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Hi Lisa
I read those before posting.
I guess my question was more around once you take proactive measures so the site is less spammy, how long does it generally take Google to stop looking at it so negatively.
Interested in both MOZ's views on this and the community here based on their experience.
Hi - Looking at acquiring a domain name that has a great product fit. The problem is it is currently getting a 10/17 Open Site Explorer SPAM score.
The existing site for the domain is running Google sponsored link ads and is full of internal pages that link off to these ads.
That explains the existing SPAM score.
If I acquire the domain I'll throw out the Google ad pages and build instead a site with real valuable content that behaves like a normal site and look at building backlinks etc.
My question is, following this approach, how long is it likely to take Google to not see the domain as some Spam factory so it starts getting well positioned SERPs?
I have this:
and this http://imgur.com/xwkI9om
Thanks for the very helpful responses here. I am still a bit unsure what I've done, because at the end of the day I seem to be on Google Plus either way. But I presume if I can see my page listed on https://business.google.com/manage/#/pages then it is a business page and not a Plus page? Is that right?
I received a postcard from Google a month or so ago and used that to verify my page. The page has address details and phone number and photos and videos and posts, which I would have thought covers off on the "rich content" requirement.
This is a link to my page taken from the above "pages" link: https://plus.google.com/b/101693763581475613867/+QlddronesAu/posts?gmbpt=true&hl=en-GB
Maybe the real question is why On-Page Grader is so limited in its ability to assess URLs, page titles, etc. I don't believe the tool behaves at all like Google in its assessment of content, so I wonder about using it at all. What do others use?
What prompted my question is that sometimes the MOZ page grader discounts our URL for not having keywords in it even though the keywords are one step back in the path (as in example 2 above).
How do you get your business name to appear on Google Maps? See attachment. What's the process to get this to happen? I have a Google Local listing, but that doesn't seem to be enough.
I notice that the MOZ Page Grader considers "/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3" in a URL string to be less effective than "/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3". Is this correct from Google's perspective?
If I am trying to maximise my SEO for the page title "Business building tips", for example, does Google think my URL is more relevant if it's in the form:
1. www.website.com/business-building-tips
2. www.website.com/business/building-tips or
3. www.website.com/business/business-building-tips
My instinct tells me 3 is more powerful, but logic tells me if I have a whole section devoted to "business" and one of those pages is "business building tips" then 2 should work just as well, possibly better?
No responses so I'm guessing no-one really knows what the answer is? FYI my rankings have started to recover since early December, with about half back to where they were and traffic at about 40% of pre-drop figures. Still no real understanding of why it happened or what I did (if anything) to start the recovery process.
Option to index images? Or option to index image attachment pages? I've not seen the first, but I have de-indexed attachment pages because I didn't have time to make them all unique. Where do I find the option to not index images? And why would that make SEO scores better?
I am trying to diagnose a massive drop in Google rankings for my website and noticed that the date of the ranking and traffic drop coincides with Google suddenly only indexing about 10% of my images, whereas previously it was indexing about 95% of them.
Wondering if addition of lazy load script to images (so they don't load from the server until visible in the browser) could cause this index blocking?
I notice my Moz Rankings report from yesterday shows I've regained about one third of my rankings but my search traffic has not increase yet. I'm hoping it was just a glitch and it will recover in full, but I don't know. I was about to ditch my new theme (which makes the site 10-15% faster and much better mobile experience) and return to my old theme when I saw the Moz report.
Would still like to get some input from experts as I see a lot of people now complaining about this on the GWT support forum (including myself).
It seems my "rookie mistake" is not the real issue. I rectified this problem three days ago, my URLs are listed in Google but I still have less than 10% of the traffic I had a week or so ago.
The decline started on 24 November, so it's hard to connect it to the Phantom 2 update on 19(?) November? Would Google collapse my traffic that fast and take this long to send me traffic again after just 4-5 days of index blocking? I wouldn't have thought so. And I think the drop occurred just before I migrated to the new site template, but not sure. Nothing in console to suggest anything is wrong except index numbers were lower than I'd expected.
Anyone else able to see anything (e.g. in code) that could be causing this? It's a real disappointment as I'd just started to get some real solid SERP traction on this site following the domain name change a year ago.
I'm still trying to understand a total crash in Google organic search traffic that started on 25 November and hit rock bottom on 27 November. It has not recovered. At first I thought it was because I accidentally had "deter indexing" ticked in my Wordpress settings after a new site version was pushed live, but it's now been three days since I corrected that and there's no sign of even a small recovery.
