Anatomy of a Deindexed Website
Many of you have asked me about the Get a Race Car site over the past few months, and wondered if it has even been re-indexed in Google. The short answer… No! However, the true answer is much longer! :-)
From Launch to Index to Deindexed to Today!
September 2007 - Launched
The site was launched back in Sept 07, just over 13 months ago. It was actually an experiment of my own, to see how much I could modify the BANS templates and customize the system to my own needs. To say the least… after applying some standard SEO practices and writing quite a bit of my own content, it was successful and profitable within 30 days!
March 2008 - Traffic Peaked
March of this year, was actually the best month for the site… and it served up more than 65,000 pages of content to more than 10,000 unique visitors, 87% of them from organic search, 64% being from Google, 26% Yahoo, 10% mixed among all others (Including MSN/Live)! In this month alone, this single site earned more than $2700 in commission from the network, under the old CJ program. Then came the swap to ePN and the GoogleSlap…
May 2008 – Deindexed
Well… all good things come to an end right? At the end of May and in early June, I noticed a dip in traffic and found that Google had fully deindexed the site… At first, I thought it may have just been a penalty, but soon found it was completely gone. I exchanged several emails with Google and was told to check the site quality, paying specific attention to thin affiliate sites.
Other factors at the time:
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Site was BANS only
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Switched from CJ to ePN
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Got an email from Google stating I was in violation of Adsense guidelines.
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Adsense was running on the site
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Site was listed in GWT (Along with 5 others that were dropped at the same time)
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Blogged about site
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Used the site to market a new unrelated site, in the sidebar.
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Had a paid directory on the site
June 2008 – Reinclusion Request
In mid June, I requested re-inclusion. At that time, I had already:
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Removed Adsense from site
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Verified in GWT, just to be sure
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Removed sidebar links to ANY other sites
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Removed paid directory from backend
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Also noticed site not available in Yahoo directory
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Asked for help on Google Webmaster Forums
To date…. the site is still not in the directory. I waited 8 weeks and…
August 2008 – Second Reinclusion Request
At some point in August, having never heard anything… I requested a second re-inclusion. At that time, I also:
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Fixed the BANS Soft 404 errors
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Blocked Googlebot from the shop/ directory where BANS was relocated to.
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Re-verified and submitted sitemap.xml
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Added a blog to the front end of the site.
Now… this time, I actually started seeing daily activity in my GWT account on the site, after the re-inclusion request. Google went from 0 pages crawled for the previous 2 months, to 53 pages/day average. I was extremely excited to see GBot coming back and decided to leave it be for awhile and see if magically, it would just reappear in the index. one thing that confused me however, is WHY GBot was indexing the shop/ pages, even after I blocked it! There are very few other pages on this site, so I dont know where the remainder of the 53 came from!
Today… GBot still crawls the site daily, but it does not deliver any traffic and no pages are in the index. I assume, they are buried in the supplemental index somewhere.
September 2008
5 Months after the initial deindexing, the site still sees more than 3500 unique monthly visitors and served up more than 30,000 pages in Sept. I can only imagine how busy it would have been had it not been hit with a slap. Earnings on the site have dropped in line with the traffic drop, but it continues to be a very well earning site. Thus a VERY hard decision I have to make…
October 2008 - I will Rebuild EVERY BANS Page and Resubmit?
Today… I am considering pulling BANS off the site completely, to see if it will help me get the site re-indexed so I can focus on the blogging content and a different strategy. At this point, I have sporadically been adding posts to the site… with only a total of about 10 since August.
Before I do this, I am going to follow my own advice from yesterday… and reconfigure the BANS side of the site. I will:
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Visit EVERY BANS Page and Reduce listings to 8 per page.
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Write at least 200 words of unique content above the listings on EVERY page.
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If I cannot find something to write about, I will delete the page.
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Add a new Blog post on the site about what I am doing that day. (In website news)
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by the end of this week, I will once again request re-inclusion.
I will run with this for another 6 weeks with the current configuration… but if it is not back in the G-index within 6 weeks from now, I will remove BANS, and resubmit to see if it makes a difference.
If you thought you could go from 3500 visitors to 20,000 visitors by removing BANS, would you?
I will continue to update ths post based on my findings….
Last Update: 10/25/2008
Update: 10/14/2008 Today, I did the following:
On the BANS setup page
- Box #2, I removed all sitewide tags and left it blank.
- Removed the checkboxes on the following: bids, times, paypal image.
- Changed the max items per page to 8
Realigned some of the site content and found it is not showing correctly. Escaping this to fix. Edit: Fixed!
Update: 10/16/2008
This morning, I am truly EXCITED to say that I noticed a change in my GWT account, and hope to see the site in the index within a few days! As soon as you login and click on one of your profiles in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you will see the overview page with 2 main boxes: Home Page Crawl and Index Status. Until this morning, the home page crawl section used to say:
Googlebot successfully accessed your homepage on June 4, 2008
June 4th was the date the site was deindexed…. and it has said this exact statement since that time. This morning, it said something a little different:
Seeing this change leaves me hopeful that I will see the site appear in the index again soon!
Update 10/19/2008
Submitted re-inclusion request in Google Webmaster Tools.Explained everything done to the site to date.
Update 10/25/2008
After reading the webmaster Q&A, I discovered from a Matt Cutts comment that reinclusion requests are generally reviewed and acted upon with 24-48 hours. Since I DO see some action in my webmaster tools on this site… I want to be careful at this point not to block too much from Google.
