PLEASE HELP: Site de-indexed from Google?

[buddhu]

Hi all,

Happy New Year.

Ok, somebody please HELP!

Our site ranked top 3 in Google for dozens of terms until just before New Years. Our homepage was PR6 and most internal pages PR4,5 or 6.

Some time around 31st December or 1st Jan something went crazy with the way G indexed and ranked us.

For example, for a Google search on "number plates", we come up around #3. Our SERP links used to show the URL:
http://www.regtransfers.co.uk
the SERP links for that term now show:
www.regtransfers.co.uk/index.asp?domain=at_ pp_static_120x61&lid=Reg+Transfers

which is a tracking URL for a link to us from www.autotrader.co.uk

for some terms we get two SERP results, the main one and an indented supplementary one. Nothing unusual about that, except that the main result in these cases is in the form of the link with the tracking URL, and the indented secondary shows the 'proper' URL without the tracking stuff.

To see this, search on "private plates" and look around #3.

What is more, link:www.regtransfers.co.uk used to return hundreds of backlinks. Now it shows 1, the one which shows up as the link URL in the SERPS!

Also, typing www.regtransfers.co.uk into the Google search returns "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.regtransfers.co.uk"

However, site:www.regtransfers.co.uk does return pages.

PLEASE someone help.
* Could a period of server downtime at our end cause this?
* Is this a penalty? What the hell is going on?
*Why has G stopped showing all my hundreds of backlinks?
* Why are my SERP results showing the wrong link URL?
* Why does it say "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.regtransfers.co.uk" when I search on our domain?

Thanks in advance...

[greeneagle]

buddhu,

How long have you had the "tracking" URL; http://www.regtransfers.co.uk/index.asp?domain=at_ up and what real purpose does it serve?

You may be being served a "dupe content" penalty. Haven't looked deeper, hope there aren't more. OOps..

I found that:

http://www.regtransfers.co.uk/

http://www.regtransfers.co.uk/index.asp?domain=at_

http://www.regtransfers.co.uk/index....=Reg+Transfers

are all the same content. What are you doing? And how many are there?

Ken

[buddhu]

Hi Ken,

Thanks for responding.

*Sigh* When I took over SEO for the company website I was presented with a huge dupe content fait accompli. In addition to a large number of domains that all pointed directly to the site or meta-refreshed to it (which I've since had changed or redirected by 301), it is and has been common practice for the marketing department to append tracking parameters to paid links so they can track performance/conversion (these are ads/links bought to attract traffic, not to impact SEO). There are probably loads of them.

I've been struggling to de-dupe our web presence, and continue to do so.

Anyway, I thought perhaps it wasn't a penalty as we are still ranked at or near our usual position. I figured that if it were a penalty we'd have been kicked altogether. I accept that I could be wrong about that.

OK, if it is a dupe content issue caused by Google treating the tracking URLs as separate pages with the same content, does that mean that all links with tracking strings appended after the page extension would have to be changed to go to another page which is perhaps meta noindex or blocked in robots.txt?

[gawdproductions]

Hey Buddhu,

google.ca (my default g) shows 134 backlinks for http://www.regtransfers.co.uk/- and around number 3 in results for 'personal number plates'.

I highly doubt that you are being penalized; give it a few days! Btw, I noticed some pr bouncing in the last couple of days as well.

Happy New Year!

[jawn_tech]

[speaking of duplicate, bug appeared to create duplicate post]

[jawn_tech]

The thing about dup penalties is it isn't a 'punishment', per se. They're not out to show you what's what for having dup content. They just don't want to list certain pages that are duplicate of others. But it doesn't mean the site itself has lost 'brownie points' with Google. (Unless PR is considered brownie points, in which sometimes dup pages - as they see it - can experience a PR drop)

I wouldn't worry much about what Google shows as backlinks. That information they provide with the "link:" command is rarely accurate, and changes without rhyme or reason. The real question is why do they offer the link: command, since it's 'broken'.

[buddhu]

Mornin' all,

Thanks for the additional replies.

Hmm... penalised or not penalised...

jawn_tech: I know what you mean about most of G's anti-dupe measures being filtering rather than punitive, but that still leaves the possibility that something we do has tripped a filter in such a way as to temporarily glitch our SERPs and link URL - as suggested by Ken.

That said, if it were a dupe filter/penalty issue, what I saw happening isn't quite what I would have expected to see...

Anyway, this morning things have settled somewhat, and we have our proper link in the SERPs rather than the tracking URL that was there for a while.

Backlinks for www.regtransfers.co.uk are still not showing (except for the one that links via that damned tracking URL). On the other hand, some backlinks do show if I search on link:www.regtransfers.co.uk/index.asp

All in all, a strange few days.

Thanks very much for all the feedback and suggestions.

[jawn_tech]

I know what you mean buddhu. I don't know what exactly they've done to ya or why. As for penalties, I once got nailed hard for using a java-redirect instead of a 301 redirect. It was just ignorance at the time -- I meant well, just to navigate viewers to the new location of a page... Anway, all internal pages went to a PR of 0 and moved back to page 4 of serps on Google for a couple weeks until I straightened things out. Wasn't fun.