I resubmitted my sitemap and forced re-index using GWT and my site is definitely indexed. But Google traffic had dropped from over 200 a day to around 10 a day.
I have a lot of links to TripAdvisor on my site (travel blog), so I don't know if that's the issue? Or if it's something in the new premium theme?
I read something about affiliate links using affiliate keyword anchors being punished by this update but I don't use affiliate links as such, just direct links to the relevant TA listing which are converted on click by a JS script provided by TA. They are all do-follow, which might be an issue (but has never been in the past). And they are all anchored by the actual hotel name or photo of the hotel. And not all my posts have them either, but the whole site has suffered just as I was getting some traction in SERPs.
There is no manual penalty notice in GWT.
Site is http://www.asiantraveltips.com if you would be kind enough to offer any advice or opinions about what's happened.
Stupid rookie mistake! I made all the changes in my development environment and copied the files and database to production with "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" still checked! Hopefully the damage is not long-lasting as I had been doubling my Google search traffic month on month for the past three months.
My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this?
About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think.
My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com
Thanks Dirk, that's helpful. I'm not sure why the images are fuzzy on Google Image Search but those ones are rather small (576PX, whereas most of my images on newer posts are 800PX or even 1024PX). I don't know what size images work best for previewing on Google.
I do get into the image search strip for some search terms. Do you know how to track views of images (as distinct from click through to pages) at all? Is there a script I could be running on my VPS which would track view of images from Google Image Search?
I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context.
Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through?
Thanks, Tony
FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".
Hi Charles, what results are you interested in? Invitations vs completions? Or something else?
Our popup survey is pretty intensive, about 13 questions, but people don't seem to mind completing it. We used to only ask 4-5 questions and when we went to the bigger survey as part of a new impact measurement model I predicted a big drop in completions, but in fact we saw completions increase! Who can tell?
We don't seem to have much of an issue with detecting exit intent. I think we do that as well as anyone does (and no-one seems to do it really well). Out problem is with deferred delivery. We don't want to pop up the survey if the customer hasn't finished their journey, and for our site that can mean anything up to 10 or more pages. We want to ask them and then somehow show the survey when they're really leaving. That's the challenging piece.
I like the idea of reading the cookie after they exit, but can we really do that? It might be the answer.
This is not really an SEO related question but because we are all marketers here I'm hoping someone will have the answer I'm looking for.
I want users to be able to defer answering an exit survey until they are finished their visit to our website. We will invite them on entry, but give them a check box that says "Ask me when I'm finished this visit" or similar. We currently launch using "exit intent" detection, but users keep complaining that we're asking them too early (before they've had a chance to do anything). And this with 30 second delay and minimum two page visit.
The question I have is, how do we get a deferred survey back in their face at the end of the visit?
Back in the days before tabbed browsers, we'd have pre-loaded the survey in a "pop under" window and it would have been there when ever they finally closed the browser window. With tabbed browsers, this doesn't really work any more. We can open the survey in a new tab but leave focus on the active tab, but will the user ever really go to the new tab?
Is there a way to force focus to the new tab with the survey in it when the user leaves the website or closes the active tab? We don't want to change survey platforms (we've just done that), we need a solution that will allow us to deliver the survey within our own platform even if the browser handling happens somewhere else.
Anyone been able to do something like this? Does your solution also work for mobile devices?
Thanks for the suggestion, I am very familiar with event tracking codes but that approach means having to add tracking code to 1000s of outbound links on my website, which is something I was trying to avoid.
I recall there used to be a way to do this automatically with javascript but I can't find it at the moment.
I have recently switched all my travel affiliate links to TripAdvisor using their javascript code that converts the natural links (direct links to TA URLs) to affiliate links. I have set up goal tracking in GA to try to put a monetary value on clicks through to these links (based on the known conversion rate to commissionable bookings) but GA is over-reporting the goals by a very large margin. I'm wondering what I've done wrong.
The first screen shot below is of the goal settings I used in GA.
The second screenshot shows that GA is reporting 7125 goal completions since I set up the goal on 7 August.
The third screenshot shows the actual number of GA events recorded on outbound clicks to TA URLs in the same period, which is just 97.
So the goal completions being recorded far exceed the actual goal completions, but I'm not sure why. I know I've done something wrong but as this is the first time I've used goals, I'd appreciate some help to see what I've done wrong.
Thank you.
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Just a quick PS here Charles, this is a new segment I've added to my site called "image traffic" that looks at the traffic I receive from Google Search (inspired by your answer).
