Google wiped me out

Hubuk · 23-05-2005, 08:41 AM

I have now spent five years building www.hub-uk.com as an online food and recipe resource. The time has come where I need to spend more time working on the site in order to develop and expand it further. To this end I now need to see it start to generate an income (especially as I seem to be regarded as been too old for regular employment in the UK). I have several projects in the pipeline with a view to achieving this but to do so I need to maintain the popularity and visitor numbers to www.hub-uk.com

Last week www.hub-uk.com was returning some high placings for various search terms to do with food and cooking. On Friday night I was checking these until very late at night and was very pleased with what I had achieved. I got up on Saturday and had cause to check a search result from the previous night only to find it had disappeared completely. On starting to check other search results I was horrified to find my site no longer seemed to exist for any search term on Google. I appreciate that there is movement up and down with search results but if you are in the top 10 results worldwide one day you might slip a few places the next day but not disappear altogether.

This completely destroys my credibility with people I am negotiating with to do business. I need to be able to understand what has gone wrong. Have I been seen to do something wrong by Google or has something technical happened which has affected my rankings? Whatever the cause I need to sort the matter out as a matter of urgency which is why I need assistance.

I have detailed below some of the sercah terms I have been tracking. These are new search terms but for other terms I have been in the top 10 results worlwide for several years.

For instance my web site name, Hub-UK, is faitly unusual and has always come up number 1. It now appears at 15 - I am sure on Sturday morning it wasn't even there.

As one of the minnows on the internet it is a bit daunting for this to happen. I simply don't have the technical or financial resources to sort something like this out. Does anyone know how to contact Google?

The "Cooking Holidays" section of www.hub-uk.com only went live on Friday 6th May 2005. In a very short time (12th May) the following search terms produced these results (second lot of figures are for 16th May):

The "Cooking Holidays" section of www.hub-uk.com only went on Friday 6th May 2005. In a very short time (12th May) the following search terms produced these results (figures in red are for 16th May):

Google worldwide (www.google.com)
"cooking holidays United Kingdom" 4th and 5th listed - remained in same position
"cooking holidays UK" 5th and 6th listed - moved to 4th
"cooking holidays France" 4th listed - remained in same position
"cooking holidays Italy" 13th listed - moved to 10th
"cooking holidays Thailand" 1st listed - now 1st and 2nd

Google UK (www.google.co.uk)
"cooking holidays United Kingdom" 3rd and 4th listed - moved to 4th and 5th
"cooking holidays UK" 4th and 5th - moved to 3rd
"cooking holidays France" 3rd listed - now 3rd and 4th
"cooking holidays Italy" 8th listed - moved to 5th
"cooking holidays Thailand" 1st listed - now 1st and 2nd

**D-A-L** · 23-05-2005, 09:06 AM

Hi David,

Firstly I really don't think you have any reason to fear anything at the moment. Your site is still listed in Google and you have some real good coverage - http://www.google.com/search?num=100...e%3Ahub-uk.com

I did notice though that you do have quite a lot of pages with no Title Tag - e.g. http://www.hub-uk.com/foodpages26/recip1272.htm You really need to make sure all these pages have title tags to help them get better rankings in the serps.

As for ranking for certain searches again I wouldn't worry too much. We have all been there and it could be you have been sandboxed by Google. This is very common with new websites and basically means your site may not rank well for your desired keywords for some months but is by no means permanent. You need to continue promoting your site and building quality content and as long as you obey the google rules those rankings will come in time. Spend your time getting some quality inbound links from other sites with a similar topic to your own and vary the anchor text in those links to target your key phrases - Use a tool like http://ww.wordtracker.com (Free trial) to identify high traffic keywords for your topics.

If you need more help just shout or if you don't understand anything. Also bare in mind their have been some changes going on in Google over the past 24 hours so this may have had a slight effect on some of your rankings.

Hubuk · 23-05-2005, 09:22 AM

Quote:

I did notice though that you do have quite a lot of pages with no Title Tag - e.g. http://www.hub-uk.com/foodpages26/recip1272.htm You really need to make sure all these pages have title tags to help them get better rankings in the serps.

This is a problem created by updating the site in Dreamweaver. I am slowly sorting it out but with over 3,000 pages it is taking time. This problem has existed since january but the one relief was that it did not affect placings on Google. The pages were still found for what the title was because the title is also in the page.

Quote:

We have all been there and it could be you have been sandboxed by Google.

I am not sure what you mean by this nor do I think it applies to a site as old as mine.

Quote:

This is very common with new websites and basically means your site may not rank well for your desired keywords for some months but is by no means permanent. You need to continue promoting your site and building quality content and as long as you obey the google rules those rankings will come in time.

Hub-UK is five years old and has over 3,200 pages. It normally takes 5-7 days for a page title to appear in the top 10 search results on Google. As for quality content the site is nothing but quality content as long as you like food and cooking. What I am saying is that I was the star in Google rankings when it comes to UK recipe and cooking web sites and even when competing worldwide - suddenly nothing.

