Is This Website Being Penalized?

[incrediblehelp]

Looking for some help from the WPW big guns.

I am starting some SEO on a website called:

http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/

The website is a WP back end, but is basically a directory to drive traffic to web hosts. Nothing big on that.

The website used to rank for lots of great keywords "cheap web hosting" and "expired domains" up until about mid-July of this year. The pages that ranked well for these kind of keywords were the home page and the domain page:

http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/expired-domains/

We went through a redesign on the news/articles pages around the time of the drop and the programmers didn’t have 301 redirects in place properly for about 2 weeks. We caught the error and fixed it so the 301 redirects worked. We figured we would see some traffic loss because of it, but not on our big keywords because the pages that were ranking for those were not affected. The pages that were redirected were news/articles pages that basically received minor long tailed traffic.

Well the short tailed traffic (“cheap web hosting" and "expired domains") is what disappeared right away. Then the rankings/traffic struggled to come back. We saw ranking come back on and off for about 8 weeks after the mistake, but at the beginning of October have completely disappeared. Check out the graph below:




Obviously we are focusing on Google for this particular issue. Maybe Google saw all the dead pages and demoted the website? Maybe the fact that hundreds of pages disappeared which all link strongly to the home page effected its overall rank? Hard to think internal rank messed up the rankings that bad?

We didn’t notice any dramatic changes in back links during this whole period of time.

Any ideas or theories?

Thanks!

[crankydave]

Jaan... Not seeing anything in particular that would make me think it's being penalized. Ranks #2 for "budget web hosting". Not exactly ultra competitive but...

Now "cheap web hosting" and "expired domains"... Doesn't show up anywhere using the allin: operators. No place. I don't know if you checked any of those previous to the problem but it seems to me, whatever was causing/allowing the site to rank previously is simply not there now rather than a penalty.

Dave

[incrediblehelp]

Yes I keep coming back to the fact that some back links must have been taken away that was helping it rank for that.

[ctabuk]

Jann, according to site report card 'Specified URL is unavailable'.


Well Goog has it listed
Expired, Deleted, Expiring, Dropped Domain Lists | Cheap Web ...
Expired & Deleted Domain Lists. Search our large list of deleted, dropped, expiring and expired domain names with that still receive traffic.
www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/expired-domains/ - 37k - Cached - Similar pages
Expired Domains Search Engine Launches | Cheap Web Hosting ...
Expired Domains Search Engine Launches. Las Vegas, Nevada - (via THE HOSTING NEWS) - August 24, 2005 - Everyday over 20000 domains re-enter the market, ...
http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com...gine-launches/ - 25k - Cached - Similar pages
More results from www.cheaphostingdirectory.com »
Is This Website Being Penalized? - WebProWorld
http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/expired-domains/ We went through a redesign on the news/articles pages around the time of the drop and the programmers ...
http://www.webproworld.com/google-di...website-being- penalized.html - 11 hours ago - Similar pages

But that's all I'm seeing. I'll run it through and post back.


IBP could not access it either.

[ctabuk]

Xenu found these
http://delicious.com/save?jump=yes&u...Domain%20Lists
https://secure.delicious.com/login?v...ime=1226657202
\_____ error code: 500 (server error)

http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/expired-domains/
http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com...ns/favicon.ico
\_____ error code: 404 (not found)

2 broken link(s) reported

[subhzash]

Totally 22075 pages are giving link back to your website.

Also, linked pages were contains more than 50 links. I think too many link backs

Also i observed that you have used "Cheap web hosting" as anchor text for maximum link backs

Its looking like you have paid link back also


Regards
Subhzash

[wige]

One thing I have seen Google claim is that they do put some weight on what pages the webmaster thinks are important. This is determined based on internal pagerank (how you link internally), where pages are located in the directory structure, how documents are linked from the home page, how pages are listed on the sitemap, etc. This information is used to some extent to determine what the web master thinks are the most important things about the site, and to determine relevance to different keywords and queries. This may have some impact on what search terms your site shows up for.

Unfortunately, when a large portion of your site goes away due to a redesign or a redirect issue, Google may recalculate what pages it thinks are considered the most important. Although Google has said time and time again that this factor does not determine rankings, I suspect it does have an influence when calculating the relevance score of a domain. As Google scans your content, it will see many potential topics that your site is about. However, it has to figure out what the main topics of your site are, which is based on internal and external factors. So, up to now Google has seen that your site is about "cheap web hosting". Now that your internal link structure changed due to some pages becoming unavailable, even though the "cheap web hosting" page still exists, Google may see that page as being less important, and "budget web hosting" as more important, and changed your rankings accordingly.

It is difficult then to guess what will happen as Google continues processing the pages as they return to the index. It is possible that Google will see your internal structure as being restored and your rankings will come back. It is also possible that Google will continue looking at your site as being about "budget web hosting" and the new links as supporting that phrase.

[Palindrome]

Have recently been through a situation where a mistake was made, not identical but similar and corrected within a week. Despite that, at least six weeks before something resembling normality returned, on a domain with an excellent link profile and regularly spidered.

Maybe Google are becoming a little slower at reversing change and the problem will solve itself, although there is one aspect of the set up that is a slight concern, the domain interlinking. I appreciate this has always been there but things change and this is an area where Google have been punitive recently. Whilst they accept that reasonable domain interlinking is okay, even where this has the potential to pass pagerank, the Inet set up could be just the wrong side of that. Small aspects, such as having main menu items also linked to one of the other domains have been felt by some to tip the balance.

I am not stating this is a problem but does warrant thought.

[ami_iss]

If I understand correctly, you had a lot of Web pages at a site with a set of URLs, and then you trashed those addresses completely and substituted new ones. That's like starting a new Web site almost. And about that time you noticed the problem - so that is probably the reason.

