Need help redoing my sites after the FL updates...

[russtay]

My business was recently hit pretty hard by Google's Florida update. I have 50 websites, 1 for each state, that deal with business services and other business related things. Before the update, my sites where listed on the first page for their top two keywords "incorporate florida (or whichever state)" and "incorporate in florida". (many having the number one spot) The reason I decided to go with 50 state websites as opposed to 1 national website is because I knew I could link the websites together and get major link popularity. This worked incredibly well for the last year and a half. After the Update, we are nowhere to be found.

I have recently redone the websites trying to do it the Google friendly way but it does not seem to be working. Before, I had each site linked at the bottom of each other state's homepage. Now, I took the links of the homepage and made a separate page that lists the links. Here is my Florida site's example:

http://www.incorporate-florida.com/nbsnet.htm

This page is only linked from my sitemap. Google has since crawled these pages and all the other state's pages (they're in Google's cache) but when I check the backward links of each site’s homepage it says that there are no links.

What is wrong with that page that is making Google not register these links? What would be the best way to link the sites together to get my link popularity back?

[ronniethedodger]

I noticed two things right off the bat.

On your links page, all of anchor text is the actual link domain. You do not have the text above your link that says "Incorporate-(whateverstat).com" as a link. I would change that text to the keywords that you want recognized, in this case "Incorporate in 'statename'". Get rid of the other link at the bottom (you can leave the text there with the domain name...just get rid of the anchor link).

One example would look like this:

Incorporate in Arkansas
Features incorporation and LLC formation services for the State of Arkansas. Also provides corporate kits, plus EIN and S-Corporation application assistance.
http://www.incorporate-arkansas.com

That is the easy one.

The other thing I noticed is that all of your sites are on the same IP address at 66.192.101.34. There are a total of 160 sites on this one address.

It is common belief that sites that link to each other in the same Class 3 block of addresses will not be counted with too much weight, if any weight at all. The reason is that search engines assume that the sites in the same Class 3 block are from the same Host. And coming from the same Host, they may also be the same Site owner. So links within the this range of addresses, may be artificial. In your case...it is!!! ;0)

One plan of attack would be to split your States up by Regions. Make regions that would make sense geographically....like states west of the Rockies. They tend to intercommerce on land more between themselves and it would make sense to have a region for it.

Add a Regional site to link the states to. Move that Region onto another Server. Finally create an umbrella site for all your regions and link your regions up to it.

Each state would have links to other states in it's region. Each state would have links to other regions and the umbrella site. You would put the regions and umbrella site in your nav bar header.

The umbrella site would list all 50, but the regions would list only states in their region.

You could set this up first by adding the region and umbrella site on your current Host, and see if it improves the situation. If it does, then no problem. If it doesn't, then maybe moving them to other servers would be warranted.

[cbp]

See this thread on Analysis of Google's Algo:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=10802

Also - DITTO what Ron said. Some would consider what you are doing as spam - so if you were hid hard by Florida, maybe that was deliberate on Google's part to penalise these sorts of networks that are spammy.

when I check the backward links of each site’s homepage it says that there are no links.

Google only ever have shown a sample of backlinks and never shows them all. The full criteria for a backlink showing in the sample is not known, but a PR threshold a one of them (used to be a very high PR3)

CBP

[ronniethedodger]

On the backlink issue. The other states are showing up for incorporate-florida at AllTheWeb, AltaVista, MSN, and HotBot.

For the term "incorporate florida" you are #1 at MSN, #3 at HotBot, a sponsored and #1 at AltaVista, and #5 at AllTheWeb (actually #8 with 3 sponsored ahead of you).

The MSN is actually a Web Directory Result of theirs. Whatever in the heck that is. It could be a paid inclusion or something else, unclear.

All in all you are looking pretty damn good I would say. You will probably only need to really change the link text maybe....if that don't turn it around, then do the regions maybe.

Good luck.

[russtay]

Thanks, Guys.

Since the update, I've been hiting the PPC's pretty hard. I know most people disagree with this but I firmly believe that that the only reason Google droped the Florida update is so that merchants would have to go to Adwords. They have to get those profits up before the thier IPO. Instead of the Florida update they should call it the First Quarter Profit Demand update.