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Yes Matt, he did. I only just saw this response - I must have missed the email notification. Thank you Charles for all the work you put into this and for finding the answer. I really appreciate it. Love learning something new.
OK, I think these are the screens you want to see, but I also gave you access to my GA so you could take a look directly.
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Not using Adwords or segments/filters on this account. Here are the screen shots you asked for. Don't worry about the drop off in traffic, that's just a link promo ending.
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I am trying to make some sense of the data in the "Landing Pages" report under "Search Engine Optimization" in GA versus the data under the "Landing Pages" report in "Behavior | Site Content".
For example, the SEO report says my page http://www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines/ received 22,000 search impressions in the past 30 days and 900 "clicks" (12.42%). What are these "clicks" when the Content "Landing Pages" report says the same page only got 382 "sessions" in the same period???
What are these "clicks" if not clicks on the search results link that should be reflected in landing page sessions on the corresponding page?
Hi John, yes I was aware of that article from Bruce Clay and that's how I determined my original URL structure. I'm just not sure it's the most current advice any more.
What's the current thinking on the best structure of information on a website for SEO? Structure for visitors can be best achieved through navigation menus, but I am more interested in how I should organise my URL structure so Google can make sense of the depth of my site topics.
The website is an Asian travel blog so there are essentially two specific types of post on the site. One type is location specific (may be about an attraction, a city, a region or a country). The other type is general (usually about an aspect of travel like travel cash, visas, scams, etc).
At the moment, all my general posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[post-name]. My location-specific posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/[country]/[region-or-city]/[place-name]/ so that Google can see I have depth of topics about each country and region. But I find it hard to keep consistency in this arrangement of URLs and I don't know if I might be better off to just have everything flat and tagged as a blog post like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[country]-[region-city]-[post-name]/?
What's best practice these days? How are others organising travel blog websites?
For anyone who stumbles across this post and wonders what happened, I did what I suggested above and scrapped the old domain, broadened the site content to South East Asian destinations and registered a new domain http://www.travelnasia.com. I have recently changed that to http://www.asiantraveltips.com which I had sat on all the time worrying about penalties if I used it. So far so good. Traffic from Google these days is much higher than for the old site so I must have done something right.
Hi guys, thanks for picking that up. Don't know why I missed it! GA code was in the header.php of the old theme and was lost when I switched themes. I've added it back now so I'll see what happens.
I can see how that would have impacted the search traffic graph on Moz Pro, but I'm still not sure if it would have affected how Moz reports my keyword rankings. Did I really suffer big drops in the SERPs as Moz reported? Or was it just a side-effect of Moz not being able to see traffic in my GA account?
Tony
Hi Kyle, thanks for taking a look. No, my keyword rankings took a hit (48 up, 149 down) over the past week but I am still ranking for lots of keywords. About half of my #1-3 keywords dropped back to #4-10. If this keeps up I expect my keywords will take a much bigger hit. In fact I am already seeing evidence of that. My URL http://www.travelnasia.com/thailand/wararot-chiang-mai-day-market/ shows in Moz as still ranking #1 for "Wararot Chiang Mai day market" on Friday but in fact I now don't even list on the first 3 pages of results.
When you say I have a lot of 404s on my site, where are you getting that info? As of Friday, Moz shows 37 404 errors on the site and many of those are leftovers from dropping my premium theme (e.g. placecategory instead of category). But I should fix them, I agree.
And yes, none of that really points to why Google would stop sending me any search traffic, and yet that seems to be what's happened.
I've added some screenshots below which may be helpful. I am still getting traffic, but not from organic search.
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On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering.
Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it.
There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered.
I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it.
The clues I'm seeing include:
Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem.
GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors.
On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely.
I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty?
Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.
Well I don't know if anyone is interested, but I thought I'd share the outcome of my site relaunch with the new domain name and expanded content coverage.
Back when I started the process, I was responding to what seemed to be an EMD penalty from Google for my domain "traveltipsthailand.com". Traffic had dropped from a peak above 500 sessions per day in July 2013 to way less than 100 sessions per day by December 2013 when I made the decision to act.
I registered a new domain "www.travelnasia.com" and redesigned the site using my master branding "Asian Travel Tips", expanding the coverage from a focus on Thailand to include China, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia (which I also enjoy travelling to). I went through every single post in the site and looked hard at what to keep and what to rewrite, restructured the content and the permalinks and re-launched on 22 December 2013.
