Craig's List

[wdj]

Hi: I have a quandary, it seems I’m being punished by Google for advertising on Craig’s List. My site www.islandtrees.com was always on page one with certain search terms. Since I have a vacation rental I figured why not advertise on craigslist. Immediately my search rank dropped. So I figured, since I’m not trying to inflate my links, I would use my pointer at www.islandtrees.de yet still I am being punished by Google. For instance with a search term “ Carriacou rental” I’m No. 2 under Yahoo and don’t show up under Google until page 13, way after a slew of sites that link to me. Here’s my quandary: because of the pointer I know that the hits I’m getting from Craig’s List are of a much higher quality than the one’s I get from Google (they go deeper into the site) – however I don’t want to throw out my Google ranking either – any ideas how to get around this? THNX!

[eggypiece]

wdj,

What is "Craig's List"?

[jawn_tech]

I'm guessing wdj is referring to www.craigslist.org, one of the first and famous classifieds directories that just grew and grew, acclaimed by a lot of press over the years.

yes?

[wdj]

Yes -- now rolling out to cities all over the world

[SEOforGoogle]

wdj -
Not sure if it's related, but I've seen pages linked from Craigslist indexed almost immediately (4 days) from Google, then get a rank of around 500 for that exact phrase for a day or so, and then dropped from the index.

Maybe a modified version of the "Sandbox effect"?

Also have seen some pages lose thier entire PR (n/a).

Anyone else experience this?

[cbp]

A link from Craigslist NOT to a penalty. Look for other reasons for the change in rankings. A lot of sites went up and down recently due to some sort of minor algorithm tweak at Google.

CBP

[activeco]

Originally Posted by cbp

A link from Craigslist would lead to a penalty.

I guess you miss one "not" here.
;-)

[cbp]

....duh ..... I gone back and added the NOT - thx

[jackson992]

I think you meant major algo change LOL

[cbp]

I think you meant major algo change LOL

I think the "tweak" or "turning of the knob" was very very minor - most search results I follow did not change at all, with the exception of a few sites that dropped in a few search results (and an equal number climbed).... those sites that moved down obviously had something that the tweak no longer gives as much emphasis to, and those that climbed have some characteristic(s) that the tweak favours .... from what I can tell there is no consistent characteristic that anyone has detected that the sites that dropped or climbed had in common :-(

CBP