Lost Rankings for ALL of my websites...

[-Kammy-]

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I have no idea what is going on here - I have spent a lot of time reading up on SEO and just when I though I knew it all....this happens.

I had a few websites on page 1 on Google (some number 1, a few moving up) and a few days ago, they all happened to drop ranking and end up on page 6 or so.

This happened to them all (at least four sites) in the space of 24 hours.

My immediate thoughts were that this could involve my webhost (Eukhost) - I do remember that they were all down on the 20th of september, as I received no traffic and had to contact them about the websites not working. This really peed me off, but I have no idea whether Google is reflecting this in the search engines now.

Does anyone have any idea what this could mean?

Could it be my host?

Has anyone experienced anything similiar?

The search terms are NOT competitive - I do not target competitive terms, and to be honest I had more or less got page 1 rankings straight away and had no problems.

^^^ That is the main point. It seems unlikely/impossible that my websites are suffering from intense competition.

Obviously more traffic means more revenue.

So please advise all you knowledgeable folks.

I will REALLY appreciate your exepertise

Thanks

[smingle]

Hi Kammy

A few obvious questions first

1. How old are the sites ?
2. When your hosting was down, google may have recached your site during this time, have you check your logs ?
3. Have you linked any/all of the sites from any "dodgy" links farms etc ?

It is hard to know what to say without knowing the sites in question

[ep90]

Have you looked on Google's webmaster tools? This often highlights problems https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard

[-Kammy-]

Thanks for the replies...

smingle:

1. Sites are very new - ranging from 2-3 months old.
2. I do not use logs, and to be honest have no idea how to use them. I just checked my host, and currently no raw logs are being recorded (I am guessing you have to request this).
3. I have made a conscious effort to avoid dodgy links at ALL costs - I would not even consider link farms.

ep90:

Webmaster Tools is reporting no faults at all.


Had this ranking decrease ocurred with just one site, I would not be so worried. 4 sites and possibly 5 were affected, and as it seems, in the space of one day. I have a reseller account, which they are all hosted on.

I am really considering a reinclusion request. At the same time, I might just see what happens and wait for a week or two.

[fizzbird]

Sites are very new - ranging from 2-3 months old.
.

In my experience, what you have described is not uncommon for newish sites.
After the sites are 6 months old you will see things begin to stabilise and as long as you have been updating the content and gaining incoming links then you should rise back up the results - not necessarily as high as you were though, it depends on the competition.

[pinman]

2. I do not use logs, and to be honest have no idea how to use them. I just checked my host, and currently no raw logs are being recorded (I am guessing you have to request this).

Kammy - couple of things.... depending on what hosting account you have with eUKHost you *should* be able to see the logs (through various tools such as Webalizer, Analog) in your cPanel. :tup

If it's any consolation, I also suffered a major blip during late September - it took about 10 days or so for things to come back to what I'd call normal levels. I also took the liberty of a Google re-submission - the first one since March.

Hope it all works out

[tbp]

If all the sites were launched around the same time, then I wouldn't worry too much about this as it often happens (although a bit late with yours). Frequently, the smaller sites that go in at the top will drop down after a period and will plummet in the rankings. After a couple of weeks, then then rise back to new positions which is most likely where they will stay.

This seems to be part of googles indexing procedure, and although it doesn't happen for all sites, its pretty unavoidable for most.

The important thing is not to panic, and make rash changes to the sites. If you leave them they will rise again without intervention, and then you can start SEO to move them higher. If you change things now, you won't be able to see the results and it could actually damage their rankings.

Although its frustrating, I would just leave them be, check them every so often, and in the mean time go off and built some more sites.

One consolation is that for my own sites when this happens, the sites usually return to their original ranking, but often higher.

Google seems to be on a go slow at the moment, which I expect is down to all the changes being made, and things are taking longer to happen than normal.

[Brendon]

1) Do your sites all have the same Whois details?
2) Do you cross-link your sites?

If both answers are "yes", you may have tripped an auto penalty, and aquired a network penalty. It may be no more than normal "new domain bedding in" pains too, as others have suggested.

A reinclusion request might be premature at this point, unless you can determine it is definitely being caused by a specific penalty, which you have found the cause of, and rectified

The odds of it being related to host downtime are slim to none, although it *could* be related to dodgy practices by your host (I'm not suggesting it is, but it has been known)

[fizzbird]

1) Do your sites all have the same Whois details?
2) Do you cross-link your sites?
If both answers are "yes", you may have tripped an auto penalty, and aquired a network penalty.

