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GreyWing
26-02-12, 05:19 PM
I have given up trying to figure out what is going on at Google. Just had another site banned / punished by them (EasyLoans.co.uk) so that now joins "QuickLoans.co.uk" in the sin bin. Both totally natural sites, little inbound links if any and content written by degree educated content writers. Compare that to xquickloans.co.uk who were second for over a month, now 5th, with little content and 250 inbound links from Russian porn sites.

Speaking with another member here today who has also had their sites banned, it appears Google are on some kind of power mission to piss off legitimate sites.

Fish
26-02-12, 07:08 PM
I used to build aff sites like anything, set em up & forget them. Some were OK in goog, some took a hit. Overall however it was worth the quantity over quality approach.

This year so far I have spent more on article content for 3 new sites than I did for any of the old one's and guess what? they each are dropping from goog serps like there's no tomorrow... go figure.

Feed driven sites I think are a primary target and it would appear it is only a matter time (unless well established, good visitor numbers, backlinks etc) before your site bends over and takes a good shafting from ggle

boxfish
27-02-12, 10:16 AM
I just had a scan at the quickloans site and I think it's fairly easy to see why it's not ranking.

Obviously paid links, nearly identical anchor text, every link is to the homepage, no external links to internal pages, no internal linking between pages, target term at start of majority of page titles.

Although you have decent links and decent content you've not constructed them into a legit looking site. I'm not saying paid links are bad, but such blatant paid links, on their own, all with the same anchor text, all pointing to the homepage is a big red flag to me.

GreyWing
28-02-12, 01:13 AM
Cheers Ian, as per the reply via pm.

Just had a quick email with Google and they say there is no punishment currently hanging over Quickloans.co.uk, so I guess it has just dropped 100 places over night for no reason. I guess they do have a very tough job trying to fend off everyone trying to bypass their system. Very fustrating though......

atlas
28-02-12, 01:24 AM
it appears Google are on some kind of power mission to piss off legitimate sites.

Nah, they just hate small webmasters and affiliate websites.

In the last year I think I've seen more websites get penalised in Google than I saw in the previous 10 years.

GreyWing
28-02-12, 04:07 AM
Just reading the complaints thread on the Google forum, people laying off staff left right and centre because of Google changes. One guy has laid off 4 members of staff from his Press Release firm whilst the 8 sites above him are scraping his content and have adsense plastered all over them.

People also mentioning what you said about small sites having no chance in Google these days, just getting swamped by bug guys and those that have budgets with adwords and accounts with adsense.

What ever Google have done over the last year seem to be peeing legit sites off

Chippy
28-02-12, 11:11 AM
Cheers Ian, as per the reply via pm.

Just had a quick email with Google and they say there is no punishment currently hanging over Quickloans.co.uk, so I guess it has just dropped 100 places over night for no reason. I guess they do have a very tough job trying to fend off everyone trying to bypass their system. Very fustrating though......

The same thing happened to me, lost all rankings, asked google and they said there was nothing worng, but could be to do with one of there thousands of updates, check your sites, another panda update has been released.
http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-panda-update-link-evaluation-local-search-rankings-113078?utm_campaign=tweet&utm_source=socialflow&utm_medium=twitter

aZooZa
28-02-12, 11:29 AM
The same thing happened to me, lost all rankings, asked google and they said there was nothing worng, but could be to do with one of there thousands of updates, check your sites, another panda update has been released.
http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-panda-update-link-evaluation-local-search-rankings-113078?utm_campaign=tweet&utm_source=socialflow&utm_medium=twitter
Many thanks for that link. I follow that site when I have time - I've just seen that they have an RSS feed which I think might be useful here, so will test that out.

Chippy
28-02-12, 11:54 AM
Not a problem, there are on twitter is your use it, the post alot of stuff on there.

aZooZa
28-02-12, 12:04 PM
Not a problem, there are on twitter is your use it, the post alot of stuff on there.
Cheers! I have added their RSS feed.

GreyWing
28-02-12, 02:51 PM
Holy jesus, my site is generating https for all url's....... and my site is not security enabled.....

Apologies to Google, hahaha, it was me this time....

Chippy
28-02-12, 03:06 PM
What has happened? I doubt I have the same problem tho

aZooZa
28-02-12, 03:08 PM
Holy jesus, my site is generating https for all url's....... and my site is not security enabled.....

Apologies to Google, hahaha, it was me this time....
That'll do it! Glad you sussed it.

GreyWing
28-02-12, 03:31 PM
What has happened? I doubt I have the same problem tho

Still not massively got it sorted yet but was going through what I got listed in Google and clicked one and the page showed a no certificate sign, then looked at the rest and I had a few of them, more than a few actually. Trying to get fixed now but the plugin I had for seo on Joomla was throwing up https and not http for some reason.


That'll do it! Glad you sussed it.

Cheers bud, nearly there.

M@tt
29-02-12, 09:26 AM
We just had www.webhostingbuzz.co.uk swallow a huge Google penalty for no apparent reason. Our own site, careful SEO/link building strategies and ranking page 1 for the likes of 'cheap hosting', 'reseller hosting'. And zap, Google obliterated it yesterday and the .com outranks the .co.uk in Google uk :(

Chippy
29-02-12, 10:07 AM
Well well well, after a ever long month my site has decided to come back to one of its rankings!! at last now to get the others back

M@tt
29-02-12, 10:11 AM
Chippy, did you change much? Or just leave things?

I decided just to ride this one through and see if it comes back. Meanwhile, our AdWords budget will triple just to keep traffic/sales up.

Chippy
29-02-12, 11:15 AM
I did quite alot in the end, tried to ride it out for a couple of weeks, but it was getting annyoing so I started making little changes everywhere to improve the site, so I have no idea what would of made the differents really but the only real thing i did in the last 2 days was add another 2000 words of content, so it could of been that, or it could of been everything and i was lucky the site got crawled last night?
Who knows with google?

GreyWing
29-02-12, 05:06 PM
I think the main issue with what is going on at the minute is that they drop you down to 80th place or so, where as before they may drop you to 10th or so and give you chance to fix things without going out of business.

At the moment dropping someone down to 80th place for a substantial period of time is not good practice.

rob
01-03-12, 09:57 AM
Possibly for another thread, but the new privacy things come in today so would expect bad PR to start - perhaps opening up the wider public to disbelieving the 'dont be evil' stuff?