Google Just Wiped Out Over 700 of My Sites

Great case study.

Yes, google is takin more notice of the complete package, fast tactics with EMDs, a few unique articles and some hands off backlinks just don't cut the mustard these days.

It is always hard to find out the hard way, I hope you manage to flesh out your websites and have them ranking again without too much of an expense.

Google is lame. Sorry to hear, but stop bowing down to Big G. They've made it clear that they don't want the average person's business. They want corporate money. They're crushing people's businesses left and right and folks STILL keep trying to deal with this nonsense. I don't understand it.

Affiliate sites are being hit hard, thin ones like you said. I very much doubt Google are checking sites "Manually" however i agree they are certainly increasing their standards for ranking a website.

-Michael

A friend of mine was complaining a few days ago that he's having no luck trying to find and buy cast iron garden furniture using Google. Many of the search results are garbage and filled with ads. He thought Google was selling these pages and making money that way, and he was mad at Google.

I told him they are Made For AdSense sites put up by people hoping he'll click on their ads. Since they obviously damage the user experience (the last thing he wants to see are more ads for cast iron garden furniture), Google is working on eliminating them.

Are you really surprised? If a user types in "buy cast iron garden furniture" the first result should be a website where he can buy cast iron garden furniture. When that doesn't happen, Google's brand is harmed and they're at risk of losing search engine share. The big G moves slowly but inexorably, like a glacier, and I wouldn't want to get caught in its path.

fLufF
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Yes you can still build EMD sites MFA, but with lots of contents updated regularly, a fan page perhaps, opt in list will be great.

I am waiting to hear is there anyone with authority site got hit by the latest Google updates earlier?

Sorry about your problem!

The sort of sites you describe as ranking well, do not look like made for adsense or thin affiliate sites, although these sites may even have less content, they will appear to look more 'natural' with a unique look. And they may not be on EMD, which is becoming to look like a red flag these days.

The lesson may be is that we should individualize our sites more, and develop our own brand names rather than using EMD's. And if we do use EMD's make sure the sites look unique.

That sucks dude I hope they come back in Google. Heart about a new panda update, that sites with good content will rank higher then sites with a good SEO.

Luuk

Thanks for sharing. Sorry to hear about your misfortune!

I think sites need to be of high quality (i.e images + videos here and there + social proof i.e FB fan page / twitter / linkdin / digg it / reddit links / plus + / etc.) and update the site once every month at least twice and consistent fresh links every month.

How much were you making from 700 sites? $1K per day?

Watch this

Watch this

That's great news, it's about time they do this! I'm not talking about you losing your sites (it's nothing personal), but about the practice in itself.

As fLufF explained above, I'm personally sick and tired of seeing crap all over the Internet. But I'm ok, because I've got experience with Internet; but I see my parents falling for stupid traps, like .gif ads on a site that have a "x" in the corner, which is a trap to click there to close them, but in fact it just makes you click the ad and take you to another page to sell you some more CRAP

I'm with Google on this one

Yup, I've noticed a few of my own thin sites being indexed. Especially satellite and "feeder" sites. Seem's as though we need to build out more pages on our sites.

I set out a year ago to make good quality, authorative sites full of good content, images and user experience

not coz I am smart - far from it I am a newbie - but a guy I know who is smart warned me of exactly all these things you are all talking about

only thing is it is slowwwwwwwwwwwww

I think it is premature to panic and start making assumptions. Sometimes sites come and go in the rankings as updates are made. If they are not back in a week then you have something to really worry about.

You suggest not making thin MFA sites. Assuming these were Adsense sites, you are wasting your time putting them on different IPs. You have already given Google all of your websites. So it doesn't matter about the IPs, backlinking, dupicate content, etc. If Google decides it does not want your sites can simply delete anything with your Adsense ID on it.


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No I am not offended as I know the way to go is authority sites with social media proof and even put in an auto responder and build a database of users. Having those said, its so much easier to build thin sites and duplicate it many many times like a money printing machine. Been doing it for almost 2 years and yes not a problem until today and somehow I don't feel panic nor angry just calm as I know its time to move on. Ive enjoyed the fruits of my labour so I know I can move on building authority sites.

I still love Google, we had a good relationship and it will last long. I meant almost all my thin sites which is optimized are rank top pages in Bing and Yahoo and that search engine gives crap results. I am not complaining I still get good Adsense clicks from those search engine but if I am a genuine user and seeing those kind of sites, yes I will get piss off. Kinda oxymoron but if you were doing this from 2 years ago MFA sites, you will know how easy to earn. You can get back your cost of domain + outsource articles in about 1 week.