The degree to which 301 redirects are recognized and trusted by Google is unknown. They tell you that they do not list redirection pages at all, or at least they used to do so. That is obviously untrue. But they seem to give a lot less weight to such pages. Never change a URL if you can help it.

Even if there is no penalty whatever for redirection, the indexable content is now at a different Web page. The old page has nothing in it, so whatever google moxie you had there must be gone, right? The new page has to start over.

It seems that every two weeks or so there is a post from some poor soul that starts "We changed the domain name of our site" or "we changed all the page addresses" and "for some strange reason we aren't getting any more visitors."

Do you think there just might be a connection? I rather suspect there is.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

[davidweb]

I had worked on a similar project where website got penalized just due to the news/articles update on the front page ( ie the main landing page)

The rankings of your site has indeed dropped to pages 500 for your targeted keywords, although it would be too early to label it as penalty ( it could be on its way to temporary/or permanent penalty). Some of the issues which I found are as given below :-

Issue 1) The content of your site is being published on other sites as well which could be confusing google. Google starts to act like a fickle-minded child who can throw weird tantrums at anything if it doesnt like anything in particular. Over the past few years Google is getting more and more strict in terms of Content.

Even if you have genuinely published unique articles, press releases,your ranking power can get sucked by external sites if they publish your article and get crawled first (ie labelled UNIQUE by Google).

For some of your articles/news, Google has granted ranking powers to Clickfire Webmaster News - Hosting, Domains, Web Development + Aplus.Net Tops List of Web Hosting Companies and several other websites where your articles are getting published and crawled even before they get crawled on your site.

This could be a major reason behind this trouble.

Issue 2) (Minor)Titles are too long (News/Article Posts), which could dilute the concentration of targeted keyword and its associated ranking.

SOLUTIONS

You can try to switch off NEWS/ARTICLES temporarily for 1-2 months. Make sure that any new article news get crawled on your site first and then on any other website. Few months back my main site received duplicate penalty where some competitors were using this trick to bring down ranking power of our published articles . We deleted our own original articles and site jumped back to life again

If this was the only issue, then Google will surely roll-back the previous rankings for your website.

Since you must be well aware of SEO, I am sure you must haven't implied any of the techniques listed at Avoid these SEO Techniques SEO HAWK ( My little link promotion )

( If your Site retains its previous rankings, then I would hope you will give me some advertising space at Discounted Rates )

[Webnauts]

Hi Jaan,

as you know I am not a guy spreading theories. And here is the biggest issue I can seen on the site:

Google have indexed 5120, and only 651 are in the main index, which means 4469 are in the supplemental results.
Once you fix that issue they will see a dramatic boost in their rankings.

I wrote an article about this, explaining your problem: Boost your rankings with Pagerank Sculpting

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by wige

One thing I have seen Google claim is that they do put some weight on what pages the webmaster thinks are important. This is determined based on internal pagerank (how you link internally), where pages are located in the directory structure, how documents are linked from the home page, how pages are listed on the sitemap, etc. This information is used to some extent to determine what the web master thinks are the most important things about the site, and to determine relevance to different keywords and queries. This may have some impact on what search terms your site shows up for.

Unfortunately, when a large portion of your site goes away due to a redesign or a redirect issue, Google may recalculate what pages it thinks are considered the most important. Although Google has said time and time again that this factor does not determine rankings, I suspect it does have an influence when calculating the relevance score of a domain. As Google scans your content, it will see many potential topics that your site is about. However, it has to figure out what the main topics of your site are, which is based on internal and external factors. So, up to now Google has seen that your site is about "cheap web hosting". Now that your internal link structure changed due to some pages becoming unavailable, even though the "cheap web hosting" page still exists, Google may see that page as being less important, and "budget web hosting" as more important, and changed your rankings accordingly.

It is difficult then to guess what will happen as Google continues processing the pages as they return to the index. It is possible that Google will see your internal structure as being restored and your rankings will come back. It is also possible that Google will continue looking at your site as being about "budget web hosting" and the new links as supporting that phrase.

Excellent post Wige! I gave you a Reputation point for that. That is what I met in my previous post.

[incrediblehelp]

Thanks for all your feedback so far.

Webnauts you still believe websites will not rank well if they have a lot pages in the SI? Please review how many pages Amazon has in the SI for us. I would be curious to know how many are in there as they rank just fine.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Thanks for all your feedback so far.

Webnauts you still believe websites will not rank well if they have a lot pages in the SI? Please review how many pages Amazon has in the SI for us. I would be curious to know how many are in there as they rank just fine.

Jaan I did this work for several customers the last month and they experienced an incredible boost in the rankings, without any other additional on-page or off-page work.

About Amazon:

1. Do they rank for every single product (key term)?
2. What is their PageRank?
3. What is their IBL power?

If their most important web pages like i.e the most lucrative products or services have NOT been moved to Google's supplemental index, they sure can rank for those terms. So for which terms are the ranking for?

Are you ready for a bet? If yes, lets make a deal. I will do the PageRank Sculpting, and if that works you should pay the bill. If not, I cleaned up the garbage for free. Can we go from there?

P.S. I did the job for our member here at WPW "Watto". PM him and ask him what happen. Just for example.
I can provide you more web sites I did that already which had had best results than with any other SEO methology.

[incrediblehelp]

John shoot me an email. I can PR sculpt myself.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

John shoot me an email. I can PR sculpt myself.

I have mail you a list of several customers we sculpted PR and experienced a great boost in their rankings.

P.S. Just a hint. We did not only take care of the supps, but of the hidden cached pages.