Blogspot blog drops out of Google - expert opinions sought

m-chapman · #1 (**permalink**) 08-03-2008, 04:02 PM

Why is my knife crime blog vanishing from Google - Knife Crime blog - making society safer It was never high traffic but I was able to count on 1000 visitors a month on average. For quite a few weeks now though, the site has been appearing and disappearing from Google, yo-yo-ing.

Caught up in a fatal knife stabbing a few years ago, I was deeply affected and started the blog to be a useful resource for others. There has been much good feedback, interest and use. Now, the traffic has gone to zero.

There are many search techniques I could employ to try to improve things - but I don't understand why all of a sudden, the blog is somehow being penalised.

That said, it may not be being penalised - other content out there is clearly significant. But for traffic to dip to zero seems way wrong - why is Google 'penalising' such a worthwhile blog? Surely the process of selecting appropriate sites is wrong. There is definitely something 'up'. Anyone shed any light?

jabo · #2 (**permalink**) 08-04-2008, 03:51 AM

Sites don't just get penalized because of its content but also for the way that it is promoted or how you do your link building with it. How do you promote it anyways?

kevsta · #3 (**permalink**) 08-04-2008, 07:29 AM

it doesnt seem penalised from a quick look? google search knife crime blog

for better search performance with blogger you need to edit the source code to swap the blog name and post titles around on the posts.

see here Optimizing new Blogger title tags for SEO

and a few more decent inbound links wouldn't hurt you either.

what are you using to monitor your traffic? have you got google analytics on it? (havent looked)

m-chapman · #4 (**permalink**) 08-04-2008, 07:49 AM

Thanks to you both for checking and info. Reason I thought something was maybe 'up' was from earlier thread - Fluctuating rank for a single key word

I am using Google Analytics; am just trying to get to root of what may have happened. For traffic to have sunk to zero doesn't seem right - but because 'knife crime' content (news especially) seems to have soared in recent times, maybe the blog has been buried by that.

Because time is very limited just to able to write the odd post, I thought there might be an alternative explanation than using SEO techniques such as building links, buy a domain, add site map etc. I'm conscious this sounds a little lacksadaisacal, but this is an important issue and for traffic to ebb away like that just seems plain odd. But maybe not... would-be visitors could simply be on summer holidays!

let me know if you think / see anything else, thanking you...

- mark.

srblogger · #5 (**permalink**) 08-04-2008, 10:43 PM

Greetings,

If your site is vanishing from Google, then you have a penalty and Google is trying to tell you something. In my opinion, as soon as you fix it (whatever *it* is) - your pages will return within a few weeks. The trick is figuring out what *it* is.

Here's my guess:

I don't know how much control you have over the code of your blogspot.com site, but I looked at your source code and noticed that you have a lot of formatting that should be put in an external style sheet. I have several blogs and I always customize the template so that the <body> tag and all my original content is as close to the top of the page as humanly possibly. I even use .css to put all the navigation at the bottom of the page's code so that Googlebot does not see duplicate navigation at the top of each of my pages. I try to think like a spider and when that spider visits my sites, it sees original content first, then duplicates like navigation and calendars near the bottom.

Also, what I see as most important is this - in the URL you provided, there is a question mark at the end of the address. I checked the "server header check" on both URLs: (1) Knife Crime blog - making society safer and (2) Knife Crime blog - making society safer

Both URLs provide a 200 OK server response, so that means that Google sees two identical copies of your page. It will then penalize and filter them out. This is the link to a good server header check tool that I use often: Check Server Headers Tool - HTTP Status Codes Checker. Try my experiment for yourself and you will see that each page produces a 200 OK. This can be easily fixed by disallowing certain URLs in your robots.txt file.

Another way to make sure the URLs of your site are clean is this: I setup 301 redirects on all my blogs so that there is ONLY one copy of my main page. Also, the categories of my blogs have a"NOINDEX,FOLLOW" so as to avoid any duplicate content issues with Google. I only want the articles themselves indexed and no duplicate junk. In my opinion, duplicate content is a SEO killer.

If you were to test my site with and without a www or with an index.php at the end of the address, you will see that it 301 redirects to my domain (with a www and without the index.php). The URLs are clean. This way Google does not see any duplicates and feel the need to filter out my valuable content. Here is my site you can use to test Health Science News

Just my two cents.

-Stephanie
Internet Consulting from Austin, Texas
Rome Italy Tours
Find Florida Vacations

srblogger · #6 (**permalink**) 08-04-2008, 11:08 PM

Is there a way you can upgrade your site's template to the latest and greatest version? The software developers usually include clean code in the newer versions, but if you have an old template, there could be messy code on your pages.

-Stephanie

<snip please use your signature for your links CD>

m-chapman · #7 (**permalink**) 08-05-2008, 06:49 PM

Something's definitely not working right. For instance, when I search on 'knife crime blog society safer' my blog doesn't appear on the search rankings, yet various links I've built to the blog do appear. It's weird, isn't it?

And I've noticed my blog title is hijacked on one link here - Knife Crime blog - making society safer: Drug dealer 'stabs

Knife Crime blog - making society safer: Drug dealer 'stabs

Others believe they're safer and less addictive than street drugs.. the amount, the correct will drug relieve your without making symptoms addicted.. you ...
apersianboy.com/illusionist/images/article632.htm - 32k - Cached - Similar pages

This is a Google description I've pasted here from a search page - it's got my blog title, yet it's pointing to a questionable anti-virus site.

This doesn't look good at all, does it - what's that about?

mark.

srblogger · #8 (**permalink**) 08-05-2008, 09:53 PM

This is definitely strange, but I am not exactly sure what is going on. I hope the site was not hijacked. If you suspect that it was, this link on webmaster world might help: Proxy Server URLs Can Hijack Your Google Ranking - how to defend?

The article explains what you can do to protect your site from being hijacked (I am not saying yours was, I frankly don't know why the other site has your description).

I looked in Google and see you have a lot of pages indexed: site:knifecrime.blogspot.com - Google Search You have 88 pages indexed, and I searched "knifecrime" and your site is #1 in google: knifecrime - Google Search

Can you check your stats to see if you are getting crawled by some strange bots, other than major search engines? If someone is trying to hijack your site, then they would need to crawl it regularly to steal the content.

Let me know what you find out.

m-chapman · #9 (**permalink**) 08-06-2008, 05:45 AM

A friend of mine, Sam Mcarthur - who runs Forty First search marketing, passed me this link filled with info...

Blog Articles Being Stolen - High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum

and this...

SEOmoz | Four Ways to Enforce Your Copyright: What to Do When Your Online Content Is Being Stolen

Thought getting a blogspot blog would alleviate doing the more technical stuff; any non-technical solutions to this gratefully appreciated - time is a real issue; just want to post regularly, occasionally link-building etc as I go.

The SEO lead at Fuse has pointed out the apparent Google updating underway (and some re-ranking that's happening) at present. Maybe it's algorithmic and will settle down in a few days or when the blog is next indexed. (Out of interest, can I request a re-indexing to be done (quickly)?)

Thanks for pointers so far, hope this is also useful to you all too.

- mark.

m-chapman · #10 (**permalink**) 08-07-2008, 03:12 PM

UPDATE: the knife crime blog - Knife Crime blog - making society safer - that dropped out of Google is now re-appearing for various searches. Reckon it must be Google updating that saw it fall away, do you think? It was very odd it disappeared from searches.

Hopefully things will get back to normal, although traffic is still very low, compared to previous weeks and months

mark.

mark chapman's profile on plaxo

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