Visitors bumbled along for quite a while at less than 100 sessions per day, with my site struggling to get a ranking in Google above #500 even for long-tail key phrases. At this stage I stupidly still had my old domain 301 redirecting URLs to the new domain. I stopped that in ear;y January and turned the old domain off - copping a drop of 50% in the already low visitor traffic.
Using Moz Pro, I've been analysing the site every week since then, tweaking and adding new content. I noticed that my images were the first content to get ranking back on Google, quickly getting up into the top #100 and even some into the top #10. This was promising, so I went back into my posts and started adding lots more images in the body content (I had tended to rely on image slider galleries up till then).
Over the past 7-8 months I've been able to see my Google rankings climbing to the point where content pages started ranking in the top #10, even on some competitive key phrases. I now have 20 key phrases ranking top #3, 51 more in the top #10, 70 more in the top #50 and 240 more outside top #50. Since early September I've started to see this reflected in Google search impressions and organic search traffic, with visitors from Google jumping from just over 200 a week to almost 800 a week in November 2014.
Overall, site visitors are now up to 3500 unique per month in November 2014 and up almost 50% from October. Nowhere near the "glory days" of July 2013, but I guess you can argue that I might have been basking in the glow of EMD advantage at that time and it would never have lasted.
So was it worth it? Yes, absolutely. It forced me to change the focus of the site, it forced me to work hard on my social media profiles, it forced me to review all the content and start adding more content. It forced me to rebuild my audience and be more thoughtful about it.
Please define relaunch. Are you just launching a new design for the site, a total site functional redesign, a new domain name?
I relaunched one of my travel sites about a year ago with a new domain for a broader audience reach and traffic dropped about 60% initially but has now recovered to around 150%.
I looked into it, but it seems like if you direct Google image hits to posts (which can be done in a number of ways), your images soon drop out of the search results. I think I'm better off getting a trickle of traffic from images (those who click on "view post") as my search traffic to landing pages is still on a steep climb.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll have a look at that.
Hopefully there's someone here who's been able to do something with Google Images traffic.
My Google search rankings are improving rapidly at the moment, but a lot of my rankings are for images (presume that means the images are appearing near the top in Google Images). How do I capitalise on that? It's not really much help to me that my images are popular unless it results in traffic to the pages where those images are used.
I am running Wordpress so I have the option to have images embed as "no link", "link to attachment page", "link to original image", etc. Is there any advantage of using one of these over the other? I'd really like to set it up so that when a Google Images user clicks "View Image" it loads the attachment page or the host content page rather than the image. Bad SEO?
I'm not sure if the fact that I'm using Jetpack Photon CDN image hosting will make this more complicated or not.
Tony
Are you still seeing errors? Can you attach a screen shot? I'm not seeing any and my logs are no showing any.
Tony
No server errors. But you may see an error screen if Cloudflare momentarily can't contact the server. I would have thought it would serve up a cached copy, but it doesn't seem to for some reason.
I'm wondering why my website www.travelnasia.com home page URL does not rank in the top 50 for the brand keyword "travelnasia". Does this indicate a problem?
A page linking to my site ranks at No 1. A domain listing for my site ranks No 2. A SiteJabber review of my site ranks No 3. My own privacy page ranks #4 and my Contact Us page ranks No 5. My home page is nowhere to be seen in the top 50.
It does rank #1 for the qualified domain "travelnasia.com", just not for the unqualified domain. I just don't know what to make of that. My competitors all seem to rank #1 for their brands, so I'm not sure why I don't at least rank in the top 50 for mine.
Thanks all. The fact that this is a smaller website and not particularly well connected is what's intriguing me. If this site can get ranked well on Google (and I haven't tested it across a range of key phrases yet), then I should be able to get mine to rank at least as well. Mine is much more up-to-date.
My site also has a responsive WP theme, long posts, keywords in URL and embedded maps. I need to work on the home page as it is currently just a list of recent posts, so it doesn't help me rank for my "brand" phrase.
In many ways southeastasiatravelblog.com is doing everything wrong from an SEO angle. His URL is too long. It's almost EMD in nature. He has way too many links on his home page. Moz On-Page Grader ranks it "F" for "Asian travel blog" - scores an absolute zero! By comparison, my home page rates an "A" from Moz for this key phrase. It makes me wonder if Moz page gradings have any real value at all.
Is there a technique to optimising for multiple key phrases?
In the "old days", we'd have written doorway pages targeted at different key phrases, or just written a landing page for each key phrase. Now we're told that more is better and having all the info about a topic in one place will get you better SEO outcomes. But that means pages must be optimised for multiple key phrases.
