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Thank you all for your assistance on this. I was never looking for a guarantee of placement, more for a guarantee of a growth in organic traffic that could be traced to something they did.
I realize that placement these days varies by user so a promise of #1 ranking really is suspicious.
After having bad experiences with a few seo and ppc companies, I would like to find a company that operates on the premise that they should get paid for producing results instead just for signing a contract.
I'm not thinking that any payment is contingent results but that a large portion of the billing is. I also know that it can take several months to get to an seo goal so I'm not taking a "you have one month to fix our site or we don't pay" approach.
Is there a company out there that has enough confidence in their white-hat processes that they actually back their services with some sort of guarantee?
Thank you for the suggestions. It looks like we may have taken a hit from Panda 21 at the beginning of November but we were moving the site to a new server so the days right before the update don't have any analytics data.
The last couple of days saw a spike last year because Advent started this weekend instead of next weekend this year so that's why some of the numbers for this weekend look off.
Overall though, it looks like we hit a peak for most keywords in January and then saw a major decline in February when we received our manual penalty and even though the penalty has been officially revoked, we've never recovered fully.
Thanks for the panguin suggestion. We use chartelligence which actually overlays within GA on any chart which is very nice.
I guess I'll go back and manually disavow those bad links even though I've already submitted them and see what happens.
Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic.
Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty.
Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.
Well, if you're in business and trying to make a profit it is actually a more important stat than traffic. I'd rather have 15% conversion on 2000 visitors than 2% on 15,000. Even though they are the same, you have much more room to grow profitably.
I went through OSE a few months ago and got together a list of about 40 domains that we had never asked for links from and were just spam.
I wrote to all that I could asking for removal and then put everything in a spreadsheet and sent it to Google. Two weeks later I was informed that a manual penalty had been removed.
Our organic Google traffic is now up over 150% from last year.
For us it was worth it.
Is there documentation somewhere that says that alerts work differently when you also use webmaster tools?
I get daily Google alerts for our site and a competitor's site. I have noticed that I am getting multiple alerts a day from Google about products and product categories on the competitor's site. Every now and then there's an actual alert for a linking blog post or something else.
How is Google noticing new product on this site but has never done the same for ours? Is there some kind of strategy involved here that I don't know about?
The site is http://bit.ly/Q0o2ob
It depends on the product. If the item is unique, such as a book that is now out of print, we keep it on the site with a pop-up pointing people to either a new version or the related category.
If it is a t-shirt design, we remove the item and redirect it to the category page for the item unless there is a new item that is a direct replacement.
You have to consider your audience. People will probably be grateful to know that a particular book they were looking for is out of print but they probably don't care that a specific color and cut of shirt is unavailable.
We've seen a competitor that has used spammy practices for years that no matter what continues to sit at the top of the rankings.
As Ian said, it's maddening as can be but you can't fix Google so you just have to work on improving your own site. (Still working on taking this advice)
So two days ago the majority of our rankings took a jump up with a few falling slightly. Our organic Google traffic has been up over 65% since then. We have a long way to go before we are back where we were in January and hopefully this adjustment is the first of a good trend.
So in our case the answer to my initial question is that it took ten days to see the first improvements. Hopefully these aren't the last.
So two days ago the majority of our rankings took a jump up with a few falling slightly. Our organic Google traffic has been up over 65% since then. We have a long way to go before we are back where we were in January and hopefully this adjustment is the first of a good trend.
If you mean something to check where you rank for specific phrases over time, you can set up campaigns in your SEO Moz account. The Wordtracker Strategizer also has a similar tool with some different benefits.
Actually, we did recover from the original Panda hit last December so "YEEEEHAAA!". We combined a bunch of similar categories and started writing descriptions for categories that were missing them.
Unfortunately, we got smacked again by Panda 3.7 in June and haven't recovered yet.
Link to our site. Where did you get the info on what Panda 3.7 was about?
Yes we do. Since 8/4 we have seen some rankings go up and some go down but there isn't any kind of pattern or trend that we can see.
In June '12 we got a bunch of our keyword rankings wacked by Panda 3.7 and haven't recovered. This is really frustrating since we had been hit by the original Panda and spent months fixing our site so that we had recovered in December '11.
I've read what I can find about this update to see if there is something specific about it that would have knocked us down again and can't find anything.
