Hello everyone!
Like alot of people last month a few pages in my site suddenly went from a top 10 listing for a series of respective key phrase searches to almost non existent. In fact my homepage doesn't even show up #1 for a search for the EXACT title of my website... which it used to.

I am guessing I have some sort of penalty maybe for linking to bad area or something.

My question is... If Google realizes a page links to a bad area does it penalize THAT page or does the WHOLE site get penalized? I am not talking about being blacklisted just scored poorly. I only wonder because it seems that when Google decides to graciously reward one of your pages it sure doesn't reward the WHOLE site!

Also, is there any way to see if Google considers a webpage a "bad area" other than using common sense... because I have no common sense. )
Thanks

PS: is this board adult-site friendly or do I need to always speak of my site in hypothetical terms?

Originally Posted by jeof0411

In fact my homepage doesn't even show up #1 for a search for the EXACT title of my website... which it used to.

I am guessing I have some sort of penalty maybe for linking to bad area or something.

that doesnot means u have been penalized .. it means other websiter are better optimized ........


do this search
site:www.urdomain.com

is it showing results ? if yes .... then u r not penalized ....

jeof0411 - You were not too forthcoming with any particulars for your site, so I am going to make a couple of comments based on what I think may be the problem you are experiencing. And this is in particular to your PS at the end of your post.

I am assuming that your site has or is considered to contain Adult Material. Is that correct?

If that is the case then I assume you will need to go into the preferences on your search to turn off the Adult Content filter there.

It may be that you do not have adult material also, but you are linking with adult content sites (sometimes linking to gaming and casino sites will have the same affect because of their close ties to adult sites.) Sometimes you are what you link to. And if you are link exchanging with these types of sites then some of it is going to rub off onto you so to speak.

One way to find out is to call your home page up in your browser and go to the info button on your Googlebar and click the Similar Pages option on the dropdown menu. This will give you a good idea as to what Google percieves to be the relationship of your site to be. If you do not have the googlebar, do a inurl:www.yourdomain.com at Google and look for the Similar Pages link on the bottom right side of each result.

This will query the Google database and pull up sites/pages that it perceives to relevant to that particular page. Pay close attention to this screen(s) of results, because if it is not relevant to your site ... then you may have a couple of problems ... the adult content problem I already explained. The other problem is that Google will not score you well for certain categories if you do not fit in with that category. For instance, if you sold "gift baskets" but the related sites results are showing "hotel accomodations" then Google is telling you that you are not relevant to "gift baskets".

The mondo-link page days are over I am afraid though. But having them can still influence your rankings somewhat. Google is aware of link pages and can detect them fairly well. It will place more emphasis on a link inside a article that references your site, than on a link with 100 others all on one page. Exchange linking is a dead art-form in the Google world ... but to some extent too, it does get your site crawled just by it's existance. Choose your links well.

I agree with above but if your site is not of adult contents even than it seems that your site is over optimized for certain keyword and backward link also have same keyword in Anchor Text . Try to have more theme based links

http://www.submitshop.com

Chances are you haven't been back listed, post or email me your site and the keyphrase your competing on and I'll have a look for you.

Hi guys. Sorry I somehow lost track of this post and just found it again. First off thanks to all of you who offered useful suggestions.

As for my site it is adult-natured and it's for a an EXTREMELY competitive search-term. I never did find out if it was ok to discuss what it would be about in open forum but let me just imply that it may be about toys and products that one would use while in bed.

About the content-filter: I always keep my search preferences set to no-filtering, but thanks! I don't have 100's of incoming links but I usually try to pick quality sites with nice PR and "un-spamm-y-ish-like" websites to swap links with and I set them up manually so I try to vary the anchor text that I give them to link to me. [ie: Some times i have them link to the actual name of my site which contains my keywords and sometimes i have sites link to me with other relevant phrases just to get some variety.]

Now all that said ... I kinda started reanalyzing some things and I am not sure it was a google penalty per se. (Please don't slap me) I know I am not blocked and my PR still fluctuates from 3-4. Here are some thoughts i had which MAY have screwed up my ranking... let me know how important if at all they could be in Googles algorithms etc:

1- I changed my .htaccess file to parse all pages as SSI so that I could use some random html cgi script. I didn't realize that doing this causes my server to not return a LAST_MODIFIED header. Not sure if this might hurt because i know Google likes files that have been updated recently and often. (i have removed this from my .htaccess after realizing tho).

2- I started using a javascript on one page in my site that allows me to link to a frameset and specify what goes into a "dynamic-ish" frame. To do this though I have to use a link format on many other pages that looks like this href=frameset.html?http://www.url-to-load-in-main-frame.com . It just opens frameset.html which contains the javascript instructing it to load whatever comes after the ? in the referring url into the main frame. I realized that this makes google think I have nothing but links to frameset.html on my page which might be bad since they link sites that link out.


3- I use lots of h1 h2 h3 tags on key phrases in my pages. i use them in logical order and mostly for stuff like table headings and headings for links etc. i didn't realize google was handing out OVER-OPTIMIZATION spankings! anyone know if i should strip down to 1 or 2 heading tags per page or is this not a big deal?