Any other helpful ideas about my site/s?

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by russtay

Any other helpful ideas about my site/s?

Well I like to build things....so why don't you throw em all in the garbage and start over...hehehehe ;0)

I am kidding....I am only kidding. I know I am going to get rapped on the knuckles for saying that.

[Mel]

HI Russtay:
you have admitted that the only reason you have fifty sites instead of one is that you wanted to use these sites to improve your link popularity. Google clearly states that it does not like such schemes and it appears that they have targeted such schemes in the Florida update, although you are not the subject of a penalty, it just appears that the intersite links have been ignored by Google.

You might want to read up on Googles Local Rank patent which is set up to eliminate all but one link from any given class C address for any search term.

You might consider replacing your 50 sites with 50 directories.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

You might want to read up on Googles Local Rank patent which is set up to eliminate all but one link from any given class C address for any search term.

Where may we read up on that? Do you have a link?

Originally Posted by Mel

You might consider replacing your 50 sites with 50 directories.

Can you elaborate on this a little further. I am not following what you are trying to say here. What is he going to do with 50 directories? And what does he do with the other site content?

Originally Posted by Mel

...it appears that they have targeted such schemes in the Florida update, although you are not the subject of a penalty, it just appears that the intersite links have been ignored by Google.

I am going to jump on this one before cbp does. Nobody knows nothing about what was targeted or not targeted with the Florida update. Everything is just speculation.

For a good discussion on what may or may not be happening, and to dispel a lot of the rumors that are floating around out there...please refer to this thread here at WPW http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=10802

As for the links being ignored by Google, you may be right about that one. But again there is no conclusive proof that it is because of the IP addressing. Although my opinion is that it is because of the sites all being on one address.

The sites being on one address is not affecting his linkbacks on other search engines though. And it is not affecting his results rankings on those search engines either. One should not over-react to changes at Google and upset the cart by doing something drastic.

The real question for this topic is why his terms were not showing up at Google, let's not lose sight of that. It might be something simple as changing the anchor text as discussed earlier.

[Mel]

Hi Ronnie:
You can find lots of references to the LocalRank patent by doing a search for just those words, but here is a link to the patent itself.

There was quite a bit of discussion about this in various forums in March of this year when the patent was issued.

Sorry I wasn't clearer with the directory thing I can see how it might be confusing. What I am suggesting is that he do way with the fifty sites which were admittedly established only to spam the search engines and transfer the contents to 50 subdirectories on one of his sites.

Well....Yes Ronnie nobody knows for sure about why anything happened, but if we take the trouble to look we can see what has happened and speculate as to why that may have happened. Having seen many spam site rings disappear (halleluja!) during Florida I do not think it too much of stretch of the imagination to conclude that this was a result of Google somehow targeting such tactics, which it has repeatedly warned against.

As for the links being ignored by Google that is not speculation but fact, just do a link: search on Google and they are not reported. and that is possibley a very good reason why his pages are not ranking in Google.

[cbp]

Mel wrote:

As for the links being ignored by Google that is not speculation but fact, just do a link: search on Google and they are not reported. and that is possibley a very good reason why his pages are not ranking in Google.

I wrote earlier in this thread:

Google only ever have shown a sample of backlinks and never shows them all. The full criteria for a backlink showing in the sample is not known, but a PR threshold a one of them (used to be a very high PR3)

That why they do not show up...

A google employee confirmed some time ago, that all links are taken into account even if they do not show up in the backlink sample.

CBP

[Mel]

Hi cbp
yep you could right about that since all of the sitemaps and links pages seem to have a PR0 even though they are linked to from PR 4 or higher pages, but then why do they not have any PR? (PR=0)

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

Hi cbp
yep you could right about that since all of the sitemaps and links pages seem to have a PR0 even though they are linked to from PR 4 or higher pages, but then why do they not have any PR? (PR=0)

My theory on that is that there is 160 sites ganged on one IP address. It is my theory also, that Google crawls by IP address and not by URL.

This makes the billions of pages it indexes quicker to access for processing. They also use the IP address and have their own internal database to do a name lookup. They do not rely on an external service.