Why would this incur a penalty?
I could imagine the links being devalued but a penalty seems a bit severe?

[EmmaFlower]

Hi Kammy,

my site is about 4 months old, it was on first page for my keywords at first and I was overjoyed, then one day google un idexed all my pages and it's taken me about a month to get re indexed and start to see results again on my key words.

I think that google ranks you highly to begin with to test the water and see how popular your site is etc so wouldn't worry about it too much just keep at it

Emma

[Brendon]

>> Why would this incur a penalty?

Are you kidding? Seriously? It's one of the oldest spam tricks in the book, and very poorly regarded by Google

[fizzbird]

>> Why would this incur a penalty?

Are you kidding?

No, I'm not kidding.

Are you saying that linking from one of your own sites to another incurs a penalty?

I'm not talking about spammy linking, just normal, relevant linking.
Will the BBC incur this penalty because they link between their own sites?

[Brendon]

>> Are you saying that linking from one of your own sites to another incurs a penalty?

Um, yeah, potentially a big-time one. Typically, there would have to be some other signs of "manipulative behaviour", or "low quality", but you'd be amazed what fits into those categories.

Commonality of Whois details and link data is most definitely a signal of quality, and if you are in the habit of cross-linking non-related sites, you're a spammer. And if you cross link related sites, you're a spammer, but for different reasons

>> I'm not talking about spammy linking, just normal, relevant linking.

I'm sorry to tell you that Google doesn't really recognise the difference, whatever they say in public.

These filters have been in place for years, to combat the old skool PPC spammers using a domain churn strategy. You have to work fairly hard to trip them accidentally, but it's certainly possible. From the details Kammy provided, his sites are definitely candidates for this kind of treatment.

That said, I've no idea if he *has* cross linked them, or what other link data exists for this group of sites or any one of a thousand other bits of information, so it may simply be fairly normal new domain fluctuations that happened to strike in quick succession.

It could even be that his hosting company have contributed, by using dodgy practices themselves - that isn't unknown either

[wistop]

No, I'm not kidding.

Are you saying that linking from one of your own sites to another incurs a penalty?

I'm not talking about spammy linking, just normal, relevant linking.
Will the BBC incur this penalty because they link between their own sites?

This comes from the idea that you cant just buy 10,000 domains and link them altogether to get a good page rank. No one knows for sure and actually the published Google pagerank algorithm suggests this is not a problem. It would actually be of no use though interlinking all your sites because the algorithm recursively examines all the interlinking. And the net effect would be nothing!

Pagerank is a function of all sites and you can think of it as one big network, not just one site or a group of sites. Remember no one know for sure outside of Google so don't believe anything that people can't back up with an official source!

On that note, the original paper that the founders published is available to read so we do actually know a fair amount about the underlying principle (read more here: Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it.). Once you can understand that then it is clear that interlinking all your sites on an even basis is of no benefit! However if you directed all your sites to link to the site you want to push then you should see some improvement.

I use eukhost and all my sites use their company registration details. So if Google really did see all eukhost sites as "the same" then this is potentially a flaw - remember they are in the business of making accurate results so treating all sites from big hosting companies as one owner would be stupid. I dont know if they do or not, but it would clearly be a mistake because I dont run all sites hosted by eukhost!

Try it and see! Document it and report back!

[Brendon]

Wistop, you have fundamentally failed to understand how PR works (or worked, more accurately). Buying 10,000 domains and linking them together was a HUGELY successful way of gamimg Google, which is precisely why countermeasures were introduced

>> Remember no one know for sure outside of Google so don't believe anything that people can't back up with an official source!

Oh, I'm sorry, did I not spoon feed you enough there?

Reference : Matt Cutts Does Domain Roundtable | SEO.com

Quote : "Regarding interlinking between sites, he said it’s fine to interlink if the sites are related, but he said not to overdo it. When pressed, he said over 10 sites interlinking might be asking for trouble. He said it would also be ok to break out your network of sites and interlink sites within a certain category. The specific example was a network of local sites, and Matt said you could either have a single portal with links to all the geo-portals, or maybe interlink between all the various plumbing sites."

"he" in this case is Matt Cutts, who runs Googles' anti spam team

Reference : Tips For Link Buying Part 3: Matt Cutts From Google - WebProWorld

Quote : "Another area that should be avoided is interlinking of sites within your own domain. Google can perceive interlinking between domains, because they are on the same IP, as link spam, and this is an action that they can and will penalize."

Again, this is a quote from Matt. It took me like 2 minutes to find fairly good, "official" evidence for my assertions