Quote:

Spend your time getting some quality inbound links from other sites with a similar topic to your own and vary the anchor text in those links to target your key phrases

Links are actually not that important for getting ranked by Google - content is God. Remember my site has been top of the search terms I mentioned for years, not weeks or days, and nor are the search terms obscure.

**D-A-L** · 23-05-2005, 09:35 AM

Quote:

We have all been there and it could be you have been sandboxed by Google.

My mistake, sorry I thought the site was very new - I reread and saw it is actually very established. Is the new content quite new? if it is, then it could still be the case (sandboxed) but if all this content which has dopped in the serps is quite old then please ignore those comments.

Without spending more time analysing your key search terms your targeting it is difficult to say but your in the same boat as everyone else, your site needs to evolve with Googles ever changing algorithm so as you say - now's the time to start putting more work into the site.

Quote:

Hub-UK is five years old and has over 3,200 pages. It normally takes 5-7 days for a page title to appear in the top 10 search results on Google. As for qulaity content the site is nothing but if you like food and cooking. What I am saying is that I was the star in Google rankings when it comes to UK recipe and cooking web sites and even when competing worldwide - suddenly nothing.

Yep as I said my mistake I was thinking this was all new content which it obviously is not. I will have a look for you at your rankings and see if there is anything else obiovus as to why you may have slipped.

Quote:

Links are actually not tha important for getting ranked by Google - content is God. Remember my site has been top of the search terms I mentioned for years, not weeks or days, and nor are the search terms obscure.

Actually that is not entirely true. Building quality content is indeed a massive step in getting good quality rankings but quality content alone is not going to bring in the masses. An example for you would be the search phrases you mentioned above - "cooking holidays United Kingdom" You may well feature high for this phrase as it is very uncompetitive i.e. noboday else is targeting this particular phrase...But try writing some quality content on say "Car Insurance" - you will not feature anywhere without some quality links from authority/on topic sites. D-A-L gets thousands of visitors from terms purely because of content - searches like "my pc keeps rebooting" ....Now I wouldnt target that phrase but it brings in hundreds of visitors a month purely because of good content. "Free PC Help" on the other hand is more competitive (not a lot) but it is competitive - and we feature well because a lot of good resources link to us for that exact reason.

On a side note how much traffic do you get a day? Unique visitors I mean?

Hubuk · 23-05-2005, 09:51 AM

My stats for last week show me being down by 2,500 page views per day but these are the top results with the number of page views for the week:

13426: http://www.hub-uk.com/cooking/tipssushi.htm
11003: http://www.hub-uk.com/
9674: http://www.hub-uk.com/cooking/tipsfruitjuices.htm
7716: http://www.hub-uk.com/cooking/tipsteriyaki.htm
7242: http://www.hub-uk.com/pages/food01.htm
5560: http://www.hub-uk.com/pages/recipes.htm
5187: http://www.google.com/search
4765: http://www.hub-uk.com/chefsbios/rickstein.htm
4618: http://www.google.co.uk/search

I continually add content to the site which is why the site has done so well over the years.

On checking with the company that hosts my web site I found this announcement posted on 15th May (my problems did not crop up until 21st May but then it would take time to feed through):

Shared servers: proton,cation,muon,boson,truth
We have introduced an additional URI inspection security layer on the above shared servers. This has been done with short notice in order to respond to an increased general threat to all shared hosting environments and providers.

The majority of our customers should not notice any difference, however, it is possible that there may be an occasional \"false positive\" in the intial stages of this implementation. We are examining the audit logs to try to determine any occasional false positive if it occurs and will restructure our rules to accomodate where possible.

If you find that your dynamic elements (forms, bulletin boards, mailforms etc.) are exhibiting a 403 Forbidden error this may be the cause. Please e-mail support@positive-internet.com with the details and we will immediately investigate. Please note 403 Forbidden errors can also occur for unrelated reasons (file permission problems etc.)

We hope that these security improvements will allow for greater stability and peace of mind in general on the shared platforms, however we must stress that for maximum security purposes we always recommend a dedicated / managed server for your web site. This also of course brings in a large number of other benefits and if you would like to discuss the options with us please don\'t hesitate to phone during office hours or e-mail good@positive-internet.com at any time.

My web site is on the Muon server. I have emailed them to ask have they done anything to affect the google spiders / crawlers being able to see my site but a I don't understand what they have done it makes it difficult. If I now it is them then I can perhaps do something about it.

If the latter is the problem, then if I can get it rectified I should bounce back on Google as soon as they spider again.

I have emailed Google support but all I got was an automated response. Unless I have to wait for people to start work in the states.

**D-A-L** · 23-05-2005, 10:01 AM

David,

Thanks for the above, can you tell me roughly then how many page views you get for the entire site per day? I was just going to give you an idea of what you could earn from using a partner such as Adsense.

You have quite a few outgoing affiliate links on each page (diluting PR to other pages on your site) ...does this pull any significant revenue for you? If not I would ditch it and go with Adsense.

I wouldn't worry at all about the possible downtime on your site. Google is very forgiving and will revisit your site a number of times before it would start dropping pages. Trust me your site is still well indexed. As for emailing them there is no need, they will not be able to tell you anything you do not already know.

