Imagine if you will, a 70′s style gameshow complete with host in spangly Gold Lame jacket, permatan, and gleaming white teeth….
“Hello ladies and gents, boys and girls and welcome to another fascinating episode of… “What’s my Google Penalty!!”
“This week’s contestant is a familiar face here on What’s My Penalty and she’s really wondering how the hell she got here again. Please welcome… KIRSTY MCCUBBIN!!”
*Crowd goes wild, insert Hammond organ medly, Cue Google Robot Dancing Girls…*
Yep, It’s Happened Again!
Over the past few days my brand new site Blokes Undies has been on a bit of a downward spiral in the organic traffic stakes. Over the weekend it stopped ranking for its own name, which is usually a strong penalty indicator.
So What Is It THIS Time Kirsty?
Well, at first I found THIS when I searched for D&G Maxi Logo Boxer Shorts (opens in new window) and was fairly convinced that these nasty scrapers had gotten me a Duplicate Content Penalty with their scurrilous spamming activity.
After a quick consult with the kind people over at the A4UForums I filed various Spam reports, shortened my feed content to stop people nicking content that could knock me from the SERPS, and generally stewed in my own juice.
But Was it That?
See, one thing you have to remember about trying to work out a Google penalty is that the first thing you find, compelling as it may be…. isn’t necessarily your issue!
I had also found another funny little issue with my indexing, where content on the site seemed to be attributed to lots of different pages by Google, despite only appearing on one. Example Here (opens in new window) but as it had been present for a while I’d put it down to “a bit of a Google glitch” and a couple of people said they’d had similar in the past.
“Can’t be that then.” I thought.
And I Reckon That’s The Nasty Little Game Show Type Trap These Situations Can Pull on You!
I’ve seen lots of “Google Penalty Checklist” type posts, and in not one of them does it say “NEVER rule out anything.”
Fortunately, the indexing situation was nagging away at the back of my head. I don’t like leaving issues and expecting them to fix themselves. Earlier, I finally thought to view the source of one of my pages… just in case there was an outside chance there might be some odd thing on there.
And What Do I Find?
Arrghhh!! The featured content gallery plugin I posted about previously doesn’t only post nice pictures and titles… it features content excerpts from each post as well. On my site, they were within the source code of each page, not visible to users, and indexable by Google. Not good.
Having checked out some other sites using the plugin I think I must have gotten something wrong with the install as I’m not seeing the same issue on any of them!
Ho Hum…
Well, all I can do is wait and see how it all pans out now. Honestly, how many penalties can one girl just trying to “get it right” actually create! I think WordPress is great, but the amount of issues that can happen without you knowing about it because of how automated and brill it all is are many and varied.
It’s never dull is it?!
March 30th, 2009 at 11:38 am
You’re a great sleuth! Thanks for this post. It’s given me a few ideas about why my site has recently plummeted.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Hi Kirsty,
I recommend you ditch the reciprocal links page, google don’t like them. http://www.blokesundies.co.uk/useful-resources/
You even use terms like – Reciprocal link URL – tut tut.
Also it is a new site so strange things can happen with dup content, becuase your site has little trust at the moment, in google’s eyes. If you build some good links, the duplicate content will not be a problem becuase you site will be much stronger than the weak scraper sites.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Has your site picked back up again, it can be hard to work out why you have been penalised, I know google likes wordpress so sometimes when wordpress has issues it does strike you as weird. You have to tread carefully with new sites but I am sure you are aware of that. Good luck.
March 30th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
I’m not too worried about the reciprocal links page to be honest Sean, i’ve got them on all my sites and there’s been no problems with them. My link activity / presence of a links is categorically not the issue here. If it’d have been 5,000 and they’d all turned up in a single week. I’d certainly have something to be worried about!
March 30th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
As much as I love WordPress, this is what I really fear when using it. There are soooo many routes to posts and pages that the first thing I do is to completely lock it down, get rid of all the widget stuff and try and use it just as a CMS. It means a little more work, but I can always re-enable it later when I’m a bit more confident!
March 30th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
You should seriously think about removing the links page, just becuase it is on your other sites doesn’t make it right – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
March 30th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Thanks for pointing that out Sean, I have read all of Google’s various treatises on these matters. I won’t be removing the links page in relation to this issue. I’ve spent many hundreds of hours researching how Google treats these pages both on my own sites and those belonging to others.