Does anyone know of any specific issues that this update supposedly "fixed"?
So a couple of weeks ago I posted that we had submitted a reconsideration request along with a list of about 40 spam pages that were linking to us that we had attempted to have remove their links to us. On 8/3 we received a note from Google that our manual penalty had been removed. We have thousands of inbound links so these 40 pages were a minuscule part of our links and ones that we hadn't tried to get in the first place.
So I thought "Great, our rankings should go up." Up until this point our year-to-year organic Google traffic was between 45% and 100% over last year. As of 8/9 our traffic is now only 26%-39% above last year.
I don't think we can handle too many more penalty reversals like this one.
That's a good idea. The "help" on this section of analytics is a whole one sentence long.
I plugged in the panda updates in Google Analytics and then ran the Traffic Sources > SEO > Queries report with Avg. Position as the second metric.
Today I was plugging the SEOMoz Google change log into my analytics and noticed that our site took an impression jump (30%) on the day Panda 3.8 was released but also, if I'm reading the chart right, a drop in keyword avg. ranking. Does this make any sense or am I misunderstanding the chart?
Fortunately, these bad links represented a very small number of the links to our site so we will hopefully see a strong rebound in the next few days.
If anyone doesn't think that spam sabotage is possible, here is proof. In February we received a suspicious spammy link notice and penalty from Google. We did several things to try and fix the problem including getting old links from not very relevant sites removed and submitted, and were denied, reconsideration twice. On the advice of Billy here on the forum, we went through the bottom end of our inbound links through OSE and found about forty domains that had linked to us and were purely trash sites full of link spam. We filed another reconsideration request listing every one of these sites along with dates we tried to contact the site owner (almost always impossible) to delete links to our site and two weeks later we received a note back that the manual penalty had been lifted.
My question now is, from your experience, how long does it take to notice a recovery from this penalty?
This experience also has me concerned that site sabotage is actually pretty simple when you can plant garbage links from 40 sites, many of which are the same with different urls, and get someone penalized on Google.
So a couple of weeks ago I took Billy's advice and went through all of the domains that were spammy links. We hadn't asked any of these places to link to us but there were almost fifty of them. I put together a spreadsheet of them all and the action we attempted to take to get the links to us removed and then sent all the information through GWT for a reconsideration request. On Friday, after having this manual penalty since February, we received the following note. I still think we may be under a Penguin penalty of some kind but I'll have to wait and see what happens to our rank after this.
Thanks for the suggestion, Billy!
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.aquinasandmore.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.aquinasandmore.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated ourquality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Our organic traffic difference between this year and last since we filed the spam link complaint has remained unchanged.
Our keyword ranking for most of our top keywords that we used to rank in the top five for is still down 20 -30 places since December.
We found another issue that, while not affecting this specific issue, could have been diluting rank. A while back we forced all of our urls to be lower-case but forgot to change the site code on a bunch of major pages to be lower-case as well so all of these links were 301'ing instead of being direct links. I've almost cleared that up now.
So I went through about thirty pages of links and found 45 from bad domains and submitted that to Google. I sure hope this is the problem because I don't know where to look next.
I'm compiling a list now.
There are lots of sites in our niche (Catholic) that have linked to our store in their side bar over the years. Google wouldn't be penalizing us for that, would they?
Once I get to page 70 of the results I see some sites that look like spam sites linking to us.
I guess I can try to contact these sites to get links to us removed.
It seems strange that there are 70 pages of what seem to me real, normal results before any of these show up but we are getting penalized for these links at the bottom of the barrel.
So last December we saw our hard work pay off as our Panda penalty was lifted and our traffic shot back up to pre-Panda levels.
Then in February we received this note:
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
Since December we've lost position on 80% of our top 100 keywords. I've gone through our links and can't figure out what the problem may be. Maybe I'm not using OSE properly. We don't buy links so I'm not sure what the problem is.
If someone can walk me through using OSE to see what the problem may be I would appreciate it.
Our domain is http://bit.ly/rbkYkp
So I went to look at our keyword reports in GA today and our most popular keyword was "(not provided)". It now accounts for 10% of our referred visits. Unfortunately, it also has a 125% avg order value compared to the rest of our site.
This is a really annoying policy that Google has implemented and will clearly have an effect on our ability to effectively market our site.
It's great to be at the beginning with a blank slate!