If you recall earlier in this article, I have already asked Googlebot NOT to index any of the BANS content on the site, but it does not seem to be helping get the site back into the index.
Today, I went into my BANS ONLY header file, and completely blocked GBot with a noindex robot exclusion as well. It wont affect the blog, just the BANS pages that Google does not like.
< meta name=” googlebot ” content=” noindex ” >
(Obviously, I added some extra spaces ALL over the place in that tag code to avoid effect on this page.
Mark
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Why Does Google Deindex a BANS Website?
- Day 1 Giveaway – The first Website!
- My Confession – I am going to Build a Website for Visitors!
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
I think there is still something wrong on your site as this url is bringing up some antique clocks…
http://www.getaracecar.com/shop/Race-Cars-For-Sale/seats-accessories
WOW! Google really is the tyrannical king in the web kingdom. YES, I would remove BANS completely, there are other ways to monetize the site even using eBay and Amazon, BANS is just nice since it’s a complete store for anyone looking to do some shopping, makes you wonder?!? PPC traffic?
Good luck Mark!
Mark: one part of your post brings me to a slightly disturbing (if not slightly paranoid) theory…
What if Google is using GWT as a short-cut to deindexing as many “thin sites” as they can.
For example… Your race car site was listed in GWT, what if Google traced the race car site to your GWT account, then manually went through and deindexed all (or most) other sites listed in that GWT account?
Perhaps we should NOT be putting all our BANS sites on one GWT account? This same scenario has hit me as well.
What are your thoughts?
@ Dan –
No doubt…. Google rules the internet! I am going to spend a few hours this week updating every single page of the site and see if it helps. If not… I will cut out BANS and try again.
@ Tyler –
That has been talked about MANY times here. It was truly the one common factor that ALL sites had… along with BANS. I hate to think it works like that… but during a manual review, it is only a quick keystroke from reviewer, to see all of your sites on that GWT account.
Mark
Hey Mark,
This happened to me, and here’s what i did to get my site going again:
1. Bought a new domain name.
2. Moved site over to new domain name
3. Redirected old domain name
Thats it in a nutshell. It was quite technical but wasn’t overly difficult.
Site has been going fine for 3 weeks, lets see what happens in the future..
Good luck with your site.
A.
I’m curious, how did you find out the site had been de-indexed? I have a site I believe this has happened to.
@Anthony
I tried this some time ago and it works for a while. Then Google deindexes again. The only strategy I know of that works (currently) is too put wordpress on the root and bans in a sub-folder.
@ Chris
use the command site:yourdomain.com at google.com. If nothing shows up you’re not in the index.
Mark,
Could you speak a little more about reducing the listing numbers per page and the checkboxes you unchecked and why?
Jeff
@ Jeff Jones –
Essentially… I want to find a way to balance my duplicated content (Listings) with my unique content (text above/below posts) The ONLY control I have over what eBay feeds the site is in the number of listing being shown. By reducing that number… the overall weight of my own content increases.
Additionally, the reason I chose to remove everything else was to clean up the display and get rid of the onpage duplication. There is no reason to repeat the word bids, or the paypal image over and over again.
@ All – I have also updated the status of the site and in a few short days, things are looking up! Scroll to the bottom of the post and it looks like G has once again indexed the homepage. Nothing in the google cache yet, but I hope to see it in a few short days.
Mark,
I am assuming that we should only leave the Site Wide Meta Tags box empty IF we have opened EVERY page up and changed the default titles,keywords and descriptions as well as adding unique content above the category listing?
Jeff
@ Jeff –
I killed them completely, regardless of the individual page status. I DID go back through my main categories already and create a custom page title for every page as well as completed about half of the content above listings on many of the pages.
The sidewide meta has never been good as it comes from BANS anyhow and you should have changed it from the default setting in the beginning. Its OK to use… as long as it is not the BANS default setting. My choice to completely eliminate it is more for my own goals and testing.
Mark,
Let’s see if we’re on the same page here.
As I have been finding searches in my stats I have gone to my BANS and changed the default page titles,keywords and descriptions for the search terms found. I also added a page title to the top of the listings page.
If the page did not exist, I created one following the same formula.
Ditto for my main categories.
I’ve never removed the site wide meta stuff because one of your 12 week BANS stores videos said not to touch that. Did you say you were using this for testing purposes?
Finally, I understand the concern to help the duplicate to unique ratio. However, won’t 200 words in the category title move the bulk of your listings below the fold and don’t bids and times create more a sense of urgency?
Jeff
@ Jeff -
In regard to the default sitewide tags… you are correct. I did say there was no need to touch them, but followed it with the statement that once you add your page title and save the page, you need to edit every one of them at the page level, to eliminate the default setting from ever existing.
The testing purposes statement was in reference to what I am doing right now on the site. Meta-Title is truly the most important tag in the mix… description and keywords have litle to no effect any longer, however some engines do still use them.
Your content can be above or below your listings… either works as far as the saturation issue. What you want to do however is write your page for the visitor. Putting the content above the listings is where most would expect to see it and on a monitor running 1024×768, which is most common, the listings stay right at the fold on my screen.
Mark,
I think we’re talking apples and apples here-LOL
If we’ve edited each page on our site we want to get rid of the site wide tags so they can’t creep into any category page-got ya!
While the search engines don’t much care about meta keywords and descriptions it is good to point out like you have in the past that the humans who are searching WILL care about your descriptions. We want the search result to give them as much reason to click as we can.
The content you’re putting above your listings helps the human visitors AND the duplicate/orginal content ratio? Correct?
Jeff
@ Jeff -
Correct!
:-)
Mark
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