18 replies to this topic

[SearchRank]

Wow, what a history! Definitely get rid of that index.html page as well as every link to it. You will want to investigate to see if there are any other issues related to the case study you read that have not been "undone".

After these things are fixed, the thing you can do is to write Google and explain your situation, what was done, it is now fixed and ask them to lift any penalties or restrictions on crawling. At least the site has a decent PR and is not grayed out.

As for the cookies that Matt B mentioned I can definitely tell you that if the site requires that one accept cookies, that will hinder crawling. We have a client that if you do not accept cookies, you are redirected to an ugly page that says you need to have cookies to see site. You cannot even view the home page. They started doing this about 5 months ago for God only knows why and because of it, have just absolutely dropped out of site in all crawlers. They perviously enjoyed pretty good rankings. All attempts thus so far to get them to change this strategy has been fruitless.

Also after all the "spam-iffy" issues are fixed, you may try a direct feed into Froogle to get those product pages listed. I wouldn't do this though until the issues are corrected and you are able to get some kind of feedback from Google on the history of the domain.

Good luck with it, looks like you have your work cut out for you.

I wonder who got them into the trouble that is mentioned in the case study. Mmmm...

[Matt B]

Thre are a couple of issues that you need to consider.

1. The spam is still in the site, causing the penalty from Google to remain. (which has been a looong penalty)

2. The site has indexing issues, causing problems for spiders. (Cookies fall under this category)

3. The spam has been removed, but the site is still being penalized for the traffic it gained from the spam tactics. (Though not likely all has been removed, from looks of that index page.)

So, if there are still some anti-Google tactics still being employed it could be reason #1. If no spam is on the site, then possibly a combination of #2 and #3.

Or it could be any combination of the above. It's probably best to start with that assumption.

[markm]

Thanks for all the great tips. It feels a bit like being part of SEO history, working on this! I want to get this sucker indexed in one way or another!! Then I promise to get each of you a nice or even some for the help!

Mark

[markm]

It's getting pretty interesting. The sleuthing continues.

1. I have decided Cookies can't be the problem - they aren't required and you can browse the site with cookies turned off.

2. I decided to check to see if any global changes were made to the site on or around the time they disappeared from the Google index. Sure enough, shortly before the pages started dropping out of the index, they implemented ClickTracks. Could this be the culprit? They did need to put another variable in the URL with Clicktracks. Maybe that variable put it over the edge for the Google spider. And it went across the board onto every page. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

3. Many (but not all) of the pages have an 'id' variable. There are many things on the net saying that pages with an ID variable might not get indexed. Googleguy has said it is not good to use that variable. Here is a test Google Tests Still. this does not explain why all the pages are gone.

4. We of course are trying to get some feedback from Google.

Man this is making me tired. Time to

Mark