Hi,
Has anyone experienced a nice jump in search engine results and have it disappear the next day? I check every so often to see where I come out in search results and for one particular phrase I jumped 8 pages in a Google search. I’ve been following the advice and instructions in this terrific forum and was pleasantly surprised to see the new position for that phrase. I thought the work was starting to pay off.
Not really believing the improvement I saw, I decided to check again the next day and my listing disappeared completely. It’s not even where it was hovering before. The site is not banned or anything like that. My hosting company thinks I removed a meta tag or something. I only recently removed the pagerank tag, which I will add back, but that wouldn’t affect this would it?
Any ideas?
Having a tough go at this stuff…
Thanks,
Z4K
I was working on justfundraising.com last weeks. First, we were ranking 95th on a keyword "fundraising". After a couple of weeks, we were ranking 17th. So I decide to work on a second keyword: fundraiser. We jump from "not in the first 100" to rank 15.
Then something happen. It was like if Google decided to shuffle results. Bunch of sites that aren’t in the first 100 instantly pop up everywhere. Sites that have been first for years fall down… Meanwhile, justfundraising.com wasn’t doing better. Each time I was looking for it on fundraising or fundraiser, the site was ranking 20 positions farter. I dont tell you the Nightmare it was.
I finally understood that my IP was tracked by the search engine so I came here and learn just enough about anonymous IP to find out my rank.
Thanks to Jim for that
Orrouk
French SEO from Montreal
Once upon a time, a cat saw a small kitten running around, trying to catch his tail.
-What are you doing there my friend, says the cat?
-My tail gives me the most powerful and intense pleasure I ever feel, says the kitten. Now I need to go for a walk but I can
I had a site that has ranked number one for years and it just dropped down to the 900th position. Then shortly after, back to normal, then out of site again.
Eventually, things change and you can not worry about making changes or you won’t learn. Mistakes are key to getting on top, without them, it’s just called luck.
The pagerank won’t do a thing for you in term of ranking, and depending on what it does behind the scenes, it may even hurt you.
I know it has been some time since you posted Z4K, but how are things now?
Orrouk, I too am seeing strange results! I know for a fact that some sites, two or three pages in size, are blowing away seasoned sites with tons of great content. I think it is a glitch and the next shuffle we’ll see our once great sites jump back up.
Fundrasing is a very competitive term, but one term that you could capitalize on would be:
Fund Rasing Ideas and Fundraiser Ideas
Both those terms have little competition and could yield some excellent results.
Just my two cents
Best regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to make improvements and I feel like that cat chasing my tail.
Here’s my tail of woe: After reading your suggestions to the person creating a site for log homes some of the stuff was starting to click in my thick head and I realized that my pages and links had non-descriptive default names such as "content ###" from the wizard I was using.
I was starting to feel brave enough to use my hosting companies template and put in my content and give it an html name without using the wizard. I uploaded them to the server and everything seemed to work fine. I didn’t screw up the template and I could reach my products and shopping cart without trouble, my links worked etc. I thought my names were more descriptive such as flowergirldresses.html, girlsdresses.html, etc. I created eight new main pages and made sure the titles were all different, etc. I added new "quick" links on the pages too. The quick links are just a table with a color background for the cell and white hyperlink text to those newer more descriptive titled pages.
I’ve disappeared from a google search on the keywords I was tracking and my home page disappeared too. Even if I specifically search for my site name zone4kids. Going as far as 100 pages I can’t find any of my new pages come up nor my home page. I see tons of my product pages, but not my homepage or flower girl dress page or any of the other new ones. I also see lots of remnants of my hosting company pushing out my site under their title to give us a boost with their rank. Even though their site is first in the address it links to my site.
I created a new sitemap with your tool and up loaded it to both Google and Yahoo. I’ve never found a way to submit anything to MSN, but that’s another discussion. I know that the googlebot visited my site yesterday and a few other times previously since I added some of the new pages. I do see in my Google WebMaster tools that the last time Googlebot successfully crawled my home page was Aug 14th. That’s a long time ago.
