Problems with Google ranking

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swordfish1

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Hi all,

I am having a huge problem with the google ranking of my web site.

We just launched the site, and google has been indexing it only for little over than a week. The problem is, this week Tuesday and Wednesday, just after google had couple of hundred pages from our site in its index (when you type site:www.xyz.co.za), we were ranking very well, and we had like 30-50 clicks per day from google searches. As of yesterday, situation changed drastically for the worse, even though more pages were added by google and now there are 1200 pages in the index. Now we are at the very very bottom of the search, even when searching for the most relevant stuff that we can offer.

I've been told by few people that I can't expect my site NOT to be on the last page when it is brand new, but I do not quite agree with this theory. First of all it was all good for two days, before dropping dead, second our content is highly relevant to many searches, especially when searching SA only.

My site uses Ajax extensively, and my theory is that google has considered it a spam or something, as there are minor differences between what is rendered when the site is requested by googlebot compared to what is rendered when requested normally (had to do this hacks because of the ajax, as it couldn't index it at all originally).

Basically I am looking for somebody who can help!

Yes, I know, I haven't posted a link to the site :) but that is because I am afraid that the mods might consider it as advertising ... and I don't want to make bad impression :)

If you believe you can help, or yo have any suggestions or comments, PLEASE let me know, and will take it from there.

thank you very much!!!
 
Google ranking is a business, there are lots of factors that may influence ranking. I've been researching SEO for 3 month now. PM your site link to me. Also google changes it's algorithm once a month or so.
 
XCalibre said:
Google ranking is a business, there are lots of factors that may influence ranking. I've been researching SEO for 3 month now. PM your site link to me. Also google changes it's algorithm once a month or so.
Click to expand...

Please share with us if you pick something up, i would also like to know why that happened.
 
Well it sounds like quite a large website and he mentioned sometimes about it ranking lower after more pages have been indexed. It might have something to do with the linking structure then, if there's several pages linking to another page inside the site it affect the ranking quite a bit. The site structure must from from one page to another like a pyramid, if there's lots of cross linking your site will not be ranked that well
 
You have been moved to the supplemental / secondary google index. You are going to have a tough time getting it back up the rankings. Basically Google has determined that your site is either trying to boost it's rankings or is something like a spam type of site. This can happen if a lot of the pages on your site are the same etc.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell.html
 
Abe said:
You have been moved to the supplemental / secondary google index. You are going to have a tough time getting it back up the rankings. Basically Google has determined that your site is either trying to boost it's rankings or is something like a spam type of site. This can happen if a lot of the pages on your site are the same etc.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell.html
Click to expand...

Ok, I am sad to say, but this seems to me like the most making sense explanation considering what I have observed! :mad:

so basically 1 year of 16 hours work per day and lots of money thrown into this project, and google just killed it overnight, and on top of it, I can't even find the reason, as it is apparently secret!

"The criteria for which pages are targeted for the supplemental index remains a subject of guesswork. But Web designers have found that pages with duplicate content, few words or pictures, and a lack of links to other quality sites are the most likely to be pulled in. Most agree that newly created sites are especially vulnerable."


Ok, I certainly don't have significant amount of duplicate content, although I am not sure what they considered duplicate. I have lots of words and fair amount of pictures, and I have tons of links to very reputable sites. Well, my site is certainly new! It appeared only 2 weeks ago, and hasn't been advertised yet. So this doesn't tell me what I did wrong ...

Well, reading in the link Abe posted, I am sad to come to the realization that google is actually far worst than microsoft or any other company that I considered evil thus far. Google can kill your business even before you start it! Great!

:mad:

Abe, thanks for the post!
 
You could always buy Adwords on Google, not ideal but better than nothing. What's the site anyway?
 
Syndyre said:
You could always buy Adwords on Google, not ideal but better than nothing. What's the site anyway?
Click to expand...

hi, yes I was thinking about this, but I was wondering how will this work? I mean my site is clearly "blacklisted". What will happen if I buy adwords? Will appear at the first pages only for a while depending on how much I pay and then fall back in the hole? or what? any idea?

I will PM you the site

thanks
 
swordfish1 said:
hi, yes I was thinking about this, but I was wondering how will this work? I mean my site is clearly "blacklisted". What will happen if I buy adwords? Will appear at the first pages only for a while depending on how much I pay and then fall back in the hole? or what? any idea?

I will PM you the site

thanks
Click to expand...

You pay per click so it's worth the risk to give it a try and see I suppose. ;) Depends what the costs are for the keywords you're looking for though I suppose, I know relevance also comes into whether an ad is displayed so I'm not sure how you being on the secondary index will impact that.
 
by the way, does anyone have any stats form a reasonable sized web site as to what is the percentage distribution of clicks by referral, e.g 50% come from google, 20% from yahoo, 10% from MSN ... or something like that

I just want to see if I am totally doomed or I can somehow survive in this highly competitve market without even being listed on google.
 
Syndyre said:
You pay per click so it's worth the risk to give it a try and see I suppose. ;) Depends what the costs are for the keywords you're looking for though I suppose, I know relevance also comes into whether an ad is displayed so I'm not sure how you being on the secondary index will impact that.
Click to expand...

