SEO Tycoon

**alex_m** · 07-10-2007, 11:56 AM

Hi,

Several pages of my website dissapeared from results, but not from index!

I did not any big changes recently, and I did not any black hat seo.

The pages are:

http://www.amicutilities.com/outlook-express-backup/

This is in top 10, and now is nowhere to found except if I search for its name.

http://www.amicutilities.com/pdf-writer/

This also was in top 10, and now is nowhere to found, except if I search for its name.

The pages are clean from black seo techniques as I am aware of, no redirects, no keyword stuffing ( keyword density is normal and relaxed ) no duplicate content.

What could be the problem?

Did the pages got penalized by the Google algorithm for something that I am not aware of?

**chrishirst** · 07-10-2007, 01:03 PM

Quote:

What could be the problem?

Did the pages got penalized by the Google algorithm for something that I am not aware of

Not penalised but given

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/releva...different.html
and
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/releva...stom-html.html

I'd say that the problem is, a whole bunch of crappy, low quality inbound links.

**ADAM Web Design** · 07-10-2007, 01:14 PM

What Chris Hirst said. Link exchanges are the silliest SEO myth going right now, and they won't do you any good whatsoever (contrary to published and prevailing opinion).

What you need to do is to find ways to generate links that 1) provide you a net traffic gain and 2) if possible, provide a net SEO gain (although this should never be your primary goal.)

You also have an architectural issue (i.e. that your submenus aren't spider-friendly due to their being embedded into a Javascript.) Change that to CSS with a little Javascript beef for the functionality and that should help too (at the very least, it will make your submenus more user-friendly.)

**alex_m** · 07-10-2007, 05:36 PM

Hi,

Thank you both for help!

I am sure I can use good quality links that provide net traffic and SEO gain ( by the way, any suggestions of how to obtain them, because most people are so reluctant to give links these days ) but the pages dropped from the results all of a sudden, so I think the problem is not just the incoming links.

For example, the www.amicutilities.com main website is still showing in the results ( on page 3th or 4th ) for the search keywords that the subpages used to show for, so I belive I should also find the subpages shomewhere in the first 100 results? But they are nowhere to find

**ADAM Web Design** · 07-10-2007, 07:46 PM

Again, that may well be at least partly attributable to your menu. Check that out.

As far as getting good, quality links goes...they come from a good, quality site that in your case would have to offer a good, quality product. With your stuff, it's hard to tell because it appears on the surface that your products have to be bought outright. Promote your site for what it actually is (a shareware site) and you'll likely pick up some organic links from shareware sites such as Tucows and Download.com. You get those types of links going, SEO will be bonus money for you at that point.

**ForrestCroce** · 07-10-2007, 09:04 PM

Publish some no strings attached freeware. I've written a couple of photography and web management applications that bring a lot of traffic to my site. Most of the people don't look around at my raison d'etre, the photos, but the software brings in a steady stream of traffic month after month ... and in your case people would be more interested in other products you have.

But don't just release some trivial "hello world" software; if you give something away that people would be willing to pay for, you'll attract a lot of interest. And a lot of that will translate into links.

**alex_m** · 07-11-2007, 08:47 PM

Hello,

While I appreciate very much your help, ( thank you for caring to answer!

) you are talking about how I can get more links, while my main question is why did the pages droped from results?

The pages were in the top 10, and now are nowhere to be found.

I still have other pages in the top 10 on the same site, which use the same layout ( and menu ).

Is there anything wrong with the onpage SEO? What could be the problem? I am sure there is some penalization or something, because the pages already have links from shareware sites, and while these listings on shareware sites are found in top 100, my pages are not

**alex_m** · 07-12-2007, 07:57 PM

One of them is back. Now when I search for outlook express backup, the page is in top 10! The other days it was nowhere to be found!

Google is weird.

Alex

**vangogh** · 07-13-2007, 02:45 AM

Alex, results change all the time. Just because you rank in one spot today is no guarantee you'll rank there tomorrow. And just because you fall in ranking doesn't mean you've been penalized.

What phrases were the pages ranking for?

It could be that something you were doing is no longer considered as valuable as Google thought previously. That's why Chris mentioned the links. Google probably devalued a lot of them if they are low quality. Or maybe you had a few high quality links that offset the low quality ones, but the high quality links aren't there any more.

Google's made it clear they don't see value in mass reciprocal link exchanges. If most of your links are coming from unrelated sites and you've been linking back to them then sooner or later Google will probably discover it.

Given the threads Chris pointed to it looks like you have been trying to develop link schemes as a way to generate incoming links.

My guess is the way you approached linking is the reason the pages dropped. It just took Google a little time to connect the dots.

**alex_m** · 07-20-2007, 10:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

Alex, results change all the time. Just because you rank in one spot today is no guarantee you'll rank there tomorrow..

I know that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

And just because you fall in ranking doesn't mean you've been penalized..

Not always. But when you dissapear from the first 200 results, then yes, you've been penalized.

