[Admin]

Originally Posted by JohnS0N

This is getting interesting by the minute.

Yes indeed, i'm going to do a bit more digging around on this niche because i don't know a real lot about it.

You want to place a noindex in the robots.txt? I was thinking, is the period when this website receives full traffic (no filters) coming anytime soon? Because it would be good to check out this exact page with your google query in this time period.

Could be important to note that most of the time my website was getting the -30 too. In some occasions there were all sorts of other filters, but the -30 was most common.

I done a conditional code for his template to add "noindex, nofollow" just to that specific category, removed the link from the global navigation and done a find/replace on his MySql DB to remove any links pointing to pages in that category from elsewhere in the site.

So the site is now devoid of any content/links on that topic.

The period when the site receives full traffic should of been a few days ago based on the patterns, but so far no spike so it seems the filter is firmly set.

I've knocked together something that will keep track of the ranking trends for several long-tails. It runs midday every day on a cron and uses Google's http://74.125.45.100 IP instead of Google.com to help avoid Google's load balancer pushing the query to different DC's.

Interesting, let's see what happens.

[JohnS0N]

Fast forward two weeks... what are your results?

I'm still getting punched.

[SEO ibiza]

hey sorry I got involved here then vanished, very slack, and it went and turned into a good thread while I was away.

Originally Posted by JohnS0N

At the time of first time "filter" occurrence, I didn't actually do anything. About a month back (from when this first happened), I bought around 15 pr5 links and around 4 months back (from when this first happened), there was an xrumer blast promoting the website. In the beginning of 2009 I also shoot a thousand or two links with autopligg.

So, the linking profile isn't as clean as it should be as I did quite some testing with it as you see, but it's nothing really extraordinary and all happened months before the filter was applied..

did you see initial gains from this "testing" ? it's not just that they've devalued these links and hence their rankings?

it would be good if we could get away with that kind of stuff under the banner of "testing" but i dont think G would see it like that.

wrt to the "PR sculpted" in the light of the latest information it might be an idea to re-think that anyway?

[Admin]

I vanished also and i live here.

The past 2 weeks for me have been a nightmare in more ways than one, so i've hardly been online.

But same story here, the site is still kicked to the curb. It almost seems like it's personal, and being knocked on the head has nothing to do with the site doing anything wrong, breaching the webmaster guidelines or any such thing.

The site currently ranks #37 for it's own name, which is quite unique and only has 11,000 other results. Nearly all the pages ranking higher mention and/or link to the effected domain so it's not some term common with anything else.

Talk about delivering the most relevant results for searchers huh? Someone "wants" to find it but Google deliver a whole bunch of noise and nonsense. Some of the sites ranking above it don't have the word in the Title or URL and mention it one buried in the page somewhere like "I seen on sitename he posted about whatever" and that's it.. Ranking above the exact match .com with the word in the Title.

So.. Not real sure what Google is smoking, but it's pretty strong.

Both Bing and Yahoo rank it firmly in #1 where any regular searcher would expect to find it.

[JohnS0N]

Originally Posted by SEO ibiza

hey sorry I got involved here then vanished, very slack, and it went and turned into a good thread while I was away.



did you see initial gains from this "testing" ? it's not just that they've devalued these links and hence their rankings?

it would be good if we could get away with that kind of stuff under the banner of "testing" but i dont think G would see it like that.

wrt to the "PR sculpted" in the light of the latest information it might be an idea to re-think that anyway?

No, there was no improved ranking or traffic in this test period, thus devaluation is not possible. The traffic remained the same for some months, then dropped when the first filter occurred.

An interesting trail began to emerge though. In the last two weeks I haven't been "penalized". The traffic still is not normal, but it never dropped as before.

What I did was I had a link bait written and added around 150 links from the angela's backlinks, more than 60% of them went to inner pages. I made sure that all those new links were indexed.

Did this linking help? I have no definite proof, but things are looking brighter.

[SEO ibiza]

in the last 3 weeks a friend's site has started this wierdness too.

it's only a small niche site, but is a genuine bricks and mortar business and used to rank for all her inner page titles pretty much because of lowish competition, plus a few of her more generic phrases until 3 weeks ago.



they havent been doing anything at all whatsoever less than white hat, just adding in content and the odd link here and there.

I suspected a hack first, but it seems clean.

the site shows up for domain.co.uk but not domain uk, it was on the first page for just domain (fairly unusual name) now its not in the top 500.

virtually all the longtail has also stopped. very random behaviour.

I think they've been devaluing links on a more individual basis.

[JohnS0N]

I tell you one thing. Boy am I glad I don't depend on one website!

This picture looks horrible man.