Here are a few ideas for you:
There is a theory that spiders give more credit to domains linking to yours that aren't hosted in the same place. The idea is that these other domains are probably not owned by the same company and being used to create link farms.
So when you look at your competitor's link map, removing the same c block can possibly give you an idea if they are creating a bunch of sites themselves for link building.
You definitely need to be getting links from other quality domains to the article. Go find tech and budgeting sites and let them know about the article. If it really is a good article you will probably have some of them mention it.
Google says they use social signals and I think Bing has said the same thing but I haven't seen anything that quantifies the value of likes yet.
There isn't a distinction between upper and lower case on your pages but be sure that your URLs are all consistent because http://www.mywebsite.com/CheapHolidaystoEgypt is not the same url as http://www.mywebsite.com/cheapholidaystoegypt.
I just wanted to say thank you all for the advice you've given on this board. When I first joined we had been stomped by Panda three times and our traffic was down about 40% from last year.
Since then, we've followed recommendations here and while we aren't quite back to where we were before, our traffic for the last three days from Google is higher than any time since May and trending higher. We are also up in Google rank for 70% of our tracked keywords and showing up for 15% that we weren't even on the radar for in August.
We still have a lot of work to do but know that we are on the right track. We can now do the same on a site that survived the initial hit but got slapped in July.
I just want to reiterate what others have said:
This forum was well worth the subscription.
Google does count this as duplicate content. Semil is right. You want to have someone do url rewrites on the server side to 301 these to lowercase.
Thumbs up for Xenu. I just used it for the first time and found a bunch of very easy to fix issues.
"then these links should not appear going forward." - They are showing up now even though Google says they have our latest sitemap and that the errors were found yesterday. How long does the actual data usually take to catch up with what WMT says is current?
The image urls are built from the actual title on the fly and don't 301 so those aren't a problem. The other one you mentioned does need to be cleaned up in the site map. Thanks for catching that.
These errors are showing up when I go to the crawl errors section and click the sitemap tab. Yes, the sitemap I shared is the same one in WMT.
Two weeks ago we changed our urls so the correct addresses are all lowercase. Everything else 301 redirects to those. We have submitted and made sure that Google has downloaded our updated sitemap several times since.
Even so, Webmaster Tools is reporting 33000 + errors in our sitemap for urls that are no longer in our sitemap and haven't been for weeks. It claims to have found the errors within the last couple of days but the sitemap has been updated for a couple of weeks and has been downloaded by Google at least three times since.
Here is our sitemap: http://www.aquinasandmore.com/urllist.xml
Here are a couple of urls that Webmaster Tools says are in the sitemap:
http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Caroline-Gerhardinger-Large-Sterling-Silver-Medal/sku/78664
Redirect error
unavailable
Oct 7, 2011
http://www.aquinasandmore.com/catholic-gifts/Catherine-of-Bologna-Small-Gold-Filled-Medal/sku/78706
Redirect error
unavailable
Oct 7, 2011
We are now doing something similar with our site. We have several thousand products that have been discontinued and didn't think about how much link juice we were throwing away until we got Panda pounded. It's amazing how many things you find to fix when times get tough.
We started with our most popular discontinued products and are 301 redirecting them to either a new equivalent or the main category if no exact match can be found.
We are also going to be reusing the same product pages for annual products instead of creating new pages each year. Why waste all that link juice from past years?
What he is saying (I think) is that sessions can generate a limitless number of urls related to shopping carts. If you use get form actions for a shopping cart the entire form info shows up in the url and can be interpreted by a search spider as a unique site link leading to thousands of products being added to shopping carts by spiders. This isn't anything you can fix but you can test by adding an item to a shopping cart and seeing if you get a url that basically says "viewcart" or one that says "addtocart&item=234235"
When trying to browse the results using the "group by domain" filter in OSE, when you click on the next page or one of the page numbers the results go back to the ungrouped list.
If your posts are getting good traffic and rank well already, I recommend writing a new post and putting a link at the top of the old post saying that you have created an updated article.
You can never be sure what the "magic sauce" was that made Google like your original article.
Dex is a yellow page company with an on-line directory.
We don't have the unique products that you do but here is the policy we follow:
Yes, you can have multiple feeds but cannot duplicate product or submit feeds for the same product for multiple domains that you own (ref)