Appreciate the feedbacks, thanks.

You'd suddenly wonder if Google sends people down to the Warrior Forum and other SEO black hat places to do some little "research".

I think it might have to do with the Panda update. Google now treasures sites with "social chatter" and high quality discussions. Huge amount of content, good following, good repeat traffic.

-wittyblogger

My sites look fine and as a matter of fact, some raised in ranking on several keywords. It seems that every time they do the algo. change and get rid of sites, it gives an increase to the sites that they left alone.

However, since you never know with Google, this is really the time (if you haven't already) to diversify how you get your traffic so that the sites don't just depend on Google traffic.

C'mon now.... We all knew this was coming. The EMD era is over - for now... cause Google will bring them back - how can't they?

But this was a annunciated war. We knew it as soon as people started trashing it with thin sites, and the ability to bring them to Top rankings in a matter of days/weeks. Google is aware of WHAT we are doing - especially HERE in this forum...

Heads up folks... when you find your gold @ Google keep it to yourself.

The link building you have done may be link wheel because the latest google panda doesn't support link wheel. You links may be posted on banded sites or porn sites which is banded

plays foul game.Mainly against affiliates.

sorry to hear about your sites getting tanked

google are certainly clamping down a lot more than they use to but as i said in a previous thread, in time the google algo is getting smarter so we just have to create sites that people actually like to be on and have it more engaging with videos, images and social media interaction

paul

It is obvious that google must help users experience, but should also encourage the google adwords and Adsens for his business model ....

adsense flippers just put out an article about how spencer from nichepursuits got banned from adsense today. Maybe there's some sort of big change in the air? There seems to be a lot of MNF sites getting de-indexed or penalized as of yesterday.

Yeah, we were shocked to hear about Spencer from NichePursuits having his AdSense account shut down. We put out a post detailing our strategy if this were to happen to us. We're currently slammed with traffic (As is NichePursuits) and both sites are up and down right now because of the traffic surge.

We haven't noticed anything particularly out of the ordinary yet, but we'll definitely see what happens. It would be odd, I think, for him to have his AdSense account disabled rather than just taking a hit on his sites...weird, right?

Sorry to hear about your sites. Not that I've seen your sites, but they sound like they fit into the doorway page category.

Google has labelled sites like what you described as 'doorway pages'. You can read more about it here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters...answer=35769#3

So that means if you've just got MFA-type sites up, they can kick them completely out of their index or give you a manual penalty where you don't show up anywhere near the top for any of your keywords.

They are working really hard at getting these filtered out by algorithms, but if you do manage to slip through that, then you're always at risk of a manual penalty (especially the higher you rank and the higher competition phrases you're going after).

I've also seen them aggressively go after people with many domains. I knew someone pretty recently who had 300 high earning adsense sites (all MFA) lose them all on one day. Your 700 must have been tied together by something (adsense, GWT, same hosting, etc...).

It really sucks and I do wish they were more clear on their guidelines for what they count as a doorway page/thin affiliate. I also think if they were kind/smart they'd make this clear when people sign up for their Adsense program as if more people knew the rules I think they'd try to follow them. Right now it's better to try to overdo the whole adding value thing and make it so no one can put your site into the thin affiliate/MFA box.

Authority sites are the way to go, I'm glad you had some of those built. I can guarantee unless you had those segregated in some way that if you had a manual review (which it sounds like you did) someone from the webspam team looked at those sites and decided they met the quality guidelines. So at least you're not starting from zero and you know exactly what to do.

All the best...

Lisa

Sorry to hear it buddy!

Google is definitely hitting hard on MFA sites. After the first panda roll out, I have shifted all my Micro niche sites to mini authority sites(20-25 articles site). Its hard, but its worth it

I had a lot of sites disappear out of the top 100 this morning, and several other people I talk to are seeing the same thing. Dunno what's going on but let's hope it's a very temporary thing.

W O W - what a bummer! I would take the ones that have been most successful and make them authority sites with "curated" content. Those seem to be Panda and other changes to come - proof. I know how disheartening it can be to lose out when you've invested a lot of time/money or both. Just take a little break, and get those sites up and running again! You've probably got lots of golden nuggets in there!

I could see Google doing this to really thin MFA sites, but it appears that they are doing this to some very good sites too. I'm not sure what is going on. It's scary. You can put hundreds of hours into writing good content and Google can just wipe you out instantly. I only used BMR on my sites for about 3 weeks and I've done no other backlink blasts. I'm working on new sites now and I'm never backlinking my sites again. However, it appears that a competitor might be able to take your website down with a $5 blast gig. I'm really disgusted.

