding exchange/schemes and it appears that the value of using some of the established link networks may be diminishing.
3. There are always options if you have created a genuine site that has unique written content, adds at least some value to visitors and that is well optimized.

I hope that my experiences and the advice of helpful warriors on this post will help others that are in the same or similar situations.

Thanks... Steven

Hi Everyone,

I have received a flood of PMs in my inbox around providing advice on this issue of losing and then regaining my rankings with Google (e.g. what has been discussed in this thread). I'm just getting through them now but wanted to make this post to ensure that Warriors are PM'ing me for the right reasons.

The notification I received in Google Webmaster and the issue for my 4 sites was NOT the backlinks I built to them. The message (which I have pasted into Post 72) clearly states that the issue was the outgoing links from my sites. So it was the sites I was linking to from my own sites and also the way I was linking out to them that the Google Quality Team had issues with. You have to read the message from Google very carefully as only a few words differ from the message many Warriors have received around improper backlinking or linkbuilding techniques.

So I don't have any real advice for Warriors that have had their sites de-indexed or penalized for off page SEO and linkbuilding activities and problems.

I do have some advice for Warriors around internal linking and the quality of sites to link out to. I also have advice for the message to written to the Google Quality Team when completing the reconsideration for indexing request. Here they are.

1. Do not link out to sites that are irrelevant to the niche of your site/page/post.
2. Only link out to sites that add value to your site/page/post.
3. It is recommended to link out to high authority sites that are relevant to your niche.
4. Do not link out to low value and spammy sites.
5. Do not have hundreds of outgoing links per page/post.
6. Do not link out to sites as part of link schemes.
7. You can also be penalized for cloaking your affiliate links.

In your message to the Google Quality Team:

1. Be honest. I told them everything I did that led to the penalty.
2. Be detailed. I provided them step by step and my response was two pages long.
3. Make sure you write your understanding of the issue (e.g. your interpretation).
4. Ensure you state the specific actions you took to rectify the identified issues.
5. Mention that you've read the guidelines (and make sure you have)

I also did quite a bit of reading at the Google Webmasters Forum about the problems as well and cited some information provided by some of the analysts.

I hope this post helps out those that are currently having issues with their rankings being dropped by Google.

Thanks... Steven