Can you see anything stupid that I did? I’m wondering if using the white text on a color background for a link is being misinterpreted as hidden text.
ht tp: ///www.zone4kids.com/
My partner keeps telling me "ask Jim"
….I really wanted to come back and give you good news for a change. One of these days I hope to send you lots of Chai.
Thanks for listening,
Z4K
I’ll take a look and see if I can spot anything once I get a bit of time. Don’t dispair, this is the life of a webmaster
Best regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
The more I think about this I’m wondering if I messed up by not redirecting via 301 redirects, my old "content XXX" pages to the newer pages. I thought removing the old pages, adding the new pages and submitting a new sitemap would redirect the robots. I have no clue how to create or add the redirects. What do you think?
Thanks for taking time to check it out.
Loretta
Yes, you want those redirects. It’s not too late, but you’ll want to do it fast.
Give me an example of a page that existed and the page that took it’s place and I’ll walk you through the redirecting the website pages. Also, how many pages are we talking about?
Regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
Here’s an example of a page that I changed:
Before
zone4kids.com/content-1-8.html
After
zone4kids.com/girlsclothing.html
I was also told by my hosting company that I could have been using the name of the file I created inside the wizard. However when the page was uploaded I never saw this name and always used the generic "content" names for my linking.
Here’s the same page with my file name that I never used, but must be on the hosts server if supposedly I could have been linking to it.
zone4kids.com/girls.html
Again not a very descriptive name as I’m restricted by how many characters I can use for file names when I use the wizard.
In all I have 13 "content" pages that I need to redirect and I’m not sure if I need to redirect those other files names I never used. If I do need to redirect those then I have 26 pages to redirect. UGH!!
Can’t thank you enough for the help!
Loretta
Try this,
Make a copy of your .htaccess file, then edit it and look for ‘rewriteEngine on’
Under that line, add this:
rewriteRule ^content-1-8.html$ zone4kids.com/girlsclothing.html [R=permanent,L]
This is a permanent redirect which tells mod_rewrite to match requests where the URI is exactly content-1-8.html. The ^ and $ match the beginning and end of the expression, respectively, and the is used to escape the period, which otherwise would match any character. After the match pattern is a space, and then the substitution. In this case, you want your server to substitute
zone4kids.com/content-1-8.html
with
zone4kids.com/girlsclothing.html
Right now, your website is generating friendly url’s for some pages, but the old ones are still valid (type in an old url and see what happens). If the Googlebot follows a link to one of your old urls, such as:
zone4kids.com/content-1-8.html
It could be considered duplicate content of the new one and you may end up being penalized. So, you want to make sure that if someone visits an older page they are redirected to the new page.
Permanent redirect (301 redirect) is what you want here, and that is what this example uses. It will Google to make note that the old page is no longer used and from now on, use the new one.
Let me know how this works for you.
By the way – I suggest the .htaccess file because you are generating pages on the fly, otherwise I would suggest a different method.
Regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
I checked with my hosting company and an htaccess file is fine. I don’t already have one setup in my root directory so no worries about overwriting anything. Since I don’t already have a file there is no ‘rewriteEngine on’ line to look for. Do I need any kind of special header for the file?
I think I should just put in the file:
rewriteEngine on
rewriteRule ^content-1-8.html$ zonekids.com/girlsclothing.html [R=permanent,L]
etc
etc
Thank you,
Loretta
Exactly Loretta, just try the first permanent redirect and see if this works for you, then add the rest under the last statement.
Let me know,
Regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
I created the file and my hosting company uploaded it. The redirects now take people to the new pages.
The .htaccess for me is perfect since I am creating new files with better names as I get time to replace them.
Now I hope to climb my way back into the search pages and hopefully in a better position.
As always, thank you for the care and advice. You make the lessons learned easy and fun!
