Google sure is sticking it to us. Options

I must have done something to p***o** the google gods. On WWW2 and WWW3 our site's main page doesn't even show up anymore. We have no backward links showing anymore (used to have 28) and our pagerank now shows the beautiful grey bar. The only pages appearing show up in the 90s. Mind you we we sitting at 39 a mere week ago.

I've done nothing that would be considered spam. I did add a link page, but it contained maybe 10-15 links and they were all sites that our competitors had links on. I just don't get it. We have a legitimate site and product. It's a joke, I have competitors with 3 and 4 domain names that point to their main site, and I have the one site that can't even stay in google. I'm hoping someone who is harmed by their stupid algo sues the crap out of them someday.

I'm starting to see why so many people dislike google so much.

They don't seem to mind taking our money for the Adwords.

Calm down, Dennis. As SEO goes this is a very minor problem and you need to stop making assumptions and start working out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Unless you've been using some questionable techniques that can get you banned or penalised (thus having a guilty conscience) why would you possibly assume this was some form of punishment?

Let's say that again, because its important.

Unless you have been engaging in link swapping to artificially boost your PageRank and have been detected (usually detection of links to a bad neighbourhod), or other techniques that you know Google would not approve, there is no reason to assume this is a penalty. Making a wrongful assumption is wasting time you should be spending on identifying what did go wrong.

So, get logical.

* If this is a google penalty, there is a reason for it. If this is not impossible (if you tried a trick or something borderline), then find it and fix it quietly and see if your rank automatically returns over the next couple of months. It can sometimes, even after a penalty.

* If there is any way at all that this could be a penalty, then start looking for marketing opportunities outside of Google now. Google penalties can last a long time in some cases, so you'll need to do something positive like boost your position on the other engines, get links from high-traffic sites, etc, just in case. If your Google ranks return, this won't have been wasted and will have boosted your traffic and marketing overall.

* If there is no reason for a google penalty, then it won't be a google penalty, so start finding out what it could be. Was your site inaccessible during the bad times following the slammer virus? Could Googlebot have been unable to spider the site at that time and dropped you from the index? If so, waiting until it picks you up again next crawl will fix that.

* Since being dropped due to server outage or congestion would fix itself, look for other possible causes so that you can spend that time constructively. Check out the sites that you know were linking to you. Have they dropped the links? Have they got a penalty? If their PR scores are lower than 4, they may not show on searches for your backlinks, but will still be there and be counted by Google's own algorithms. Google only shows backlinks from pages with a medium PR value, and doesn't show links on pages with low PR scores. Find out if any links you had have really gone, or whether they are just too low in value to show in searches.

With all due respect, Dennis, I know its a shock, but the best advice I can give you right now is (in a friendly way) to say "stop whining and start doing something about it."

The greatest success stories are not those of the charmed for whom nothing goes wrong, but rather they are people like Henry Ford, the founder of Ford motors and Inventor of the Production Line method of factory assembly - Ford went bankrupt several times in the early years. He didn't give up, nor write about how awful the bankruptcy procedures were, he simply got back up and got back to the work that he believed in even when others did not.

This is an opportunity to either show your mettle, your brilliance, and your character, or to realise that you don't have the resolve to face setbacks - which of those it will be is up to you yourself and no other. Certainly not Google.

I'm hoping that you take this in the spirit intended - a wake-up call to remind you that you can overcome this setback, and even turn it to your advantage by using it as a spur to greater efforts and greater success.

Remember that putting all your eggs in one basket, even as plush and wonderful a basket as Google, is not a risk-free startegy. Use this reminder to widen your marketing and look beyond Google for the wider market. Google is not the only game in town and thousand of internet users still own credit cards even though they have never heard of Google.

Wishing you all the best, and hoping this was just due to the slammer virus.

Very eloquent and meaningful post, Ammon.

Darn near makes a good article!

J

All sites that contain a link to our site also have links to competitor sites. This is where I found the links, and they all relate to our industry. The only think I did differently was add a resource link page to some of the higher ranked sites that include a link to us.

Now we have two sites for our product and they have always linked to one another. I honestly can't think of anything that I did that caused my site to disappear from Google.

I am honestly stumped.

All of our eggs are not in one basket, but as you know google dominates many popular search engines, and it's a huge hit.

