BigDaddy=Big Screwup...or am I just screwed?

[StephenR]

Man, my relationship with Google these past few months has been a real love hate affair. More recently the latter because of the BigDaddy push.

Sooo...has anyone else experienced a major hit in their site indexing. So far Google has decided to deindex...oh.....30K or so pages of mine. That's just wonderful.

Anyhow, if SEO is your game I would appreciate it if take a quick run through top-affiliate.com and see if there are any red flags that may have prompted Google to deindex. I've scrutinized it for quite some time now but I'm drawing a blank.

Wait a minute....hahaha...while researching some more info for this post I came across this link which also may help some of you: http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/showthread.php?t=8037

It appears maybe I got nailed with numero 6! Blast! But this post was made over a month ago sooo....I would still appreciate an unbiased look at my directory for any problems. Thanks people!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Stephen,

So sorry you got dropped. 5 Star got dropped back in Sept for about 6 weeks and I was DEVASTATED. I think my problem may have been the canonical issue. I corrected and then asked Google to re-index using the format Matt Cutts suggested - then I got re-listed.

So the 1st thing I checked on your site was the canonical issue, which you've corrected, I see. You still have PR so that's good. You could possible have some duplicate penalty issues since all the program descriptions are probably the same and submitted to lots of other directories. But I doubt thats it or all directories would get de-listed.

Have you read the WebmasterWorld threads? Thats where people usually figure it out IF there is anything to figure out. Last week when I was reading WMW it seemed Google was just having an oops and dropping sites for no reason. Could be the hyphen URL deal. Not sure.

Fingers crossed you'll come back soon. In Alexa it looks like your traffic is staying fairly steady so that's good. When did you get dropped?

 

[StephenR]

Mid June is when I noticed these SEVERE deindexing issues. I submitted a reinclusion request last night so we'll see how that goes. WoW though Linda....dropped for about 6 weeks [whistles]....I've only had to deal with this revenue loss for a few weeks now but 6 weeks......I would be doing a monkey stomp on somebodys desk. LOL.

Like most of you I've spread my SEM and website promotion pretty evenly around the web but at the end of the day Google is still my organic bread and butter. Google does provide a solid service and a slew of highly profitable solutions....I just hate how much we rely on them. If MSN did this I wouldn't even waste time writing about it. Maybe I'll create my own search. =)

 

[KLB]

Here are some suggestions. While I can't promise they will help, they certainly won't hurt and many people believe that they can help with SEO.

The first thing I tried to do with your pages was validate the HTML and found that your pages contain lots of HTML validation errors. It is believed by many that validation errors can screw up search engine bots and make it harder for them to "understand" pages. At the very least valid HTML & CSS will help ensure your pages display properly across a wide range of browsers with little effort. The best way to validate code is to use Firefox with the Webdeveloper extension.

Way too many tables. If you were able to ditch your use of tables and use DIV tags and CSS instead to handle layout, you would be better able to organize the order of the raw HTML and text of your pages for a more optimal key word placement. This could also greatly simplify your HTML code of your site making your pages easier for search engines to understand and improve the HTML tag to text ratio. Google may be looking at the overall HTML structure of pages in their algorithms.

Make more extensive use of <Hx> tags. While I found <H1> and <H2> tags on your pages you should make more use of the <H2> tags and lower order <Hn> tags to help add semantic structure to your pages. This could really help search engines better understand your pages.

From a personal observation, I found your pages way too busy and confusing. I could not be at all certain what was ads (if there were ads) and what was content on your site. The layout also confused me so much that I wasn't sure where I wanted to go on your site. If I had stumbled upon your site during a natural search, I would have probably immediately backed out of it as I would have assumed it to be "spam" simply because of the high "noise" factor and complexity. Google may be looking at your very high link density and the complexity of your pages and be making a similar conclusion. This conclusion may not seem fair or accurate, but a user like myself will only take a few seconds to evaluate a page before deciding to back out of it.

 

[StephenR]

It looks like Google is working it out. 4,050 pages indexed and counting. Pheww. Thanks for the critique too much appreciated. Maybe it is time for a COMPLETE site overhaul and reprogramming.

 

[KLB]

It looks like Google is working it out. 4,050 pages indexed and counting. Pheww. Thanks for the critique too much appreciated. Maybe it is time for a COMPLETE site overhaul and reprogramming.

It seems to be the summer of collosal Google SERP disasters. My site took a massive tumble on July 27th. I've fallen completely out of all of the search phrases for my site. Even the ones I have dominated since 1999. My traffic has fallen by 80%, which means I'm taking a severe beating finacially speaking.

