Site SERPs decimated. What to do?

[businessdata]

Scratching my head over this one; over the last couple of years I have slowly built up couple of thousand visitors daily from Google natural listings to my personal finance site at http://www.QCK.com, then one day (April 25th) POW!! Not removed completely, but man oh man severely dumped down the listings in ALL key terms like compare pensions, secured loans etc. Even the site name itself "QCK" formerly on number one spot, now several pages away. I still have Google PageRank of 5 on most main pages.

So what could have happened? Searching for an answer the next day I came across a site that had exactly duplicated over 300 pages from my site and replaced some of the ads with their own affiliate links. Seems it had been up around six weeks or so. I got into a hot lather over that and within 24 hours the site's affiliate link providers had removed them from the networks and within 48 hrs the site itself was disabled. Filed a Notice of Infringement with Google, and the infringing site's Google listings are now down to 2 (dead links). But this hasn't helped our site. Maybe this has nothing to do with anything. Reread Google Webmaster guidelines a dozen times, and we don't do any black-hat stuff like cloaking, hidden links, work with SEO firms or link-farms etc.

Communicating with Google is like whistling into the wind. People who own sites and have worked hard to build them up with solid content and in-links to get up somewhere in the World's No. 1 Search Engine are not regarded as customers. Completing their 'feedback' form gets you an automated email with standard help links which you then reply to saying "Yes I read all your Webmaster stuff" then .. brick wall 1.

Sure I spend a lot on Google Adwords, and I have to say my rep is great, always responds etc. But in this case she says it's Chinese Walls bro. Sure, she can put a word through the internal channel but basically the Other Side are very protective of their Algorithm and Adwords people are not trained in Search. Brick wall 2.

Any clues from enlightened minds out there ??

[incrediblehelp]

People will copy (http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=54419) your website all the time. All you can do is try to contact the person doing and ask them to stop and/or file DMCA report (http://www.jaankanellis.com/report-those-content-copiers-with-search-engine-dmca-act-submission-pages/)

Now as for it hurting your, it probbaly wont in the search engines. Scraper websites will always rank lower than the original content.

[businessdata]

Thanks, I have already filed a DMCA Report and it seems that all the offending pages have now been removed from Google's index.

Any ideas on what steps I need to take to get back up the index?

[glengara]

With cookies/JS disabled the site wouldn't download properly, I had to force quit.

Another page I looked at was trying to connect to uk.intelitxt.com, which seems to be a scumware programme....

[businessdata]

Strange, should work OK. The cookies and javascript have been there all along. Hasn't seemed to have stopped 99% of people + search spiders so far. It is part of the cms used to run the site in any case and would necessitate building everything again from the ground up. I do not think this has anything to do with the problem at hand.

Re intellitxt, this is only on news article pages + a handful of others. Have had this going since January. Essentially it brings up a Yahoo sponsored search advertiser in a little pop-up box when mouse-overing one of several keywords on a news page. Some fairly big publishers use this Vibrant Media service without detrimental effects and I have yet to see any evidence of this being labelled offensive by Google Search. Strange, should work OK. The cookies and javascript have been there all along. Hasn't seemed to have stopped 99% of people + search spiders so far.
It is part of the cms used to runthe site in any case and would necessitate building everything again from the ground up. I do not think this has anything to do with the problem at hand.

Re intellitxt, this is only on news article pages + a handful of others. Have had this going since January. Essentially it brings up a Yahoo sponsored search advertiser in a little pop-up box when mouse-overing one of several keywords on a news page. Some fairly big publishers use this Vibrant media service without detrimental effects and I have yet to see any evidence of this being labelled offensive by Google Search. But scumware??

[glengara]

I read here it doesn't seem to work with Mac OSX, so that might explain my difficulties with accessing your site.... http://battellemedia.com/archives/000560.php

And you're right about it NOT being scumware, my mistake ;-)

[businessdata]

I am on Mac OSX and so does everyone else in the office here, none of whom are seeing a problem with the Intellitxt ads on Safari or Firefox. Maybe when that article was written in April 04, the ads were incompatible with OSX.
There must be something else on the site. As we use Firefox mostly we missed the fact that the news on the front page appears a bit screwed up on Safari.
Still don't think this is a factor in the SERPs drop. Reading elsewhere I see a whole load of people got dumped on by Google on this same day, so feeling for some kind of common denominator.