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

What phrases were the pages ranking for?

outlook express backup

I'm on the 6th position with this page: http://www.amicutilities.com/outlook-expres-backup

pdf writer

I was on the 6th position with this page: http://www.amicutilities.com/pdf-writer

The first page dissapeared, but then it got included again, and now is on the 6th place again. The second page dissapeared, then got included somewhere on the 16th position for several days, now is gone again from first 200

I know link exchange is not worthing much in search engine eyes, and I also have many one way incoming links. However I also know that search engines do not penalize link exchanges. At worst, they simply ignore them, and do not count them

But I'm sure that link exchange is not the problem here. I tough to have duplicate content, as much of the content on the pages was also present on software sites. I changed it to make it unique. So no duplicate content penalization. I also thought maybe a bad redirect ( I redirect http://amicutilities.com to http://www.amicutilities.com ) so I checked it and made it a permanent 301 redirect

No hidden text, not so much link exchange ( tought there are some ).. but still can't figure what the penalization is for.

I'm sure is penalized, otherwise it would show up somewhere on 200 results...

**vangogh** · 07-21-2007, 12:51 AM

It's not necessarily a penalty even with that kind of drop, though it could be. There are other explanations though. If you were getting credit for a number of links pointing to the page that are now not counting for anything that could be enough to make the page fall that far.

I've had pages rank well at one time and then disappear later.

Do you have an account with Google Webmaster Central? If not set one up. Google just added a new message feature where they will tell some webmasters if they've done something that's invoking a penalty.

I don't think there's a penalty though. The pdf writer page ranks #1 for 'pdf writer pro' What I am seeing with a site: search is Google has indexed several of the pdf pages with parameters at the end. The content of each is still unique, but I see a few listed as supplemental. I wonder if Google is getting tripped up somewhat by the different parameters. It shouldn't be a problem, but maybe it is. You might try blocking all the pages except the main one in your robots.txt and see if that has any effect. It might not, but it would be something to test.

The PDF page looks fine to me. I don't see anything that I would expect would cause a penalty with it.

**coolguy27** · 07-21-2007, 04:43 PM

Build for more quality links...

**alex_m** · 08-02-2007, 03:44 PM

Finnaly I discovered the problem!

Yes, the page WAS PENALIZED !

This is because I had a direct link to the Payment Processor: https://www.regnow.com/xyz(productinfo) on the very page with the product.

As www.regnow.com is a large payment processor, with tousands of products and tens of thounds of affiliates who link to those products, Google thought that my page is some kind of affiliate page, because it pointed to that URL that was probably considered "bad neigbour" .

I replaced the link with a link to a local order page on my site and two days later my page was back in SERPS on the 16 position.

Before that it was nowhere to be found in SERPS ( not even in top 500 ).

So, be carefull to whom you link to! A link to a website that many spammy affiliates link to might get Google to consider you as bad as those spammy affiliatess

**ADAM Web Design** · 08-02-2007, 05:56 PM

Dude, that's a bit of a stretch. How did you pick that piece of information up?

And you still have the menu issue I pointed out earlier...that's as much a user issue as it is an SEO issue, too.

**alex_m** · 08-02-2007, 06:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Dude, that's a bit of a stretch. How did you pick that piece of information up?

And you still have the menu issue I pointed out earlier...that's as much a user issue as it is an SEO issue, too.

The page mentioned was out of the SERPS for "pdf writer" for many weeks. As soon as I took out the URL from page, withing a few days the page reapered in SEPRS for "pdf writer", on the 16 position.

I knew that linking to a "bad neighbour" can cause problems, but I did not considered RegNow site to be a bad neighbour.

Yes, I still have the menu issue but I do not know how to fix it. It seems to work well under IE and Firefox

**arbor_hill** · 08-06-2007, 10:03 AM

do you guys really believe in that bad neighborhood penalty?

wouldn't every directory be penalized if that was real?

**ADAM Web Design** · 08-06-2007, 11:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alex_m

The page mentioned was out of the SERPS for "pdf writer" for many weeks. As soon as I took out the URL from page, withing a few days the page reapered in SEPRS for "pdf writer", on the 16 position.

I knew that linking to a "bad neighbour" can cause problems, but I did not considered RegNow site to be a bad neighbour.

Yes, I still have the menu issue but I do not know how to fix it. It seems to work well under IE and Firefox

That still sounds coincidental to me. I've seen pages disappear from SERPs and then reappear seemingly "just because" (it happened to the SEFL site, and I changed nothing on it). I wouldn't consider RegNow a "bad neighbour" either.

If you want to fix your menus, start with the menus from the link below and then add in some Javascript for functionality:

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/

arbor_hill: I believe in not linking out to anything that is unethical (not without a nofollow, at least) both from the user and the SEO standpoint. If I do link to something unethical, I warn both users and search engines alike that it's something I don't support and link out to strictly for informational purposes.

As far as whether every directory gets penalized, 99.999% of them never see any real search engine traffic for anything because they're slapassed together by some lazy webmaster who wants to make a quick advertising buck using phpLD.

**vangogh** · 08-07-2007, 02:08 AM

arbor_hill I feel much the same way Adam does about linking to 'bad neighborhoods' Also I wouldn't think that one bad link is going to penalize your site. If you think about the idea of six degrees of separation then most sites are only a few links away from yours. If one link to a 'bad neighborhood' put you in that same 'bad neighborhood' in a short amount of time the entire web might be one big 'bad neighborhood'

I think you can be penalized if a large part of your links go to spam sites. One link can probably be forgiven, but if the pattern is to link to those spam sites then I think you might be found guilty by association. You can't always control who links to you, but you can control who you link to.