When my traffic completely died this weekend, I thought it was something that I did. I had recently put a pretty new header graphic on the site and I thought that caused my rankings to drop. Then I come to the boards and see that there is a new Google bloodbath in progress.

Try BPO,

I can't really comment as I haven't seen your site that you're saying is an authority site that was deindexed. But even if you've got a lot of content and a lot of pages, that doesn't make your site an authority. The original poster could have taken all the content he had on his 700 sites and combined it into one and it would probably still look like a thin affiliate/doorway page.

So just poor to marginal content written around keyphrases that doesn't offer a whole lot of value is on their radar. Doesn't matter if you have 1 page or 100+ pages.

And this isn't a recent thing. But I do think the webspam team has gotten more aggressive, maybe they hired more people, because it does seem more common.

Also if you look on that same page I had a link to there are other reasons for google to rain on your parade; buying links, link schemes (which almost anything people on this forum are doing to get links can possibly be considered), and other stuff.

If you've really got a manual penalty on a site the best thing to do is try to figure out what it's for so you can avoid that in the future. You can bring them back if it's worth it to you.

So anyway, long story short, offer some value. Don't think just because you've got a big site it's the type of site google really wants at the top of their search engines. Really think about whether it's the type of site people want to land on to solve their problems, find their solution, whatever. ra

And yeah, build a list so you've got a long-term asset from all the hard work you're doing. And try to find additional methods of generating traffic for your sites too (youtube, direct traffic from links, paid traffic, etc...). Google has a lot of the traffic share so I think you're crazy to at least not try SEO, but at the same time you're crazy not to look for traffic in other places.

It makes things more of a pain for us as business owners because we've got to be good at a lot of things and got to deal with a company like google who's got a monopoly on search, but that's the reality.

Plus by building a high quality site that has real authority you're just following a good business model of offering value.

All the best...

Lisa

I would like to point out this trend is not new. I lost many 'micro-sites' as far back as 2010. In 2011, many of them were deindexed.

This trend is going to continue.

I think certain micro sites have there place and are valid.

For example what do you if your are the victim of a certain type of fraud/crime. You may want to know about the proper procedures to go down and who you can contact for help. And how to find a good company to represent your interests. Some times a site presenting un bias use information for someone who needs advice is what a micro site can be useful for. And if all that site has is just one single adsense advert running along the top to help fund its hosting and domain name where is the harm.

Think about it. Why has ezine become so popular at first it wasn't just for backlinks. I myself found useful results from searching on google and finding useful articles and answers to my questions appear on an ezinearticle.

Would you not agree that informative sites like this have a place? There is another side to it. I've seen some terrable sites today on page 1 ranked for certain kw, and im telling you all they had was just adverts all over the page, and no content. It was awful.

I think it boils down to one thing. If you look at the site you make think it has geniune content that is really informative and useful to a user and helps the overall user experience of an individual using google then you should not expect a deindex. I think the days of automateing stuff are coming to an end. Maybe fleshing them out a bit and making a fb page are needed. So it may take a little work to get your five figure monthly cheque.

I don't think so. Thin affiliate MFA sites are still everywhere and dominating the SERPs. I think the problem had to do with maybe the same link you were using? Same adsense code? Same clickbank hoplink? There's got to be something they traced.

I really was mad at first to know that they completely deindexed my #5 ranking site over night and after 2 months they also suspended my adsense account stating that my sites were generating invalid clicks. I had few sites with quality content on the home page and the sites were built on adsense ctr theme.

Looks like google is hunting down these types of sites. Two of my sites were ranked #4 and #5 for their respective keywords. Both the sites were built on EMD's and they both had more than 5k posts and would update everyday. Both the sites are completely gone along with other sites. Those sites were getting 40 to 50 visits a day in an average.

Now I really don't know what to do next as I have bought so many EMD's. It looks like the days of EMD's gone.

Google uses an algorithm called Information Retrieval (IR) to determine whether your site looks ugly or not. The Panda algorithm is designed to use all of the variables in the meta tags and provide an adjusted IR score based on quality of the content.

This will affect a webpage if it has:

- Empty content on web pages
- High Ad ratio
- Too many repeated keywords
- Template footprint
- Grammitcal errors

Every web page’s content and every backlink that a webpage points to, is run through the Crawler and anylized by the IR algorithm and then given an IR score. This score is then combined with Pagerank to produce a final ranking.

For anyone who doubts that Google takes manual action against violations of its quality guidelines, please spend the 4 minutes to watch this video that Google released today:

At the OP, were the sites in a general niche that was going through a clean up or a wide variety of core niches?