I try to play on the straight and narrow, so as not to offend Google, and in almost eleven years of building my site I have never had such a bad fall from grace.

 

[StephenR]

I've looked high and low but I have yet to find a viable thread that explains what ACTUALLY is going on with Google. It took about 2 months to get my disaster straightened out. I submitted a reinclusion request to Google back in June but I'm not sure if that even helped any.

DEFINITELY a bad summer for some of us. I have faith it will work out for you though. However, I know that hit in revenue stings a bit. I'm pulling for ya.

 

[KLB]

DEFINITELY a bad summer for some of us. I have faith it will work out for you though. However, I know that hit in revenue stings a bit. I'm pulling for ya.

The tragedy for me is that at the end of August I traditionally start to go into my highest traffic highest revenue time of the year. Telling me this could take a month or two to straighten out is like telling a toy store three weeks before Christmas that their power and heat won't be restored for a month.

I've been working on my site for almost eleven years and right now I'm seeing traffic levels lower than I saw in 1996/1997.

What I need right now is lots of word of mouth "advertising". If people have kids in school studying science or know science teachers/professors (especially chemistry) please make sure they know about my site, its periodic table of elements and all the resources it provides.

At least through word of mouth via classrooms could help improve traffic and build more links to my site. If I'm going to get through this, I need all the help I can get from anyone willing to give it even if it is something really small.

Nobody is bringing as much information together in the way I'm bringing it together on the web. Yes there are hundreds of periodic tables on the web, but mine has one of the most extensive collections of data points of any table and it is one of the easiest to use. Heck my site is so vast that according to Google it has collected over 13,000 references to it from the various languages of Wikipedia (http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikipedia.org+"EnvironmentalChemistry.com") -- none of which I requested or solicited.

 

[StephenR]

Dang Ken. That's horrible. All I can say is keep your fingers crossed and it probably wouldn't hurt to get that reinclusion request in ASAP. I was monitoring my sites performace and this is how it went:


Top-Affiliate.com
08/03/06 - 4K pages listed
08/06/06 - 900 pages listed ???
08/07/06 - 30K pages listed an even bigger ??????

B2Bsearch.org
08/07/06 AM - 226 pages listed
08/07/06 PM - 3K pages listed

FreeAdvertisingBlog.com
08/07/06 AM - 1,500 pages listed
08/08/06 PM - 34 pages listed (this one is actually good because I switched blog platforms and those 1,470 pages are history)

I'm noticing similiar highs/lows on my other niche sites as well. We'll just have to ride it out...again and see what happens. Unquestionably though I think it is safe to say Google is having internal difficulties. There is no hiding that fact any longer and I'm not the only one who knows this. Check it out:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/google-seo-algorithm-problems

...maybe...

 

[StephenR]

I was just thinking....You may be aware that Google recently updated its Adsense TOS. You can now add Adsense to 404 pages!

I thought this was kinda funny with the current indexing/deindexing issues so I modified my 404 page to take advantage of this and I recommend you do the same to recoup some losses. You can review my page by going to...well...http://www.top-affiliate.com/busted LOL.

 

[KLB]

I was just thinking....You may be aware that Google recently updated its Adsense TOS. You can now add Adsense to 404 pages!

I have some pretty comprehensive .htaccess instructions and PHP code that do 301 redirects to get almost all lost users to the right pages on my site. One of the best sets of .htaccess rules I have that would help any site reduce the most common "lazy" 404 errors are:

RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)\.html.+$ /$1.html? [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)/(.)target= /$1/? [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)/default\.htm$ /$1/? [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)\.htm$ /$1.html? [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)\.ht$ /$1.html? [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)\.h$ /$1.html? [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)\.$ /$1? [NC,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z|0-9].*)&gt$ /$1? [NC,R=301,L]

Now obviously this assumes that the file extension used for pages is only .html. This also assumes that one uses index.html, not default.htm for directory index pages. Note, you might need to add your domain name to the target URL depending on your server configuration.

Oh the trailing question mark on the target URL is to strip off query strings.

 

[Teli]

I never did understand why Google decided to allow AdSense on 404 pages. Well, that's not entirely true.

In some instances, a person could actually be looking for information on a specific topic, land on a page that doesn't exist, and click out to another website that does through AdSense. But, in most cases, the site owner really doesn't want the user to leave the site (at least, I generally don't), and provides suggestions for the user.

Plus, the information 404 pages tend to be generic - sorry, couldn't find what you're looking for - text. How does that help advertisers using AdWords?

Ah, oh well, I'm just thinking out loud and rambling now...

~ Teli