On further investigation it looks like you are by no means the only person being affected. Our sites have not been affected as yet but I am seeing many people complaining of similar problems such as yours - keywords completely dropping out over the last day or two. It looks like Google is goring through a fairly major update right now - I know it's hard but I would sit tight for a week or so and you may well see all those rankings come back just fine.

I checked out your inbound links too and you actually have some really good inbound links to your site. Bottom line is I think you have a great site with some fantastic content. I see no reason for Google to peanolize you and I certainly would not do ANYTHING drastic just yet. As I said if it were me I would sit tight and see what happens.

Let me know on the traffic and revenue (if any) form those affiliates though I think you could make some decent money there from the right advertising network.

Hubuk · 23-05-2005, 10:20 AM

Thanks for that reply. It feels more reassuiring to hear an independent voice giving that advice.

Funny you should mention AdSense. I actually have a salesperson in New York who has been trying to convince me to put AdSense on the site.

The existing banners (down the left of the page) are a waste of time. The two main banner adverts have ceratinly earned their keep - or at least will do.

Whether to do AdSense is something I have thought of but I am not sure it is worthwhile. This was what I replied to Google in New York last week:

My stats for last Monday showed just over 8,000 page views for the week. If we work this to a monthly figure that is only 240,000 page views per month. I would have thought 1% would be good click through rate which would mean I could get 2,400 click throughs a month. If you paid these in Sterling at 1p per click through (which is high compared to what some of the companies over here are offering) that would mean a monthly income of £24. That isn't enough for me to want to have to add code to my whole site and have to upload 3,200 pages again.

I said a lot nore as well but my argument is, if people are making good money why will no-one give me a financial example.

That figure above (8,000) is about the average number of page views per day the site gets. It was up over 11,000 around Christmas and in quieter months it may drop to 6,000 for two or three weeks.

**D-A-L** · 23-05-2005, 10:33 AM

Hi David,

Although your traffic is not that high Adsense is not all about high traffic. As you are probably aware advertisers on the Adwords network will pay more for certain keywords. For example a site about gardening with 10,000 page views a day may pull say 100 clicks but because it's about gardening they only be worth a very small amount per click. On the other hand a site about where to find a lawyer, with 1,000 page views a day pulling just 10 clicks may earn far more due to the significantly higher cost per click to the advertiser - again it's down to competitiveness on the ads.

If it were my site I would strip the affiliate stuff immediately, at the moment its not pulling any extra cash for you, looks ugly and probably leaking PR to other pages.

I have a fair bit of experience with Adsense so if you want some help just PM me and I'll help you intergrate it on some high traffic pages on the site so you can see what you could earn - then if it works you can start rolling it out over the entire site - if it doesn't you haven't lost anything (except those ugly aff. ads).

Hubuk · 23-05-2005, 09:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by D-A-L

On further investigation it looks like you are by no means the only person being affected. Our sites have not been affected as yet but I am seeing many people complaining of similar problems such as yours - keywords completely dropping out over the last day or two. It looks like Google is goring through a fairly major update right now - I know it's hard but I would sit tight for a week or so and you may well see all those rankings come back just fine.

I checked out your inbound links too and you actually have some really good inbound links to your site. Bottom line is I think you have a great site with some fantastic content. I see no reason for Google to peanolize you and I certainly would not do ANYTHING drastic just yet. As I said if it were me I would sit tight and see what happens.

One thing that does seem strange to me is that it should happen on a Friday night / Saturday morning which being the end of the working week is nnot a time I would have thought anyone including Google would choose to chnage the way things work.

I have looked at some of the sites that rank high for search terms where I was high up and I cannot see what they have that has enabled them to stay inposition when I have dropped. If things have changed you would have thought it would have lowered some of my results but to virtuallu wipe them out seems extraordinary.

If you take the search term "Hub-UK" (which is very specific to my site and not something many people would search for anyway) and serch on www.google.co.uk for UK only the result brings me up half way down the second page. I was top worldwide until the weekend. Looking at the cahed pages of myself and the top ranked site I just don't see why they are there and I am so low down. Doesn't make sense unless Google have klnocked back my site for some supposes infringement - having not tried to do anything other than create more web pages I can't think what this could be.

I am still twitching because this is now costing me money as I am having to ignore enquiries from people wishing to pay me to use my positioning to find their sites.

**D-A-L** · 23-05-2005, 10:20 PM

Hi David,

Specific times are irrelevant, Google could make some changes this evening and it wouldn't filter through to some sites for a week or so. Remember they have an index of billions of pages on over 10,000 linux servers!! that takes time to update.

What you are seeing with searching hub-uk I have seen before and it's hard to tell if you have been peanalised for some reason but like I said you really need to sit back and see what happens. Even if you act now and try and change something it wouldn't take effect for weeks - One things is for sure with Google, any progress takes months these days.

I know its easy to panic, I've been there myself and you just want answers but unfortunately it's not always that easy. The only thing I can think of which may not be obvious to you is that someone has perhaps stolen your content and you are being flagged under Google's duplicate content filter. This is pretty unlikely but possible I guess.

Other than that I can't see what you've done wrong.