I don't think it is manual reviews, it is a whole change that Google rolled after 10PM EST yesterday, I checked my sites and they were moving up in the serps and today they are no where in the first 10 pages, my 2 sites are 8+ years old but I developed them recently..

This problem has the same answer to almost every other one where sites are dropped. Build good quality content for users not for search engines. If you have great content everything will work itself out and the "thin" websites dropping in the rankings will help you.

I think it has more to do with the linking than the EMD. I have a local site and a nationwide site that both got hit. The linking was done in a organized and progressive manner (just like many of the WSOs on this site recommend).

From what I've heard, non-english serps are not affected at the same time as global results. FYI, I've never seen much movement in serps for domestic sites, it seems like panda is not even implemented for serps in my country.

Sorry to hear bro.

This is weird lol. We probably won't know what's going on for another couple of weeks when everything settles (wildly guessing).

All of my sites moved UP today so I guess that's a good sign lol. I had one site move up 324 positions after being in no mans land for six months and that site only has THREE pages of content. It has no ads on it however.

There have been warnings for over a month now of an impending "search winter"

hahaha

Ya, im not a fan of MNS.

You know why?

Because its unlikely when you have 700 sites that you would bother to spend time and money to build each site PROPERLY.

Thus people who come to me for SEO on MNS just makes me laugh.
They want to rank for keywords for $50. $30. LOL!!

Even if i did it for that amount, it wouldnt be worth your while.
Because mini sites dont earn much.

That is why people are churning out or spamming MNS so they can multiply their earnings. but in the cause of doing that, they reduce the overall individual effectiveness of their MNS.

So even $50 will not break even for you for 1 long tail keyword that is easy to rank. Before you break even, your rankings drop and you have to pay for SEO to rank again.

so it doesnt make sense.

Content is definitely king at the moment.

Well let me tell you now, it is not just made for adsense or thin content sites or Exact match domains that are being affected.
I think Google has gone crazy - 4 of my client business sites have been deindexed, and when I talk about client sites, these are web design clients. They have not been promoted with blog networks, they have been promoted through article marketing only and this a few years back already. The sites are just gone.

Just spent time reading Google's forum, its not MFA sites, its not EMD sites, since Google just wiped out about 30-40% of their top rankings for no apparent reasons, good sites, bad sites, new sites, old sites, authority sites, all been wiped out.

It's penalizing sites that are over-optimized based on the stuff I've read, still not sure if it's on-page or backlinks related... or it could be a just a scare tactic to let us confess that we've done some link-buying. Let's wait for a few weeks and see what happens.

Not sure why the hate, just because our sites get hit, doesn't mean they're of no quality. I've spent a lot of time nurturing my sites.

They've seriously gone nuts. I have been looking over the internet and some solid and well built sites with good content that didn't have any adsense on them at all are GONE. In fact, I'm seeing MORE spammy looking sites

You can still build and rank so called micro sites of about 5 pages or more, but you need to write great content and the articles must be over 700 words.

Yeah, I'm reading similar results everywhere - seems Google has either rolled something back or the changes they've made took some time to implement.

I just had two sites which where ranking in top 10 for 10 keywords lost there rankings between april 14 and april 17th, Today morning one of my sites is back to where it was, but one is still no where. Its an EMD (BOTH) , and i dont think Google is penalizing or anything, sites will bounce back, its just the site has reacted to the new algo changes that G made. One of mine is back and I hope to see the 2nd one also back soon, it was at rank 1.

I have not used BMR,ALN or any other stuff like that in any of these sites

Both are hosted in hostgator as well

i find a lot of discussion today in the google webmaster forum, and the problem was the shared hosting account:

https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/p-14-ZbK5uc/y4ck-Zz9GGAJ

Google problem, not ours.

Have you guys read this stuff about Google penalizing sites that are over optimized - Too Much SEO? Google

I've seen some big drops in a couple of my thinner sites. When I say thin, these sites still have 20+ pages. My authority sites with 100+ pages are killing it though.

The shortcuts are gone it seems. I am fine with that.

My understanding of 'thin' sites isn't the amount of articles, according to that Google human review document that got 'leaked', thin sites = content you can get elsewhere, i.e you aren't offering anything new to the searcher.

Dunno if it's right or wrong but I still see loads of 1/2/3 page sites ranking, but they do offer decent content even if it isn't much, and all be it these are low competitive keywords, too.

I guess you got hit by so called "over optimization penalty". If all your internal and external links had anchor text your EMD, then this is the main reason you got hit.