Google Reconsideration Request – Panda Penalty
I resubmitted my site for reconsideration by Google. Same response: “no manual spam actions found”. Grrrrrr………
This Google Penalty is driving me insane.
Traffic has stopped. Nobody will ever get to read this……………..
I have tweaked a few more things and gotten rid of a few more links that may have been pointing at things Google doesn’t like.
The only real thing to do now is sit and wait and see if it improves. Things are drastic!
So, in the meantime, I have started a new site, based on the concept of trying to leverage the massive “power” of Twitter.
It is an open blog concept, so anyone can submit content. The idea being to randomly pick a “Twitterer” and invite them to post anything they want onto the blog.
They then inform their followers about the post and we see what this does for traffic.
So go and have a look at Tweets, Twitter and the Twitterverse. If anyone wants to post there is a contact page on the site.
Google reconsideration request my ass!
Duplicate Content and Google Panda
My previous post was on
Duplicate Content.
I mentioned that there were a couple of ways that, specifically WordPress, opens you up to the risk of duplicate content. Google, and the new Panda update, penalise websites and blogs for this. Google does not like duplicate content.
In my last post, we addressed the whole “Canonical” risks of duplicate content. For this post we will look at how posting your entire blog to your “home/blog” page puts you at risk, from a duplicate content point of view.
So, you write a post and publish… With WordPress, your new post “lives” on it’s own page, however, it also lives a “parallel life “on your “home/blog” page.
It actually also lives on a “tag” and “catergory” page (but this is for another post). So one post is essentially living on, up to four separate pages! Duplicate Content!… Read Google penalty!
One way to get around this, is to only post an excerpt of your posts to the “home/blog” page. This is not ideal, because you still have some duplication, however, it is minimized to a certain extent.
Ideally you want to be posting a unique excerpt, that you create seperateley, that links to your posts (in this way avoiding duplicate content altogether). However, most WordPress themes do not have this functionality.
So, the way to minimise this is to post just an excerpt onto your “home/blog” page.
This is how you do it:
After a few sentences or the first/second paragraph in your post, click the “more” button (as in the graphic). This will automatically create a “break” in your post when it is published to your “home/blog” page.
A link, normally, entitled “more” or “continue reading” will appear on this exceprt of the post that, when clicked will take you to the full post. This’ll minimise the Duplicate Content.
There are other ways to post only excerpts, but this is the simplest, in my opinion.
More on Duplicate Content to follow.
Duplicate Content
Just sharing something I have learnt lateley about Canonical Issues and Duplicate Content.
As mentioned in my two previous posts: Google Penalty and Google Penalty Update my site has been penalized by Google.
So I have been doing research on why this has happened. One of the possible reasons is what Google calls Duplicate Content.
Duplicate Content takes many forms, I will discuss one of them here for the moment. Have you ever come across the term “Canonical Issue”?
Basically what this means is that it is sometimes possible to reach a website with the address www.example.com (note the “www” at the beggining) and to reach the same address without the “www” at the beginning (ie. example.com).
We may see this as the same web page with the same content, however, Google sees it a two separate web pages with the same content. That is, Google will see this as “duplicate content”.
Now one of the big issues that Google Panda (the latest search algorithm update) has, or will penalize you for is “duplicate content”.
I never knew this before, but it is apparently critical and should be one of the first things every Worpress Blog Owner, should fix immediately!
Here is one of the ways to fix it:
1. You need to get into the “file directory” of your website, through for example Cpanel.
2. Make sure your Cpanel allows you to see hidden files.
3. Find your .htaccess file. You will now need to edit this. Cpanel has an edit funtion.
4. Insert this code into your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
5. Replace the address above “example” with the name of your site.
6. Save the .htaccess file
Done!
What this piece of code does, is tell the “search engine robot”, that all versions of you “non-www” website have now been permanently redirected to you “www” version of the website. Basically that the “non-www” version does not exist anymore. So, Google will not index the “non-www” version anymore. Duplicate Content, or this version of Duplicate Content gone.
There are other Duplicate Content issues apart from this, but these will be dealt with in another post.
Google Penalty Update
As you can see from the graphic above, things have gone from bad to worse. Since my last post, my blog has suffered more penalization from Google. The big G!
I tried to tidy some things up that were suggested to me. Resubmitted my blog for reconsideration. Google replied that they found “no manual spam actions” and suggested that there were a whole host of other possible reasons that may be responsible for the dip in my rankings.
By the way my PR ranking has dropped from PR4 to 3 too. Aaaaaaarrrggghhh!
I asked a friend of mine, Internet Guru, Luke the “Puke” Hardiman, to have a look and give me some advice. You can check Luke out at New Release. He said the obvious, and something that I should of picked up on; that I was linking out to my affiliate “s*x toy shop”. I had done this unwittingly and out of excitement.
Anyhow, stupid mistake. Or, at least I think that this was the mistake. Went through old posts and tried to clean up as much as possible. Nothing to do now but wait and see.
Very frustrating, because Google won’t actually tell you what they don’t like about your site.
This is dire, dire, dire.
Learning, learning.
:-)
My Site has been heavily penalized by Google
google filter
Another update….
It seems that my blog has been penalized by Google. As you can see from the graphic above, my search queries and “clicks” have dropped dramatically.
There are a number of reasons that this may have occurred.
1. Linking to bad sites (ie. my sex toy site),
2. Linking to a lot of affiliate sites.
3. Cross linking between sites.
4. The list is endless….
Go and have a look at:
Google Webmaster Guidelines for a list of possible, or impossible infringements.
I read through the list and have tried to fix things I thought might be penalizing my site.
I have to say it is a very frustrating situation to be in. Honestly, even though I do not get a lot of traffic full stop; I stopped getting organic Google traffic completely and felt it almost from day one. Frustrating because you have no power over any of it. At all.
You suddenly come face to face with how influential Google actually is!
Anyhow, after reading the guidelines and making the changes I though would help; I have resubmitted my site for reconsideration. Google allows you to do this through it’s Web Master Tools. Here is the link for Google Site Reconsideration.
So, I am writing this with the knowledge that almost certainly nobody will ever get to read it! Frustrating!