For example, I currently have three pages that are related topically:
Ideally, I probably should combine all of these into one page now. But how to optimise for all those key phrases? Should I just optimise within each Heading 2 as I would within a page? Does that risk confusing the overall page SEO?
How on earth does "southeastasiatravelblog.com" rank No 3 on Google for "Asian travel blog"? It's just a collection of basically PR type travel articles. I have profiled its backlinks using Open Site Explorer and 71% of them are dead. The rest seem to be mostly "run of site" links from his other websites, which aren't particularly travel or Asia related. The highest PA for a live backlink to this site is a link from within his own website (PA 27, DA 15). Most of his backlink anchors are URLs and look fairly EMD to me. The site has few shares (6 FB shares, 7 FB likes, 1 Twitter share).
So what makes it rank so highly for this phrase?
My site I'm comparing against is "travelnasia.com" which is a fairly new domain with a DA 23, PA 31 and about the same amount of shares but far fewer backlinks at this stage because I recently changed URLs to shake off what might have been an algorithm penalty from Google. I am now receiving a growing level of Google search traffic again, but it's a long climb back. I'm looking at strategies, which is why I was checking out the site above.
I am about to move my Thailand-focused travel website into a new, broader Asia-focused travel website. The Thailand site has had a sad history with Google (algorithmic, not penalties) so I don't want that history to carry over into the new site. At the same time though, I want to capture the traffic that Google is sending me right now and I would like my search positions on Bing and Yahoo to carry through if possible.
Is there a way to make all that happen?
At the moment I have migrated all the posts over to the new domain but I have it blocked to search engines. I am about to start redirecting post for post using meta-refresh redirects with a no-follow for safety. But at the point where I open the new site up to indexing, should I at the same time block the old site from being indexed to prevent duplicate content penalties?
Also, is there a method I can use to selectively 301 redirect posts only if the referrer is Bing or Yahoo, but not Google, before the meta-refresh fires? Or alternatively, a way to meta-refresh redirect if the referrer is Google but 301 redirect otherwise? Or is there a way to "noindex, nofollow" the redirect only if the referrer is Google? Is there a danger of being penalised for doing any of these things?
Late Edit: It occurs to me that if my penalties are algorithmic (e.g. due to bad backlinks), does 301 redirection even carry that issue through to the new website? Or is it left behind on the old site?
Yes, it's a strange one. I don't understand what advantage they get from scraping my logo and headings. I have disavowed their entire domain as there appears no reasonable way to contact them. I doubt they'd reply if I did. I did a full backlinks report this morning and found four more similar sites (similar URL structures) linking back to me, although none of them appear to be working.
If they end up getting better SERPs than me, I'll be wanting to know why!
I have noticed just this week a lot of new backlinks from a site called handmadearea.com - for example http://handmadearea.com/url/hp-printer-software-zpe-center/. It looks like the site is somehow stripping my content structure and inserting spam where my content goes.
Has anyone seen anything like this before? Should I be worried about it? The backlinks are not showing in Google Webmaster Tools so I can't easily disavow them at this point. Are they likely to be doing me harm? What can I do about them?
If these are going to be all separate sites with no relationship, I recommend using businessname.domain.com. I don't think you need to add city at all unless there are likely to be duplicated business names.
At PubCon 2013 I notice Matt Cutts mentioned Panda softening and I wonder if anyone who was there has any greater insight into what they are thinking? Is Google finally responding to the overwhelming number of webmaster complaints about Panda? What sort of issues might they be responding to?
"We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we've got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected - to some degree."
All I am seeing on the discussion forums so far is more blah blah blah...
What's really bizarre, Gary, is that Moz reports that I rank at 16 for "traveltipsthailand" on Google US, but looking at it today I couldn't find an entry anywhere in the top 100.
I have another connected domain "asiantraveltips.com" which also does not rank but has not manual penalty notifications. I say connected, because they cross-link to each other.
I know it's not a server-wide penalty or C-block action because I have other sites on the same shared hosting account that are ranking OK and holding PR2 or PR3.
My only recourse now would seem to be to migrate all my Asian travel content onto a new domain, kill the old ones and all links and start again. It really is getting that desperate. But I'd still like to know what I did wrong to deserve this mistreatment by Google. FYI I rank bloody well on Bing, for what that's worth. On the phrase "traveltipsthailand" I rank #1 and on "travel tips thailand" I rank #2 and on "thailand travel blog" (my other brand term) I rank #5. So it's purely Google that hates me.