I do know that the site has been crawled as recently as yesterday, so I'm not sure if they crawl sites they are penalizing.

On the bright side do fall on the first page for their Adwords, it's just frustrating that we can't be found in the main engine.

Oh and I appologize, I was just venting.

dgcccomllc I think Ammon is correct you need to start looking at what might be wrong.

Assuming that we are talking about the site in your profile...

After doing a little checking I see you still have links in the Google directory, Zeal and Yahoo -so missing/removed links are not a problem.

I also see that your server is running MS IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000 - this could be your problem, the slammer virus only effected MS servers - yours could have been one of those effected.

Wasn’t able to look at your source code as you have it copyright protected, BTW when did you install the copyright protection? Has it been in the last 2 months? I have seen a few sites suffer when this script was not correctly installed.

I also noticed that three sites out of the nine you are linking to on your resources page appear to have the same problem you have - no back links showing. - This could very well be your problem. But I must stress that these other sites could have been caught in the slammer virus. And not to assume the worst -yet.

<added>Only speaking for myself, the venting does not bother me - you should read some of the stuff I write about the big bad G</added>

the site in question is not the dgcc site but rather the recruittrack site. It's frustrating as we had been moving up and then it seems as though our backlinks all disappeared. Including the one from our main site that had been there "forever".

Now I've done some more checking and we show up in about the same place for other keywords. I was focussing on our primary keyword. It still really doesn't explain the disappearing backlinks. Oh well.

No need for apologies at all, Dennis. Venting is good and even constructive where it helps us get something out of our system so we can get on with what matters.

You haven't lost Google traffic totally of course because you have the AdWords and good positions in them. That's one of the main advantages of PPC is the fact that you have still got a presence even when spidering goes wrong or an accident damages your normal indexed rankings.

It may have been a typo but just in case:

All sites that contain a link to our site also have links to competitor sites.

Who links to you can't cause a penalty because it is beyond your control. It is who your pages link to that can cause a problem if the sites you link to have been deemed a 'bad neighbourhood' by Google.

In previous discussions, knowing Google's love for scalability in all its solutions, we came to the conclusion that while most 'bad neighbourhoods' will be assigned by hand, the penalties for linking to sites in that list are probably automated. Link to too high a percentage (an unknown percentage, naturally) and 'boom' - automatic PRzero...

I was talking about the recruittrack.com site thats the one in your profile.

3 out of 9 links on a page I think could be considered a high percentage.

But the Grey bar isn't PR0 ? Unfortunately, that PPC is costing quite a bit.

Who knows I may have linked to a site in a bad neighborhood without realizing it. I placed links to sites that I thought were associated with our industry (they also happened to have links to our sites buried somewhere on our site, but were still related.)

Forgot what I put in my profile LOL.

Hmm, from what I can recall they all had backlinks. Maybe you're right, the slammer happened right around the same time everything started. I know that one was a PR3, but it's a company that we're starting to do a bit of work with, so I wanted to drive some traffic their direction, not that we generate that much traffic ourselves.

cache:http://www.recruittrack.com/ - did not match any documents.

There's no cached snapshot of your page, so that may be a reinforcing indication that you were simply unlucky enough that the site was unreachable when the spider last came around.

I've not checked as to whether Google drops the cache of penalised pages (anyone know for sure?), but it seems most likely to be a sign that the bot couldn't grab it - Occams Razor.

if you type in Recruittrack for the search, if finds the site, and it has a cache page. But then I noticed that it has a page that wasn't intended to go to the search engines. I was just using that as a place holder of sites that mentioned us so that I could filter through them later.

http://www.recruittrack.com/recruiting_sof...tware_links.asp

That might not be a good thing since I didn't wish to link to those.

Hope you dont mind me jumping in on this thread dgcccomllc, but I have a similar problem.

There's no cached snapshot of your page, so that may be a reinforcing indication that you were simply unlucky enough that the site was unreachable when the spider last came around.

Very interesting Ammon. Do you think that google bans, drops, penalises individual pages?

A domain that I am having probelms with shows a cache for all pages within the site, except for the home page.

.

Your search - cache:http://www.domain.com - did not match any documents. 

Suggestions:
- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords.