4- Dont think this is necessarily hurting me but: i found another site that links to me using cgi. and a meta refresh AND server side i think. so when you click on a link in their site to www.their-site.com/link.cgi?mysite.com you are automatically served up MY page. So google has indexed MY HOMEPAGE under the other sites URL. consequently my homepage actually disappeared from the index for a few days. Maybe because google thought it was duplicate content or something? In fairness I didnt complain too much because the other site has a PR of 6 and comes up top 10 for a ton of key phrases that i haven't been able to score yet!

Sorry for the long rambling post Thanks for any help / suggestions. (BTW those interested in looking at my site can check out my signature and im sure you will be able to deduce how to find my site my key phrases are pretty easy to get too when u see the site. and by NO means do i think my site is optimized/designed perfectly as i have had NO training... so be kind )

Wow, I am much too old for a site like that.

I noticed that the She-Net place has the number one slot for your site name. They are also showing up as a linkback, three of them as a matter of fact. The weird thing about the linkbacks though are that they are re-directions and not actual static Html links.

In the future, try to avoid the dynamic links. Oft times they will do you know good and the site that uses them are PR hoarders. This type of hoarding can backfire on them (rumor mill). But in this case though ... the link appears to Google as being a static link (why else report it as such). Here is what I am seeing Google Link Check and the link they are reporting is this link. Hover over that to see what I am talking about.

With all that said, I would have to say that you need a ton more links with your keyword in them from external sources. Right now you do not have much to speak of -- barely (pardon the pun) nothing at all.

One thing you could do to get a lot of links going pretty quickly is to jump in with an affilliateship with some of them Pay Sites (if you know what I mean). They will set you up with the sneak peak stuff to make some pages with. Create a directory to put them in and have a link to your Home Page on each one ... or even advertise on of your products on each page even.

Do not have a link from your main pages in the site to this material, and make sure the material does not violate a whole mess of laws -- be prudent in picking your selection out. All of these special pages will be pointing into your main part of the site, and nothing pointing back.

Now go out and offer free (non-popup) galleries to, umm, you know what I am talking about, places like the hun, jj's thumbs, etc. These two are pretty much high-powered PR sites and clean (as far as this industry is concerned). What you will get is some valuable inbound links to your site. Plus on these peoples visit, they may even see something they like at your site (because of one of your product ads) and/or you may pick up a commission on referring them for a sign-up referral at the same time.

You can try to come up with material yourself, and skip the referral approach. There are a number of places where you can purchase fresh material on CD for the purpose of royalty-free re-publishing. You can probably even set up your own subscriptions to view the higher rez versions if you want.

But the first scenario is probably the easiest. The main idea is to get a ton of that stuff up and get out there and get the links. Shoot for four or five different layouts per week per site, week in and week out....don't ever stop, you can never have enough backlinks.

is it showing results ? if yes .... then u r not penalized ....

I dont' agree with that. Even though your site may be indexed by Google, does not mean it has not been Penalized. I had a site penalized for linking to LinksToYou.com, guess Google considers it a link farm. After going from PR4 to PR0, even though I had over 1000 links pointing to my site, I wrote to Google to try to explain. Bottom line, I never got My PR back until recently, over 1 1/2 years. My site was still indexed by Google, but I DEFINETLY was penalized. I never again received a visitor from Google.com

You don't agree with what? I am not following you.

But yes you are right about linking to a FFA or Link Farm, it will get you penalized. If you clean your site up, then the penalty will be removed. Google is very forgiving, and it will only take a couple of months to get back in it's good graces ... not sure why it took you a year and a half, unless you still had some tarnish.

As for the link farms linking to you ... Google will NOT penalize you for that.

Thanks for the very helpful information Ronnie. Yeah I realize that about she-net. I posted about that but may have bee in another forum. The way they are getting the number one listing for my site is through cgi-bin script. Strangely enough I used a tool that lets me see a SSI page BEFORE it is processed to view what their links page source code is. It writes out a page that has a Meta Refresh tag of 0 and your url. I thought google doesn't like meta refreshes but who knows.

I actually have some inbound links but not many from sites with above PR4 ... so google won't show them.

The idea about getting an affiliate program and linking to my homepage on each one is a good idea. But what program should I use? Most adult affiliate programs Google won't index. So how can i generate pages for google to see that link to my main site? and how do I get google to index them all. I am under the assumption that google will usually index an affiliate companies OWN home page but not every affiliate signed up under it. Would GREATLY appreciate if you have any suggestions on one i could sign up with.

When you talk about making a directory and putting all these pages in it... did you mean on my main site? or a directory in a new affiliate program site?

thanks
jeoffory

Let me clear up some confusion.

I mentioned a couple of sites that will provide static Html links to your site. They are crawlable and will provide you with numerous backlinks over time. Do to the nature of these sites, I will PM you with those links.

Those links however will point to your site, specifically to a directory you have set up to contain the material. On those pages you will have a link back to your Home Page. The material you will have to come up with on your own, but you will be able to ascertain that by viewing the other sites that use this method who have links on the sites I am going to PM you with.

I think once you start tracking back from those sites and see how they manage to structure things, and who they are using ... you will get the picture real quick.