6 replies to this topic

[Andre]

Hi all. Haven't posted in years.

I have a SEO problem and I'm in need of an expert opinion:

I had an affiliate program custom developed for one of my sites. The programmer used session IDs which showed up in the URL. Google indexed lots of pages with the session IDs.

My traffic on the site dropped from about 2,500/day to about 1,500/day. I corrected the problem. No more session IDs in the URLs. But my traffic is still at 1,500/day. It's been about a month now with no improvement. The only remedy I could think of is looking through "site:www.mydomain.com", making a list of all the pages indexed with sessions IDs and then listing those URLs in my robots.txt. The result is that those pages are no longer indexed, but my traffic hasn't improved. Anything else that I can do to make good with G?

Many thanks.

[Jill]

It's a good thing to fix, but not sure why you thought it would improve your traffic?

[Andre]

My thinking was that getting those pages un-indexed would remove duplicates of the real pages from the index, hence G would see that I do not have duplicate content, hence a possible penalty for duplicate content would be lifted - restoring the former rankings of the real pages. Just stabbing in the dark here!

[Jill]

Nope. Since they don't penalize for duplicate content it's doubtful that was the cause of your woes.

It's more something you just don't want to have happen because there's no need for them to index so much stuff when they don't have to.

[Andre]

Many thanks Jill.

I hope it's ok for me to post an example: My homepage www.biz-logo.com used to rank top ten for "business logos". Now it's not in the top 1000 for that keyword. What baffles me is that it's still indexed. It's one of several pages that are still indexed but that went from top 10 to nowhere. Normally with radical changes like this I just wait it out and things return to normal within a couple of days, but it's been a month. It seems logical to me that there's a connection between this drop and my session ID hiccup - since there is nothing else on the site that would make Google unhappy. Not that I know of.

[Jill]

Is there anything else that may have been done on your site, or on your behalf via linking, or even just with your server?

[Andre]

Is there anything else that may have been done on your site, or on your behalf via linking, or even just with your server?

The only thing that I can think of is the inbound links from my affiliates. The affiliate program was built in such a way that the affiliates just link to biz-logo.com without the need for an affiliate code, so our inbound links have increased somewhat over the past few months. I guess this could be seen as a way to artificially inflate pagerank, but it's a tough call as the there are other reasons why we built it like that - notably to make it easier for affiliates, to give them "clean" links which have more credibility than affiliate links and to improve the accuracy of our tracking. I don't really see how Google can have a problem with this, but that's the closest thing to bad tactics that we use.

I don't think these links are the problem as some of the inner pages also lost rankings, for example www.biz-logo.com/pre-designed-people.shtml which ranked top 10 for "cartoon logos" and is now nowhere to be found for that keyword. As far as I know, none of my affiliates link directly to that page. Most link to the homepage.

Thanks Jill. I appreciate your help!