Using site: operator - advanced options

I used the site:www.website.com inquiry today and have a question. When posting this in the google search bar there were 293 pages. However, there is an options tab you can use that gave the following results:

recent results.....293 pages returned
past 24 hours....did not match any pages
past week.........did not match any pages
past year..........9 pages (all but one pages with PDFs)

How valid is this information - does this confirm the ban that I thought I have been under, or is just using the command itself more accurate. Since I cannot find any of our pages in the search results when I enter parts of the content in the search bar, I have to assume that the site is being black listed in some way (site is mainehomeconnection (dot) com.

I am working on reconsideration request - but at the same time trying to figure out where I stand.

I don't see how you would think that would confirm a ban. All it says to me is that you haven't updated your site other than the 9 pages in the last year. Now if you have updated you site since then, then you might have a problem, but the info you supplied is not enough to go by.

In another post I had discussed how our site has gone through a dramatic drop - from it position of top 5 (for 4 years) for the term Portland Maine Real Estate. As of 6 weeks ago, it does not appear in the top 1000. Also, it does not appear in the SERP when exact content, from any page, is pasted into the Google search bar.....which is very strange.

We are working to fix canconical URLs and clean up code according to the validator. We are also going to eliminate all links from our blog to our website, and try to create cleaner code for our navigation - but we cannot find any other issues that would cause this drop - and just trying to understand if, in fact, we are banned. It shouldn't be so hard to simply get to the bottom of this.....but it sure is.

What have you done for the site in the last 4 years? If you haven't updated anything about it, it seems like you became complacent with your ranks.

And if you ranked 4 years ago, then you could have ranked for directory submissions and reciprocal links, and all that other junk that is no longer worth anything. If that's the case, your site may have just recently been devalued.

Do you have any quality links?

We have been constantly working on our site and our backlinks are comparable to those at the top of the rankings, where we previously were - but based on the info I provided, are we now banned or blacklisted (or is this information not enough to make a determination).

It looks to me like you have a serious problem listening to advice. When checking out your site I found this:

http://www.google.com/support/forum...69ff4ee11&hl=en

Why didn't you take any of the advice that was give to you there? That's been two months ago, and if this truly were an urgent matter, you would have done something by now.

The "minor technical" issues (as you referred to them in your other thread) lead to duplicate content - which will get you devalued.

Setting up new domains solely for the purpose of linking to yourself - this could get you penalized (Google has registrar info and can tell when if it's you that's doing this most of the time).

Having very few links (7 in YAHOO - that's like having none at all) - means you have nothing pushing you forward.

You may have used to have links, but they all dropped off as they were of little quality.

The site change you made without the 301s could have also led to links being removed.

The thing is, you need to fix all your canonical issues, nofollow the blog links, and work on getting quality links.

If you're not going to do any of this, do not bother coming back and asking more questions. <add> If you refuse to take advice, then why ask for it in the first place? </add>

For what it is worth, we have taken the advice of virtually all comments we received in WMF - I expect the programing to be done within a week. However, the issue on the blog is more difficult - since I have received contradictory comments on this point in both the WMF and other forums. That is why it is a difficult decision to determine if this is the primary culprit.

Regarding links - I think that some evaluation is necessary of the competition (on a local level). Our backlinks in G and Y are similar to our competitors and have been for years. Does a drop from 10 links to 7 cause one to drop from position 4 to 1000. That does not pass the straight face test.

As I said, we are working to fix all things that have been suggested to us (of which some were is was just an algorithm change - wait it out). But get an understanding of just what our current "status" is was the purpose of this post.