I will be removing all of my links pages at some future point and replacing them with multiple pages of content rich articles aligned with various topics of relevance to my link partners. However what I won’t do is engage in knee jerk reactions and pull the pages completely when I’ve already assured myself that the worst Google will do is ignore pages like that.
March 31st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Don’t know if it makes any difference but your sitemap gives 4 identical pages of links.
Thanks for putting your hassles up, it certainly helps others try to get things right.
April 1st, 2009 at 9:20 am
Do you have a particular wordpress theme you use for your sites or vary as you go?
April 1st, 2009 at 11:46 am
I do understand you point of view.
The best thing you can do in the short term is to build some links into your site, you will then eaily out rank the people who have copied your content.
This will help give you some ideas for building links – http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 am
Hey Kirsty,
Looking at your site, there is one major issue that 2 seconds of snooping at your code reveals, and that is missing description header tags on all your pages. This is why in google it appears like you have the same content on all pages and is likely to be causing some issues.
The site also needs to use nofollow and noindex correctly – for instance only allowing google to reach your posts via the cateogry, so not allowing the indexing of tags / date / archives this can be achieved.
You will also see issues on pages like http://www.blokesundies.co.uk/shop/boxers.php where only the title is entered and no description / unique content.
April 2nd, 2009 at 11:38 am
I think its just a google thing with new sites you cant avoid. One of my sites has over 10 000 inlinks from some really good quality related sites and doesnt appear in serps.
I am in the fashion niche too so lots of other blogs link naturally to my site and since the 3rd of Dec I have been in the sandbox. Its come back out for a few days and goes back in again. Domain was new registered end of oct
I checked on google webmaster forums and they doesnt seem to be any problem with my site and I also did most of the things you have done. I had over 3000 indexed pages but it included plugins and all, and I removed those more than a month and now 300 post show BUT still no joy
I have resubmitted site in webmaster but still no lucky, so i understand how it feels but sometimes you just need to sit tights
During my quest I stumbled on this post http://econsultancy.com/blog/3244-econsultancy-site-migration-and-seo-impact-the-story-so-far thats a fairly big site and they redirected to a new domain but you will see the problems they had…worthy a read
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:53 am
@ Edward… Ummm… no. Not having meta tags will have no effect on whether or not Google thinks you have all the same content on your pages and would certainly never trigger a penalty. OK not having a description tag is not idea, but if you look at my sites in the SERPS you’ll see I’ve managed to get all pages to have very interesting, unique descriptions without use of the meta tag.
Also the other page you identified is the shop section and just isn’t meant to attract traffic of its own. The site is also using nofollow and noindex in the manner you’ve suggested via a meta robots plugin.
@Sherry – it’s very confusing, isn’t it? If you’d like me to take a bit of a look at it for you do drop me a line. Sometimes a second pair of eyes can be very useful!
April 4th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
hi kirsty, long time listener, first time caller, as they say.
a bit off topic, but the penalty thing made me think – with that and the market beacoming more crowded each day, can you still get decent click ( let’s say under a dollar) for decent products?
this is also a question for anybody else, but i am wondering how are people doing and are they still getting 0.5 to 1$ clicks on anything, as nitch as it would be.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I’ve used the feature article plugin before. You can set the preview length iirc in the admin page. I set it to allow 2 lines of text and then I always make sure those opening lines are attention grabbing!
Matt “Google spam king” Cutts once blogged on duplicate content, he stated that you won’t be penalised as such, rather that the posted copy won’t rank and Google is very good at spotting which one came first. Google will always rank one of the pages, it just doesn’t want to bother with both.
The problem with duplicate pages is that often your links get split between them so neither builds up enough page rank between them.
This seems to be an often misunderstood topic but Google have shared lots of info on this. Could it be that other sites are just better optimised and better linked than yours? It’s competitive out there!
Good luck with getting back in the rankings!
April 15th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Yes you are right that Google does tend to “select” content where duplication exists, but there is a limit to the G-meister’s toleration of it on a site. If content is repeated multiple times on multiple pages it will tend to trip some kind of filter. Also, I think that if your site has over a certain percentage of duplicate content you’ll find yourself up poop creek with the SERPS. I’ve seen this on 3 separate sites now, 2 of my own and one owned by a friend.
Incidentally, the site is now recovering after I removed the plugin. Phew!!!!!!
May 14th, 2009 at 10:24 am
[...] So on March 30th I wrote a post complaining that once again I’d fallen victim to the whims of dear old Google and had been handed a right old royal slapping on my new mens undies site. Refresh your memory here if you need to. [...]