Google Penalty and Ranking Experiment

Hello and thanks for reading . Well, before i post what i am doing in this experiment i would like to give you a flash back on what happened last year June 4th. I have a games related website which ranked 1-10 for almost all of its keywords and was racking up to 100k uniques a day but on June 4 2008 google imposed a penalty on hundreds of domains accross the web and my site was one of them, i was smacked down to 10k uniques a day from 100k a day.

I tried several things to remove this penalty, such as i added fresh quality content, cleared up internal duplicate meta titiles errors, fixed sitemaps, added fresh links but nothing worked and eventually i got fedup.

I have recently started working on it again to get back my old serps or to get out of the penalty. My home page and about 5 of my internal pages never got slapped, they ranked steady for their keywords, however, rest of whole site was slapped, all those pages were still indexed and had their PR intact. Now recently i have started seeing my pages deep down the line, usually in between 7-12 pages down.

At this point i decided to do an experiment and see if i can get my rankings back with some strategy.

Day1: I have added a game page to my site, i selected a game which is due to be released end of this year, the reason i picked this game is because since it is far from its launch there is no competition for it which means it should rank instantly given that my pages are not penalised.

a: I added a game page to my pc section of site and since all my fresh content gets featured on home page which is pr5, this article gets on a pr5 home page.

b: Added 400 words of unique and quality information with images and a video.

c: Wrote another informative blog post on my other gaming site and inserted a link to my first game page.

d: Submitted my blog article to digg and got some votes, then submitted it to couple of social bookmarking sites.

e: At this point my blog article is indexed and showing up on first page of google, however, my first game page is still not indexed.

f: After waiting for a while i decided to submit my first game page to digg.

g: Google indexed digg page first and now when i wake up in the morning i see my page is indexed as well.

h: I rushed to check if this page is ranking in serps for its keywords and to my extreme grief, my game page was no where to be found in serps.

Iam now going to ask couple of friends to blog about this page or when writing an article about pc games put a link to my game page as a nice resource ( experiment purpose )

I will also submit my game page to couple of socialbookmarking sites as well as create a squido lens and a hubpage.

I would appreciate if you could suggest an alternate way of testing it or tell me a some innovative ways to get a link or two or just give your feed back. I hope this help others too.

Thanks

So what is it you're testing? Sounds to me like you're just trying to optimize a page. That's not an experiment.

Why dont you tell us more about this penalty? What was it caused by?

May be i was not very clear on this. Well, my site is suffering some kind of penalty which was imposed on 4th june last year and now iam applying different methods and see which one of these methods actually work, right now i have just did the basic optimization of the page to see if i can rank for the keywords which have no competition. If this doesn't work, i shall add another page but will use different kind of meta title right now its "GameName MyNicheKeyword" and if that doesn't work i shall try to change the url structure for next game i shall add and if that doesn't work i shall build a new site and 301 this site to new site, i shall do what ever it takes to get over the penalty. I would need your help, suggestions and recommendations in the process

Sure mate, on June 4 2008 google imposed a penalty on several sites accross the web. A little insight ont his penalty can be found here

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3668739.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3750322.htm

I don't really know what it was caused by, i have not sold any links to any site, my site has been featured on digg, stumbleupon, reddit, delicious several times, its listed in directories such as dmoz, google, botw, yahoo and has links from .gov and .edu sites. I did purchase links long back before google took its stand against linkbuying but i don't think google penalised me for those links.

However, there were some discrepancies in my urls and content, i had hundreds of duplicate meta title and description errors which i fixed instantly after the penalty, this also cannot be a reason because of a lot of my friends with bigger sites still face the duplicate metas errors in their webmaster consoles.

Now, there are these two things which could be a reason for the penalty

1: over optimization
2: cookie cutter

My site is optimized for its content. Urls and metas and every on page factors were perfect and i had alot of sites linking to me for my desired keywords, so may be this over optimization could be one of the reasons.

Now about cookie cutter, my site contains thousands of pages, some are very big and some are very small, i can't really help those small pages which contain 50 -200 words as that is the maximum amount of information available regarding that particular game topic.

My site serves video game cheats, i have hundreds of pages written by my self and editors, alot of unique content which is often copied by other sites and i can't really help it, i my self have alot of cheats which are duplicates but you can't really make them unique.

I also suspect it could have been due to amount of advertisement on my pages? i have 2 adsense blocks, one tribal fusion banner in header, one adsense banner in footer.

mm, Iam lost

elaborate on this

Game cheats are codes and hints which users enter into games in order to make special moves or cross some stages

Excuse but somenthing is missing..here.I have seen a lot of sudden drops but this one is more likely to started by google and then in a climat of panic wrong,fast actions which ended in disaster.


This is a scenario of some stupid seo trying to optimize urls and change the site urls which is the same for years.Only in such cases i have seen such sudden drops and so deep in time.

Also i do not think you have slapped/penalized/filtered by google.This kind of things happens all the time if you act in a panic mode then disaster is close to your site.I am sure that you did a lot of changes the months after 4 of june(which was a major reindexing period see that http://forums.seochat.com/showpost.php?p=697327&postcount=8 last image).Please tell me what you did to improve your rankings.

If you situation is bad I would move you index page content to a temporary page so the regular users can still access it and then create a new index page which is blank except for a Title and H1 with your full website url in it..
Allow google to index it and and check that its been done and if searching on the url will bring up the site in searches.
If that works swap them over again and if you get penalised there must be something wrong with the page!