Links (in Yahoo, except from this domain) for the top ten sites on Google for portland maine real estate:

#1 - http://www.mymaineproperty.com - 3472
#2 - www.godemetria.com/ - 342
#3 - www.homesinmaine.com/ - 247
#4 - realestate.yahoo.com/Maine/Portland - 44
#5 - www.homes.com/Real_Estate/ME/City/PORTLAND - 40
#6 - www.johnhatcher.us/ - 136
#7 - www.mainecoastproperties.biz/ - 1526
#8 - pressherald.mainetoday.com/ - 36,517
#9 - realestate.mainetoday.com/ - 30,192
#10 - www.portland-me-realestate.com/ - 650
you - mainehomeconnection.com - 7

Now what in the world makes you think you are similar to these?

BTW - I'm glad to see you are taking advantage of the Local 10-pack, though. Congrats on that.

Okay, I see you point - what tool did you use to obtain these numbers? Using linkdomain:www.site.com I came up with different results. Using Marketleap.com, I come up with yet another set of numbers. I'm not saying that links are a factor, but how much influence do links in Y have in the G SERP results. Our site has no issues in Y or M. Do you have similar link results for G for these sites?

BTW, what exactly is a 10-pack? Can I create up to 10 listings in the local business center?

What do you think about this: Many of the Y and G links are from blogs. A link from a blog roll creates a new link each time a post is published - over and over again. A situation occurs when you have your own blog and links are generated from the archive - each time any kind of post is created. This is not done with an "SERP corrupting" going on. I noticed over 200 links from my blog to my home page that I did not create - they came from this archive thing. so this goes back to your earlier question about following advice - the solution is not as clear as it seems.

Those were the top ten results in Google. I used Yahoo Site explorer to find the links (just go to yahoo and type in link:domain.com). Yahoo gives a more accurate representation of your links that Google does, since Google only provides a sample. Once the links pull up in Yahoo, I clicked the drop down menu next to the (pages)(in-links) buttons towards the top, and selected "except from this domain" - which filters out internal links.

The 10-pack refers to those 10 mini results that show next to an image of a map. They come up whenever a "local" search is triggered, whether it be through IP targeting or by searching for a city + keyword. I would not suggest trying to spam the LBC with multiple listings of your business. If you have multiple locations, then makes sure you list all your locations. If you run two businesses from the same address, list both separately.

As for your blog creating links that you "didn't put there" - if you put your link on the blogroll, then yes, you did put it there. The simple answer to this would be to add the nofollow attribute to all outbound links, which should be pretty easier for your programmers to implement.

re: "...I would not suggest trying to spam the LBC with multiple listings of your business..." -- absolutely TOP advice here js.....but methinks this OP will ignore same...
sigh...



Jim

An interesting thing - if you run this link domain result using our www version of the website compared to the non-www version the results are different. Then we have almost 600 links to the homepage URL. On the list of programing efforts is to redirect all URLs to the www version. We already made that change in WMT.

Regarding blog links, what I was trying to get at and better understand is links that are from the archive in a blog. For some reason each archived post generates its own new link - over and over again. I can see these in the WMT external links to home page. There are more links created then actually appearing in the posts. This is a very strange thing that I'm sure others are having problems with and don't realize it. I am hoping that no-follow will help solve this issue.

Good spot. I didn't try it with the www. However, combine that with the second half of your post, how many of those are coming from that blog of yours? If you really want to know this answer, export the results to .csv, then open in Excel, and filter/sort them by the URL. You could then delete all those coming from your blog, and have a realistic view of your links that (could) count for something.

Not quite sure I understand what you mean by "each archived post generates its own new link - over and over again". Posts should only appear one time throughout your blog. Having them appear in multiple places would lead to duplicate content, also, and your links would not be the only problem with that.

These are some examples of what I am talking about. They appear in WMT as external links appearing on the home page.

http://www.mainerealestatenews.com/?s=approved (repeated 3 times)

http://www.mainerealestatenews.com/?s=communities (repeated 4 times)

http://www.mainerealestatenews.com/?s=estate (repeated 3 times)

and on and on. I don't understand how this is happening - or if it is even an issue.

Now, to make it even more interesting - links from the "pages" section of the blog - to very specific internal pages of the website (that have more detailed content) are only shown once (as they should be) on the exact URL in the WMTs