[SemAdvance]

Re intellitxt, this is only on news article pages + a handful of others. Have had this going since January. Essentially it brings up a Yahoo sponsored search advertiser in a little pop-up box when mouse-overing one of several keywords on a news page. Some fairly big publishers use this Vibrant media service without detrimental effects and I have yet to see any evidence of this being labelled offensive by Google Search. But scumware??

Google does not report on all offending issues it finds, merely comes by and rips your soul out if it finds you using something it doesn't agree with.

Given the span of time between your implementation, Googles 90 day lag for changes on your site to be seen and the recent BD update it seems to me you were delivered a calling card from Google.

As was noted... since your content is older and would be seen as first published... you would always win the battle with any site that stole your content after... and this in and of itself... is not enough to have decimated your site as has been done.

Try pulling out your January move... and wait a month or two...maybe sooner to see any effect. May need to write a reinclusion...

[emils]

businessdata,

I do have a couple clues for you - just from what i learnt over the last years .

My own experience tells me these things about Google:
- Google knows and remembers your site history.
- Google takes your site as a whole and indexes it as such.
- Google follows its own internal algo 'hints' in this manner. Any possible factors on your site, making it to look similar to junk sites, are accounted and a resulting value computed. If this value excesses a given treshold, paw - you're history. Small site changes or algo changes can therefore have a dramatic effect on given websites, usually suddenly.

and the final one,
- Google is constantly refining and tuning its algo. This means that one day your computed quality factor may exceed treshold due to these small, continous changes.

From looking at your site, I see the following quality signals that I believe to be definitely affecting you:
- You have way too many links on the homepage. Google recommends having not more than 100. I do take this very likely, it has proven a very important rule to follow in practice.
- You are using pages with very long filenames and lots of dashes. This isn't good. I prefer using a page like 12345.htm than using very long filenames with keywords separated by dashes. Again this is something that I've been testing myself.
- The site that copied you, has done a lot of harm on you. Your site has suddenly appeared as having partially copied data, and G lowers ranking for such sites. The so-called duplicate pages missing may have caused site overall 'keyword dilution' and a decrease in site size. This is also counted as lower site quality.
- Your site has a LOT of javascript. By removing javascript, and keeping a low code-to-text ratio, performance of our websites has dramatically increased ( I currently experience for example a 20% boost on one of our websites, simply due to such a minimal change ).

What you can do to get out of this problems:
- Lower the number of links on your homepage to 100 or similar. Move the less important ones to secondary pages.
- Add new pages constantly. Change your homepage constantly, thats where G looks first. Make sure these pages are 100% original. Do not copy articles from elsewhere for this purpose.
- Work to gain new links over the next months.
- Cut some of the javascript off.
- Be patient. Recovering from such a situation may take a couple months for example

I know these may look rather as simple suggestions, but from what I have experienced myself, if you follow such recommendations then your site will eventually go back up in SERPS. Do not do anything 100% dramatic - simple optimizations, changes, adding fresh content, getting links, all in a constant manner may work out marvels for you.

We use such technique of all-positive signs in achieving 'trust factor' for our sites. And yes it does work great.

[emils]

May need to write a reinclusion...

I disagree with this. Your site is not banned, your pages are indexed, your homepage is also indexed. You have no reason to file for reinclusion, you are included. Just try to give all positive signs to G during the next months.

[quark]

get rid of all javascript you can. much can be accomplished with CSS. Start writing copy and not links and images. Google is looking for content of around 6-700 words of relevant copy. what happened to you may as well just have been caused by the fact that with Google's current policy, your relevance was not obvious in the copy on the home page. i did not look further as there is where most of the weight goes.

[dburdon]

Businessdata,

do you have a tie-in with Yahoo? Your site content seems to be mainly adwords type ads, but without the Google appendages. If you are associated advertising with Yahoo, it would only seem natural that Google may be expressing some displeasure.

Am I wrong?

[bbcarter]

Google does not report on all offending issues it finds, merely comes by and rips your soul out if it finds you using something it doesn't agree with.

Matt Cutts indicates they're trying to change that now that they have more employees- their plan is to warn sites that seem above board but not to contact the ones that are obviously black hat.

I agree it can be like whistling in the wind, but I've found that even if you don't get a direct response, emailing them repeatedly can get you results, maybe.

[bbcarter]

emils:


Your site has a LOT of javascript. By removing javascript, and keeping a low code-to-text ratio, performance of our websites has dramatically increased ( I currently experience for example a 20% boost on one of our websites, simply due to such a minimal change ).