Best Regards,
Loretta
Hi Jim,
The redirects are in place and I clawed my way back into the search results. I was really happy that I was able to see my home page again in search results when I googled my company name. I thought all was well but I decided to wait before making anymore changes to see that things were stable. Checking again on a few keyword searches as I do most everyday I noticed we disappeared completely again.
I checked Google and I don’t have any alerts or messages. My sitemap (done with your tool :-) is OK and was last downloaded Oct 1st. My site is indexed with thousands of pages. I even found some of my new pages indexed.
However, when I check Google Cache I have this message:
cache:www.zone4kids.com – did not match any documents
When I check info:www.zone4kids.com it says no info is available for that url.
What could possibly be going on? I haven’t changed any page information since implementing the redirects. The return to keyword search results were better than previous rankings and was pleased to see the progress. I waited just to see some stability before continuing to plug away at some more optimization stuff.
I know this is the life of a webmaster… it sure is exhausting when things like this keep happening. Any hints on what to do next?
Thank you,
Loretta
Not to worry
Try info: www.zone4kids.com
I get a number of pages, you just needed the space
I did notice that
fortune3.com/Zone4Kids/
is the same as
zone4kids.com/
and that is duplicate content (on your main page).
I’d stick in a redirect (htaccess) that looks for the first and redirects to the second and make it a permanent 301 redirect, not temporary!
You are lucky, right now, Google has the fortune3 address as a supplemental result, so Google sees your site (zone4kids) as the main site.
do site: www.zone4kids.com and you’ll notice a supplemental result. Click on that result and you can see what I’m referring to.
"exhausting" – tell me about it
Hope that picks up your day Loretta!
Best regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
I’m having a tough time understanding supplementals. I don’t see anywhere the word "supplemental" when viewing search results. How can you tell if your in supplemental? What should it look like?
I think syntax is really important as I get different results with:
site:www.zone4kids.com versus site: www.zone4kids.com
I took your advice and checked with my hosting company about duplicate content and they said it is not duplicate content that both addresses point to the same directory structure on their server. They do this for all the companies that they host and a 301 redirect is not necessary. They said that I probably disappeared because I changed my home page and it will take a bit of time for Google to re-index. I checked several Google forums and they said several months….I’d hate to wait several months and not see any improvement. It would really frost me if in fact Google has pushed my address to supplementals in favor of my hosting company’s address and a 301 redirect would have quickly resolved it.
How long do you think it should take to re-index? Do you think I would benefit from pushing the 301 redirect?
Thanks,
Loretta
Don’t take my word for it, ask the above question on other forums and see what they say.
Question: Can you name a site that is hosted on fortune3 that has high PR (not that it really matters, but does add to the equation) and ranks well in Google’s search results? I only ask so that I may verify they have the same setup as you (two domain names pointing to the same content).
I’m sure they have sites that use their services, rank well and are proud of, but I didn’t see them listed on their site? Can you get the addresses of a few?
Best regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
Here are two sites to check:
jewelryshopping.com
They have a page rank of 4, but I couldn’t find them on the first 5-10 pages of search results for product keyword searching on wedding rings, keepsake jewelry, pendants or childrens jewelry.
soccergearcentral.com
They have a page rank of 3 and I searched soccer uniforms and found them on page 6.
Both sites are setup the same as mine with two domains pointing to the same pages on the server.
When I search using site:www.sitename.com or site: www.sitename.com both of them have their homepage come up in the results.
Must be something I did to my site….
Z4K
I can not believe they put this into writing!
Duplicate content IS the same html file found on another page or another domain! Engines can, and will punish you! The definition of duplicate content from Google is:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
Google explains duplicate content here:
google.com/support/webmas…n&answer=66359
Google
Hi Jim,
Thank you for the info and I certainly don’t intend to get you into the middle of this dilemma. I value your advice and guidance immensely. And BTW all the searching and reading on this in other forums makes me want to run right back here because your organization of this forum is much easier to navigate and find the information you need.
Keep up the good work.
Have a terrific day!
Loretta
No problem Loretta- I’m glad you find it easy to navigate.
Best regards,
Jim.