Hmm, i wonder if you been into seo for long. I did not change any thing which was not supposed to be changed. If you mean fixing of meta duplicate errors then what else should i have done to them? How did you assume all this though?



Changing the url structure of a single page for testing purpose is stupid seo? And do you realize this site wide penalty is up for 1 year now? which means all long urls are burried under the serps and almost no where to be found. And have you ever heard of 301 redirect? And which cases you talk about here?

And since you don't think dropping from top 5 spots to no where to be found is a penalty what else it is?

Now coming to the the link you posted. Do you know there are several kind of penalties? and this case scenario you posted above doesn't necessarily means i have the same issue!



In this that guy speaks about his pages being dropped from index and loosing his PR, he refers this issue to excessive link building he has been into. Now if you had read what i wrote above you would have known that neither my pages dropped from index nor my PR and on top of that i have not done excessive link building which could possibly invite the penalty.

It was not site specific penalty which was imposed on me it was related to certain practice and thousands of sites simulatenously were slapped, please read those webmasterworld links i posted.

My home page is probably not penalised, home page still shows up 1-2 for a very competitive key word. My new pages still get indexed, its just that they get cached very late and don't really show up in serps instantly or show up deep down the serps. I can probably try that for my content pages but again i don't think that would work as i have previously added quality content into older and fresh urls which certainly did not change the situation.

I might have misunderstood your suggestion, if you think i did, please elaborate on your proposed solution. Much appreciated.

My friend i do not imply somenthing bad for you.When i said for stupid seo's i wasn't refer to you,i dont know you or your site,so I would be stupid if i said that.I did read the posts u said but believe me i have seen thousands of that.

The period you said(june)was a reindexing peiod thats a fact and a lot of webmasters knows that.The guy at the post is not talking about loosing pr its just normal reindexing period and the effects of it.When i was starting this kind of buiseness i too spend times in forum reading my site "dropped sudenly" and of course i did that cause my sites too sufered by this.Until i understood whats happening.Now i can predict forum posts like that

301 redirect its a solution but its best not to change urls.hard tested experiment 80% failure.Pr maybe never come to normal.And serp too.I have more than 12 examples of sites(owned by friends or me) who lost huge traffic from changing url and 301 redirect and recovered betweent 6 and 13 months.

What i am saying is for big sites(contet not traffic) i have no experience in small sites.

If you havent done somenthing extreme(such changing urls) to your site before sudden drop and 2-3 months after,I am extremely curius to find out what happened.I have never experienced that.In fact i have never experienced a penalty although i have some sites trying to achieve that(cloaking,link farms etc.) in the name of experiment .



Cause its the common symptoms of sudden drops.




3 years is it ok?But this doesnt proove somenthing i know a lot 5-7-10 years seo's that are based on speculations.In fact i dont want to be a seo i just try to understand how google works and monetize it(which i am doing it very good).
Anyway i am interested to review you site.Can you please send me the url?

By Prs being messed up he certainly means his pr is down. Now since you said June was a reindexing period i would like you to back up your comment with a reference, quote some thing from a credible source. If for a moment i agree to what you said that Google was reindexing in June 2008, i would want to know if all sites over the internet got reindexed? did all sites experience same downward trend in the traffic?

Sites often drop suddenly (yo yo effect) its when you either get excessive amount of spammy links or just because its google dance, such transitions are temporary and in several cases sites return back to ther original ranks or higher.

Its not good to 301? so if you have an old age script with session ids and badly manufactured url structure you would not want to change it to some thing pretty and easy to read by both of users and search engines? And please read again, in my case i proposed to have 301 redirect to only one page and if that 301 redirect brings back my serps i shall have no reason to not to 301 whole site.

This site was way bigger, was racking up more than 100k uniques a day, so its not a small site by any means.

This again gives me a feeling that you didn't pay attention to what i said above, mate i never changed url structure and have not done any extreme changes beside fixing meta erros and that was a good thing to do, however, it had no effect on serps.

And i am doing websites for over 4-5 years and have couple of sites which rank number one for very competitive keywords, this means i have been to the some sort of experience which led me to having top rankings accross several domains. Just like you, i have been to hundreds of threads where users had been complaining about how their sites dropped and then eventually came back but my friend this is a different case and i suggest you go through my initial posts and then follow the webmasterworld links to get the hold of the topic.

What i have learnt from your arguments is that you are quick at assuming things and interpret things to your self made understandings which is vague and lack reasoning with logic and proof.

I think we should stick to the topic and not turn it into a rant as that would be the last thing i would want in this thread.

Lets help me

My friend i agree that ur site and what happened is the main problem not only for you but for everyone who wants to monetize google traffic.when i said about reindexing periods i mean googledances and believe me in that forum the word googledance its bad word they dont like it here i dont know why.




This partly true but is hard to explain everything ,i assume that we have some standart knowledge.

So what do you believe that caused this sudden drop?
Cause competition its not sudden.
If it is a penalty which are the reasons?
Cause i personally never experienced a penalty.

And please provide me the domain if it is ok.Its very interesting case(i am not selling seo work dont worry).

I never experienced a penalty either, just the temporary yoyo effects. I am not too sure of what really went wrong as i have been following all white hat methods. Its probably a duplicate content or cookie cutter case, i have alot of unique content written by either me or my editors and often other sites copy my content and since all game cheats are same alot of sites use almost same material hence the duplication. Some of my pages contain little content but that is mainly due to the fact that we have very limited information regarding that particular page which is usually 40-100 words. I was kinda fedup and now decided to do some thing about it.