Does putting it in a js file do that same for you? Did you try that?

I've heard a lot about CSS helping in this context- seems my sites with CSS have gotten more pagerank faster... can't be sure tho.

B

[incrediblehelp]

businessdata why are you trying to rank a .com in the UK? Why not get a co.uk domain? Are you hosting the .com in the UK?

[espectations]

Style sheets definitely assists as it normally means that there is less code at the top of the page for the spiders to crawl leading to the content of the page being more accessible to the spider.

Page size and download time reduce extensively.

We have done some tests with table pages, no images, just text (printable pages) vs CSS pages no images just text (exact same text)

The CSS pages appeared in the SERPS much faster and seemed to maintain their position much longer.

Download time of these pages were as little as 2 seconds.

Tried, tested, proven.

The only problem that I could establish with CSS is that older browsers do not support it. So take a look at your target audience - if they live in a country with backward technology and non-tech savvy users rather stick to tabled sites but make sure the page downloads in around 12 seconds on a 28 kbps modem.

We live in Africa and over here it is something we need to take into consideration as some of our neighbouring countries are still on dial-up. Even in South Africa the countryside is still on dial-up.

[great_9]

To be on-topic:
How can one find if he's site has been copied?
Or better, how can one find if he's content has been copied?

For example, a news site should search for a part of the sentence (for ex. search: "iran has been fighting against firefox") and sometimes google won't even find your page with that content (if it's indexed).

[TenTonJim]

http://copyscape.com

put your url in there it will give you some results probably... also just randomly copy and paste/search sections of content in your home page - put it in quotes.

You will probably be surprised how much of your content has been copied, particularly if you are ranking well.

[businessdata]

Thanks for the feedback..

Dburdon, yes Yahoo is a direct partner. You may have a point. Maybe Google is now penalizing sites which feature AdWords competitors. There is a lot of quality content there though, descriptions of perfin products & services, best-buy tables etc. See the huge amount of content in the Tax section for instance. Takes a lot of time updating.

Espections suggests we use style sheets not tables. Yes we do this already.

Incrediblehelp asks why I am trying to rank a .com site in the UK. This has never been a problem for me in the past with this site or others I have worked on. Maybe some local search engines would ‘mark’ us down but I have never seen evidence of this happening with Google. Whatever, it is a done deal, am I really going to throw it all away and start again with a .co.uk?

Emils, you mention that there is too much javascript. I will take your advice and will try to reduce this where possible. Also will reduce the number of homepage links, probably also a good point. The pages with very long filenames and lots of dashes are confined to our proprietary news articles – we write 4 a day and this format works for these pages very well as they get picked up by news sites and the long titles ensure the news articles are ranked and categorized correctly. They are one example of something that is still being listed OK by Google.

Emil also says “If this value excesses a given threshold, paw - you're history. Small site changes or algo changes can therefore have a dramatic effect on given websites, usually suddenly.” I have no doubt he is right. But what is weird and interesting is that many sites experienced a major Google SERPs fallout on April 26th. I note the most popular thread on Webmaster World http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/ is titled ‘Very Odd - Big Drops in SERPS Today April 26, 06’ (not started by me).

TenTonJim, agree Copyscape is a great utility. Worth checking this every month, that’s where we found the site scraping QCK.com.

[andy_art_trigg]

Incrediblehelp asks why I am trying to rank a .com site in the UK. This has never been a problem for me in the past with this site or others I have worked on. Maybe some local search engines would ‘mark’ us down but I have never seen evidence of this happening with Google. Whatever, it is a done deal, am I really going to throw it all away and start again with a .co.uk?


I started with a .com and became concerned that I didn't rank as well in Google.co.uk (for a UK sites search) as I did in Google.com (my site is unfortunately also hosted on US servers). As my site is useful mostly to UK visitors I took advice on the SEO forums and purchased the .co.uk domain. I then parked it to point to the .com site that was already well established and changed all my email links and site links to .co.uk. This seemed to do the trick and I now rank just as well in a UK only search.

[ryanforbes]

businessdata why are you trying to rank a .com in the UK? Why not get a co.uk domain? Are you hosting the .com in the UK?

There are 1000s of .coms that are hosted in the Uk and rank extremely well in the uk if your server is based in the UK. I cant see how that would make a difference and there would be little point changing as all his backlinks and years of SEO would be lost.