Thanks Syndyre, I will do that very soon!
 
just tried to phone google on the phone on this page
http://www.google.com/contact/

"google doesn't offer live customer support at this time" the IVR said ... and told me to go to www.google.com/... for help ... how pathetic!

anyone ever managed to speak to anyone at google, live? or via email? or whatever? "at this time" is like they don't work at this time of the day, or is it that they don't have telephonic support at all ever?
 
swordfish1 said:
Thanks Syndyre, I will do that very soon!
Click to expand...
Their Adwords program may just pull you off the secondary index. I don't know. They will place the ads at the top of the page in the highlighted section. You can also indicate which market (SA, USA, etc), and there are different costs per click depending on the market, the time and the value of the words. Any new web site that has lots of links, referals, etc has a fair chance of being "black-listed" by Google. It's not about Google being nasty, its because of the idiots out there who try and trick the page rankings. Does anyone else have your site in their page? Maybe they have been blacklisted and by virtue of this, you are being blacklisted.
 
Nope....ur site is probably in the sandbox - especially like if you say the site is new.

I've been in SEO for years now. Google spidered your pages, and yes - you would rank for a short time while google asertains where you site should be ranking. Whats happening now is supplemental, you need quality relevent non-spam links to your deeper internal pages, this over time will pull you out of the sandbox and supplemental. The content also needs to be UNIQUE - if you copy from supplier pages etc you generally will be thrown back into supplemental.

The sandbox can last up to a year - but patience and constant quality link building could make this shorter. Once again patience is the key!
 
thanks Abe, I will try the adwords, I am working on the meta tags, links etc right now, want to make everything to the best of my ability beofre doing anything.

then the plan is to get it listed on ananzi and similar sites and getting some adwords. My site is not listed anywhere yet, at least not hat I know of. Actually there might be 1-2 links on some of our providers sites, but they are all relatively big companies so shouldn't be a problem I believe.

it is petty that google cannot afford to get few people to manually intervene in such situations. Obviously due to the implementaiton of my site, google wasn't happy about something, but on other hand due to the interactive nature of my site certain things are not possible with conventional methods.

For example, when you load a page, you have lots of information on the page, which is organised as "tabs". In other words, you see one at a time, until you click on the link to view another tab. Google might consider this as spam, as there is hidden text on the page. But is it really hidden? It will appear when a visitors click on the clearly visible link? Well, it is debatable. I thought of not loading this text, until the visitor click, but what about indexing? This text should be indexed as it is highly relevant to what the page is about. Then if I have different rendering of the pages for googlebot than what I return to normal browsers, this is also considered as spam.

So how do you implement a technically superor web site which is far more efficent (fast and uses less bandwidth), while dealing with pathetic constraints like this? It is hand break on progress to me! Google needs manual intervention in such cases, as clearly technology alone is not enough!
 
hey MrWireless, thanks for the reply!

well, here is my big problem, everybody is saying "it is this, no it is that" .. how do I find our for sure? So I can work on solving the problem, e.g. if it is blacklisted, figure out why, change the way it works etc, or if it is sandboxed, work on the links etc? How do I know what to do? Is there a place (web page) where I can go and see what is the status of my site? There is nothing apparent in the google's webmaster tools.

the other thing that bothers me, in this sandbox theory is, if there is such process, does this means that highly relevant content will not be shown just because it is new? It sounds really not like what a good search engine would do ... just my opinion

by the way, in the two days of "glory", when I got 30-50 clicks from google searches, I noticed that most searches were relatively specific, therefore yielded less results (in SA), wich made my site appear on say the first page. Obviously if you search for something broad, then there are many sites before mine, and mine will show like on page 5-10 or whatever ... this to me made perfect sense, exactly what a good search engine would do.
 
The problem is I think one would be talking about well over a 1000 staff members for the sorts of intervention you are talking about. Better to fix the algorithms. The key is to have lots of original content.
 
swordfish1 - Google doesn't pay much attention to metatags. Other search engines might, so it is still worth putting them in but don't expect it to help your Google rankings. I wouldn't panic just yet. Give time for Google to update it's numerous data centres around the world. Also, you could have a high PageRank and still be in Google's supplemental index at the same time. A friend of mine's site used to get the majority of it's traffic from Google until it almost dropped to nothing. His PageRank is still intact though.

The little I know about SEO is that titles of your web pages are given a lot of weight by Google. Each web page should have a unique title with keywords that are relevant to that page or to your site in general. Also, the positioning of keywords in the title is important. Placing the keyword at the beginning of the title will get you a better place in search results than placing them at the end. The same goes for the urls. Place relevant keywords in the urls of your links because Google gives weight to those as well.

You say that your site is quite heavy on Ajax. Ajax is primarily Javascript and any content that you pull onto a web page via this means cannot be read by search engines. Same goes for Javascript menu links. Search engines cannot read those links and cannot spider the pages these point to. Search engines are getting better with dynamic links but sometimes they will only index the link itself and not the content. You say that you have 1200 pages in the index but is there any text below the title link in Google's search results? If the results only show the link and not the text then it is because Google has only indexed the link itself and not the content of the page.

The Google sandbox period, as I understand it, is to allow Google time to establish if your site is genuine and not a fly-by-night. Don't know if it is the same as the purgatory suplemental index. Anyway, give it some more time and hopefully you will find that you are not in this secondary index after all.
 
Abe said:
The problem is I think one would be talking about well over a 1000 staff members for the sorts of intervention you are talking about. Better to fix the algorithms. The key is to have lots of original content.
Click to expand...

I am sure this type of issues has left more than a 1000 people jobless anyway ...

but obviously yes, fixing the algorithm is much better, if possible :)
 
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