The home page of the domain in question is a frameset. As you may well be aware IE5 does not show the google cache of frameset pages. (NS4 does)

Prior to my problem the cache of the homepage showed as any other cached page, with the exception that the page was blank (The IE5 bug).

I am beginning to think that there is a possibilty that I may have been reported by a competitor who thought I was cheating because he or she would have been unable to view the cached content.

An overscrupulous or junior google employee may have thought that my <noframes> content was ott (I think it certainly isnt!) and perhaps, applied a penalty.

This is of course pure supposition as the frustrating thing with all of this is, that you have no real way of identifying what the problem is, as google provide no means of doing so.

You simply have to go over everything with a fine toothcomb and hang about until the next update and hope it resolves itsef. If it doesnt you then have to write to google and hope that they will give you the time of day.

Dont get me wrong, I think google is a great resource with lots going for it. I do think however, that it needs to provide a route for quick resolution of webmaster issues.

I think most people would pay a small fee to know if a ban had been applied, it would certainly save a whole lot of time and effort at the outset. I cant see why google couldnt say, "ah yes, dont worry, your site was down on the last crawl, it should be ok again soon" OR "ah well, yes your site has been penalised, we suggest you look at x y or z".

For those who are shouting, "Whoaa, doesnt that give google carte blanche to create another earning stream by penalising at will?" My short answer is that I very much doubt they would behave in such a way, and if they did, they would quickly be found out.

the links page I was talking about is this page http://www.recruittrack.com/recruiting_resources.asp
You have nine links on this page and 3 of them show no back links.

Also how long ago did you install the copyright protection script? As I said before this can cause some problems if not installed correctly.

Usually the grey bar is not a penality - Usually.

But if for some reason the copy right protection script or your server being down casued gbot to skip your site the bar would most likley be grey.

I was able to bring up a cache page if I directly input the site URL

<added>

My short answer is that I very much doubt they would behave in such a way, and if they did, they would quickly be found out.

Not to get off on a side tangent but...what would you do if did find out they were doing this...pay for addwords?? Or just pay the fee to be reinstated?? Sorry but I don't think as highly of Google as you do.</added>

the copyright script has been there from the beginning of the site development (over a year).

I guess I'll just wait and see, but it sure would be nice if google would actually indicate if a site is banned, and if so the method towards correction. Afterall, if they have an algo to determine a banning for various reasons, then that algo should also be able to provide at least a superficial reason for the ban. Afterall, there are some legitimate people out there who may do something that google doesn't like without even realizing they did so.

The reason why I put up that other link site on the forum is that it appears in google's cache and I'm not entirely certain why. It was for my info only and wasn't linked.

The reason why I put up that other link site on the forum is that it appears in google's cache and I'm not entirely certain why. It was for my info only and wasn't linked.

with dynamic pages they do not need to be linked for google to find them. If you don't want gbot to find these pages you must block gbot or at the very least "no index" them.

Afterall, there are some legitimate people out there who may do something that google doesn't like without even realizing they did so. 

believe it or not most of the banned sites I have seen were not "bad guys" trying to manipulate Googles results - just average webmasters trying to make their site work better or sell better.

My best advice (for what it's worth) is to get rid of the links that are to the PR0 sites with no backlinks, try to make sure that your server is up and running around the end of next month...keep your fingers crossed. If after next update you are not restored - get a new domain name, if you want a fast recovery.

Not to get off on a side tangent but...what would you do if did find out they were doing this...pay for addwords?? Or just pay the fee to be reinstated?? Sorry but I don't think as highly of Google as you do

I think that if there were evidence of them doing this, they'd be found out pretty quickly.

Besides, who said anything about paying to be re-instated? It would be up to the individual site owner to choose if they wanted to use a fast track route to find out about any possible penalties.

the new domain name is out of the question. This is our software name and we do have steady traffic. I'll just have to wait. I'm really starting to think that it had to do with that stupid virus and I just happened to be unlucky.

Would anyone else here consider killing a virus writer to be justified homicide ? Of course I would torture him or her first. We're pretty damn good about protecting ourselves, but we still get affected from other sources.

a fee to be reinstated. I can see scandal all over that. Google needs to generate a little extra cash for 4th quarter, ban a few thousand sites. Sounds like trouble to me