[businessdata]

I started with a .com and became concerned that I didn't rank as well in Google.co.uk (for a UK sites search) as I did in Google.com (my site is unfortunately also hosted on US servers). As my site is useful mostly to UK visitors I took advice on the SEO forums and purchased the .co.uk domain. I then parked it to point to the .com site that was already well established and changed all my email links and site links to .co.uk. This seemed to do the trick and I now rank just as well in a UK only search.

Sure if you can get the .co.uk, why not? But, as ryanforbes says, as long as your site is hosted in the UK it makes no difference. The evidence is out there.

[incrediblehelp]

businessdata like I have said many times here at WPW as long as your hosted in the UK or have a co.uk it should do the trick. No need to go and get a new domain and start over. I just know for a fact that websites with co.uk AND/OR those hosted in the UK will always do better on UK engines than those hosted in the US with a .com. Why shouldn't they?

[freehits]

Scraper websites will always rank lower than the original content.


Wed all love to think this is true, but I think we both know it isnt. Any scraper you see on page 1 in the serps is clearly ahead of its source page.

I assume you mean the original or first dicovered source is generally not the one penalized for dup.

[incrediblehelp]

True, let me clarify. As long as the source document is optimized, has good IBL's and has done syndication correctly it will appear higher than the scrapper. I can usually find good reason why the source is out ranked by the scrapper or syndicated article website.

[magic_majax]

edited quote
- Google takes your site as a whole and indexes it as such.

I generally agree with this, if you add spurious content you will dilute your keyword density or tilt it in new directions at any rate.


- Google follows its own internal algo 'hints' in this manner. Any possible factors on your site, making it to look similar to junk sites, are accounted and a resulting value computed. If this value excesses a given treshold, paw - you're history. Small site changes or algo changes can therefore have a dramatic effect on given websites, usually suddenly.
I started a weblog for rants and general daily stuff (for two friends) - I drafted some content on there before updating it to my site. I think this was a bad move.


- You are using pages with very long filenames and lots of dashes. This isn't good. I prefer using a page like 12345.htm than using very long filenames with keywords separated by dashes. Again this is something that I've been testing myself.
Not so sure on this one - long semantics laden uri's seem to work on google and yahoo.


- The site that copied you, has done a lot of harm on you. Your site has suddenly appeared as having partially copied data, and G lowers ranking for such sites.
I think my own blog may have torped some of my pages, ironically. I've also given out a bit of content and people have submitted content and then cloned it onto other sites of their own, annoyingly.


What you can do to get out of this problems:
- Lower the number of links on your homepage to 100 or similar. Move the less important ones to secondary pages.
I had well over 100 links and was pawning the google serps for quite a long while, I don't take this hint that seriously.


- Add new pages constantly. Change your homepage constantly, thats where G looks first. Make sure these pages are 100% original. Do not copy articles from elsewhere for this purpose.
- Work to gain new links over the next months.
- Cut some of the javascript off.
- Be patient. Recovering from such a situation may take a couple months for example

I know these may look rather as simple suggestions, but from what I have experienced myself, if you follow such recommendations then your site will eventually go back up in SERPS. Do not do anything 100% dramatic - simple optimizations, changes, adding fresh content, getting links, all in a constant manner may work out marvels for you.

We use such technique of all-positive signs in achieving 'trust factor' for our sites. And yes it does work great.

This seems like good advice. Myself I'm still high in google but some stuff that was top has totally vanished and other stuff is on the second page of listings.

Yahoo is fine. I think copying my own blog did a lot of damage. Yahoo doesn't seem to care on the other hand, I'm doing better than ever over there.

My site's non-profit so it doesn't matter much to me really anyhow. It's annoying when your own diary, giving stuff away and your authors building sites starts to hurt you though.

On the other hand a completely fatal mistake is to remove uri's completely, above all don't do that!

I guess if you had really specific ideas about the structure of your site but wanted to keep uri's intact you could use the meta robots noindex tags, in html 4 at least - if using xhtml then maybe switch those pages to html4 and use noindex metas, so as to keep the uri's, bookmarks, etc, and the engines happy but reorient your keyword structure and desnity. Probably just better to leave them as they are and add more keyword content to tilt the balance back.

I think adding regular content is king, I've been a bit lazy lately.

As a personal experiment I just edited my blog's uri, using blogger's publishing tab, so I've now escaped my blogsearch beta listings - it'll be interesting to see if this has an effect. I'm also freshening pages in general so it might not be easy to tell what exactly changes what.