This became clear to me when we did a change in April of this year. We changed the domain from .com to .net -- did not move it from the server or the IP address it was at. Just a name change.

Google came in almost immediately and had a feeding frenzy with all the new pages .... brand new content that was never on the .com site.

Those results showed up just as quick in searches at Google. I thought I was a God at that time.

Only one problem.....they all had .com on the link and in the listing. They were .net pages with a .com name.

So....having 160 sites ganged on onto one IP address will have some repercussions. It would depend on the Host and how cheap they are.

I have seen some of these instances do pretty good, and some that have no ranking at all.

[russtay]

Back win I had the links on the index page, they all appeared in each others backward links. The only anchor text that I used was the name of the state. The fact that they are using the same IP addy didn't seem to matter back then so maybe that's a new thing with the FL update. But now that I think about it the pagerank is the same as before. The only difference now is that the backward links aren't showing up and I'm not on the first search result page.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

You can find lots of references to the LocalRank patent by doing a search for just those words, but here is a link to the patent itself...

Dang. I could not get past the first paragraph in this thing. Is there any more discussion still going on about this? Or is it pretty much dead?

Originally Posted by Mel

Sorry I wasn't clearer with the directory thing I can see how it might be confusing. What I am suggesting is that he do way with the fifty sites which were admittedly established only to spam the search engines and transfer the contents to 50 subdirectories on one of his sites.

No problem. Thanks for clearing that up. I was not quite sure what you were saying.

That would probably be a good idea in his present situation. Not because of the alleged spamming possiblities, but because I think the one site with all of the states should be moved to a better server.

But moving or consolidation still may not be necessary. The issue was his keywords at Google. They are not an issue on other SE's. If by revising his link pages with the keyword in the anchor text does the job, then there is no more problem.

Still....even the possibility of it being viewed as spamming is enough for me to combine the sites. But that is my feeling (and yours too I see) and it is up to him to make that decision.
[/quote]

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by russtay

Back win I had the links on the index page, they all appeared in each others backward links. The only anchor text that I used was the name of the state. The fact that they are using the same IP addy didn't seem to matter back then so maybe that's a new thing with the FL update. But now that I think about it the pagerank is the same as before. The only difference now is that the backward links aren't showing up and I'm not on the first search result page.

More importance is put on links on the home page. A page that is one click away, is less important. Two clicks very bad. Three, forget about it.

Moving those links onto their own page and one click away would downgrade the importance, and it is on a lower PRed page. That is more than likely the reason that they are no longer showing up. Remember that Google does not show all backlinks.

I have one more question. I was looking at your Florida Home Page......Where is the link to your Links Page? I cannot find it.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

Hi cbp
yep you could right about that since all of the sitemaps and links pages seem to have a PR0 even though they are linked to from PR 4 or higher pages, but then why do they not have any PR? (PR=0)

My guess is that they are new pages and just recently indexed by Google.

[russtay]

"Sitemap" - at the bottom of the page.

Those links are two clicks away from the index page. Should I put them back on the index page? I was worried that google was seeing over fifty links on my index page and thinking it was a link farm thus removing it from the search results.

Also, i read that index page to index page linking was looked at as a link farm.

[Mel]

Hi Roger
Yes those patent applications seem to be deliberately written in the most confusing manner possible.

Try using image link at the top of the page and then going to page 5 of the drawings where there is a flowchart which shows how they weed out all but one of the links from any given Class C IP address.

[fathom]

Why not just have one site and non-duplicated content -- if you did this then Florida's update probably would not have been that bad.

main site http://www.nabuse.com

Note: I did note that many sites/pages still have PageRank thus not penalized just yet, I would seriously re-define your "link strategy" and add specific content that is not on rach others site.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

Hi Roger
Yes those patent applications seem to be deliberately written in the most confusing manner possible.

Try using image link at the top of the page and then going to page 5 of the drawings where there is a flowchart which shows how they weed out all but one of the links from any given Class C IP address.

Yeah, I went to the image section, but it is not displaying too well. I was having a hard time reading it. Plus the page was "jittery" when I scrolled. That is the best way I can describe it.

I will keep trying. Perhaps there is some info that can be had on the net -- with better pictures. I need pictures drawn out for me I think on this one.

Thanks again Mel.