90 replies to this topic

[thx1138]

Please understand... nobody is scolding you or fussing at you. We're just giving friendly warnings and (hopefully) helpful advice so you won't have to face these dilemmas in the future.

No, no, no, believe me I absolutely understand and agree with everything that's been said, I've always felt like I was blagging it with these positions and I've used the revenue provided to pay off my mortgage in anticipation of times like these.

It's just a human desire to seek an explanation even though you know it's unlikely you'll find one, oddly the only thing that has changed significantly with regards to my site in the last few months is adding Google analytics code.

Charlie

[Jill]

oddly the only thing that has changed significantly

In these cases, it's rarely anything you've done. Which of course is what makes it all the more frustrating.

Unfortunately, Google giveth, and Google taketh away.

[thx1138]

Yes my site is 6 years old, whats strange is it still comes up no1 on google for a couple of specific search terms 'logo design bath' and 'graphic design bath' but everything else has gone completely. I also use google ppc but when you're used to having 500 or so orgainic page hits a day for nothing it isn't really viable to pay for that sort of exposure. I think i'm just going to sit and cry for a bit...

Hi Lunatrix, yes exactly the same here, still No.1 for a couple of specific search terms so I presume not penalised, but everything else gone. When did your problems start, I noticed your site is also a .co.uk one and you use Google analytics, I wonder if this is a UK index problem?

Have you made any changes to your site recently?

Charlie

[thx1138]

I just found my site on page 98 of Google's SERPS after applying the '&filter=0' to the results, does this suggest that my site is tripping the duplicate content filter?

Charlie

[Jill]

Is it in supplemental results?

[thx1138]

Is it in supplemental results?

Yes Jill, it appears to be.

Charlie

[Jill]

Copy some of the text from that page into Google in quotes, and learn where the duplicate content is coming from (if somewhere). That should help get to the bottom of the problem.

[thx1138]

Copy some of the text from that page into Google in quotes, and learn where the duplicate content is coming from (if somewhere). That should help get to the bottom of the problem.

Thanks Jill, I did as you suggested with the following text:- 'send flowers online in the UK' and a multitude of odd, what look like artificially generated blogspots addresses are listed with this text ripped from our description tag, is this likely to be the issue?

Charlie

[Scottie]

'send flowers online in the UK'

That's a pretty generic statement and one that many sites probably have... try using something unique to your site.

Try using Copyscape to get a more accurate comparison.

[thx1138]

OK I've tried some larger blocks of less generic text and am not finding any duplicate content, Copyscape flagged one of my other domains where I had a doorway page linking through to my main site. I've now put a 301 redirect on this domain instead.

I searched for my site using the following syntax:- site:www.mysite.co.uk *** which I believe lists your pages that are in the supplemental index (is this correct) and my home page is there?

Is anyone prepared to check my site for me to see if they can figure out any issues, I'd be very grateful.

Charlie

[Randy]

I searched for my site using the following syntax:- site:www.mysite.co.uk *** which I believe lists your pages that are in the supplemental index (is this correct) and my home page is there?

No, that's not going to show you just supplementals.

As far as I know there is no search you can do that will call up only supplemental pages. About the best you can do is do a site: type of search on your domain and then look for those that say Supplemental just after where it lists the URL address.

[thx1138]

Thanks Randy, I think I'll try and reduce any content on my site that might be considered duplicate although with product page templates it's not easy, then submit a sitemap and see if that helps.

I hate feeling like I've done something wrong.

Charlie

[Michael Martinez]

Is it in supplemental results?

Yes Jill, it appears to be.

Right now, the most common cause of Supplemental Results listings, according to people like Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, and Vanessa Fox, is a lack of trusted inbound links.

Google is now doing a much more frequent crawl of pages in its Main Index, but it appears to be recrawling the Supplemental Index no more than once a month (perhaps longer but I'm still checking page updates and don't have a firm idea of the timeframe).

If a majority of your inbound links slipped into the Supplemental Index, your own pages would have gone Supplemental. You can see how many pages on your site are Supplemental by doing a site: search.

This behavior became most apparent in the weeks following Thanksgiving 2006, but it may have been implemented much earlier, probably by October 15 or so. I think that it took Google 1-2 months to shake sites out of its Main Index that were no longer considered to be trustworthy (because of their lack of trusted inbound links).

[seadog]

One of my sites had the hompage dropped by Google on Jan 10. This lasted about 2 days and everything came back fine. 2 weird things happened along with this. Google Webmaster Central showed my site last crawled on Oct 15! When in reality(thanks Clicktracks) I could see that Googlebot was coming everyday or so. Another weird thing was only 2 pages(out of a small 8 page site) where showing up when running a "site" query. After a day 4 pages where showing up. On the third day the homepage came back and so did the traffic and the rankings.

I posted this in Webmaster World and found several others with very similar problems.

Good Luck!

[thx1138]

Thanks everyone,

I now think I was barking up the wrong tree with regards to my site being in the supplemental index. I've performed the following seaches:-

'flowers delivered uk' - Top position

'flower deliveries uk' - Top position

'flower delivery uk' - Around position 300

Great some top positions, except virtually no one uses those terms and the vast majority use the last one I'm currently running at one sixth of the traffic of last week.

Given the semantic similarity of these searches does this not seem odd?

Charlie