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 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

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.