WebProWorld - View Single Post - From position 12 to position 500, all because the Site Description changed!!

Clint1 · #9 (**permalink**) 11-04-2008, 10:03 AM

Seiretto, the bots can read JS.

Daz, I'm unable to see your source code, you apparently have it disabled. I was able to get to it by saving the page then viewing in Metapad. I notice your tags are sort of 'backwards', I'm not sure if that means anything or if you changed that recently. You have a bot verification tag that's also backwards, but below it could be a problem even though it's between  :

<META content=eTA/9PdyUkpMJ/EHsUcMHkpvTCXsirYy6OH89M3UklU= name=verify-v1>


Your page is HTML but that tag above is XHTML: /> which can break the parsing of a page. If that is something recent, you should change it to HTML with the proper closing HTML tag.

But if I had to guess, you'll be back to your regular spot in January because you're probably just another victim of G's "Christmas time small business attacks". For 6 years now, just before Xmas around Oct or Nov, G wages war on small business sites and either removes them from the index, or moves once top-ranking webpages so far back it's the same as being removed. This is so all the big time websites will get all the business. Matt Cutts knows about it and even admitted to it two years ago with a comment like "we don't anticipate any Xmas time 'issues' this year", which is proof something is going on each Xmas. But that statement was a lie since it's still happening to this day.

Webmaster forums all over the place have posts similar to yours. There's a lot of them even at the G forums. This year the pattern (for most) seems to be the Gbot "claiming" it cannot reach any of your webpages. And of course everyone at G blames the website hosts of the victimized sites. I too have been victimized by this atrocity every year for 6 years now, and like most from this year, I also got the "unreachable" error in the G Webmaster Tools console for ALL of my webpages (and the robots.txt file). This is how site owners realized the problem. And yet G will have you believe it's all coincidental that thousands of site owners all at the same time suddenly got unreachable errors. That's BS. My guess is they're getting a cut from the sales of big name business websites. Notice too, this problem has never affected any of the big name websites, only small business.

If you haven't yet, get you a G WMT account and watch the Diagnostics area. But there's nothing any of us can do other than just wait till January and prepare for yet another Xmas of zero sales, and spread the word so that they are finally held accountable.