Have I done the right thing?

wonder_lander · Feb 7, 2013

For the past 5 years I've ran the website the-pier/co/uk which is an information site about the piers around the UK.

Over the past 12 months I've noticed search traffic dropping off and search terms I was previously #1 for are now no longer listed.

I've added each pier that I've got an article on as a KW in advanced web ranking and it shows that on Google my site isn't in the top 100 results.

I ran the articles through copyscape and found that a lot of my content had been duplicated, some by actual pier owners who had now built sites as well as information copied over to wikipedia. I've slowly been going through and serving copyright infringement notices to ensure that any site either re-writes the content or provides a credit link back to our source article.

Now this has almost been complete I've asked Google to do a re-inclusion request and explained the situation to them....will it work?

Looking at GA I can see the only traffic Google sends me relates to Pier furniture which was a high street retailer that went belly up at the end of 2008. I added a couple of bits of info about the company being in administration as we used to get people asking where they could by a lamp or desk!

Anything you can suggest I do to get the search terms back on track? The KW's still perform as expected on Yahoo/Bing.

Murray · Feb 7, 2013

wonder_lander said:
Now this has almost been complete I've asked Google to do a re-inclusion request and explained the situation to them....will it work?

In short, no, not unless you had a manual warning in your webmaster tools?.

If not Google will do nothing for you if it's algorithmic.

Do your traffic stats correlate with a drop off around any panda dates?.

wonder_lander · Feb 7, 2013

Murray said:
In short, no, not unless you had a manual warning in your webmaster tools?.

Nothing at all in webmast tools

Do your traffic stats correlate with a drop off around any panda dates?.

What's the easiest way of finding out? In 2008 we were the authority on a number of piers that didn't even have websites. Since then the results have literally disappeared completely. Not a slide.....a culling!

Murray · Feb 7, 2013

wonder_lander said:
Nothing at all in webmast tools

What's the easiest way of finding out? In 2008 we were the authority on a number of piers that didn't even have websites. Since then the results have literally disappeared completely. Not a slide.....a culling!

Look at your traffic stats for the date visits dropped off

Then look at google updates, you can find them listed here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

And see if any of the updates correspond with the date your traffic dropped.

Aegean · Feb 8, 2013

Personally I would take the URL out of your page titles and make them more frendly. Also take the # symbol out of your titles, such as on the home page.

As far as the content goes, as long as it was on your site first then someone else copying it shouldn't affect your google rankings. After all, anyone can copy anything.

I see you have relevant outbound links from your articles, but do you have relevant inbound links to them?

wonder_lander · Feb 8, 2013

Aegean said:
Personally I would take the URL out of your page titles and make them more frendly. Also take the # symbol out of your titles, such as on the home page.

I've removed the # but what do you mean the URL is appearing in the Page Titles? Is this something that the All in One SEO plugin is doing? How can I see the title to know if I've managed to fix it?

As far as the content goes, as long as it was on your site first then someone else copying it shouldn't affect your google rankings. After all, anyone can copy anything.

That's what I thought but I can't understand why our search terms have dropped out of the Top 100. Sure if the actual pier launches a site I would accept that there is a high chance of it being a better result than mine but why have I been killed off?

I see you have relevant outbound links from your articles, but do you have relevant inbound links to them?

We've got links from various tourist sites, holiday sites, B&B's, flickr photos, wikipedia, forums etc. These are all natural links from people who found our content useful.

boxfish · Feb 8, 2013

run a site:the-pier.co.uk query in Google to see which pages are indexed.

Everything from page 12 to 15 is the forum plugins getting indexed.

You need to deindex all these as they shouldn't be showing as viewable pages as they are garbage/empty - can't be helping.

Once it reindexed without all those you should see a significant improvement.

wonder_lander · Feb 8, 2013

boxfish said:
run a site:the-pier.co.uk query in Google to see which pages are indexed.

Everything from page 12 to 15 is the forum plugins getting indexed.

You need to deindex all these as they shouldn't be showing as viewable pages as they are garbage/empty - can't be helping.

Once it reindexed without all those you should see a significant improvement.

What a very helpful and knowledgeable bunch you lot are! Clues for a clueless person when it comes to these things....how do I de-index them?

boxfish · Feb 8, 2013

Add:

Disallow: /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/

to your robots.txt file

wonder_lander · Feb 8, 2013

boxfish said:
Add:

Disallow: /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/

to your robots.txt file

Thanks again, there wasn't a robots.txt file in the root so I've added one and pasted in the following:

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/

That OK?

boxfish · Feb 8, 2013

wonder_lander said:
Thanks again, there wasn't a robots.txt file in the root so I've added one and pasted in the following:

Code:

User-agent: * Disallow: /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/

That OK?

Looks fine to me although there definitely was one there as I looked at it first to make sure I got the correct syntax, it was just blocking /wp-includes/ and wp-admin/ which you could add or it should be ok without.

I personally wouldn't change anything else and just see how that goes. Those pages account for 33% of indexed pages, a lot of them throwing up syntax errors and suchlike when you click onto them so getting rid should improve the overall site quality immensely.

I've checked backlinks etc to see if anyone's fired a load of crap links at your site and everything looks clean to me so IMO it's a case of wait a few weeks and see what happens.

wonder_lander · Feb 8, 2013

Thanks for all the very useful feedback. Is there a guide I can use to gen up on what to check and what's good and bad practice?

wonder_lander · Feb 18, 2013

Well I got a response back to my re-consideration request:

Dear Site Owner or Webmaster of http://the-pier.co.uk/,

We've received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://the-pier.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We've reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site because any ranking issues that you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the web spam team.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can occur as we make updates to present the best results to our users.

If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things that you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons why your site may not be doing well in search.

If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Yours sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

boxfish · Feb 18, 2013

Good to hear you have no manual penalties.

I saw this article recently and personally I think what's mentioned is the same as what happened with your site.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/six-months-with-panda-story-of-complacency-and-recovery/44774/

I've been keeping an eye on your site and the homepage only started displaying the new title in the SERPs over the weekend, it took a while to reindex, hopefully the pages you have blocked should start dropping out of the index now.

Blossom · Feb 18, 2013

More links and more content will help.

Also, I'd get rid of that email address on the homepage - spam trap.

wonder_lander · Feb 18, 2013

Cheers guys, I've deleted the comment and have a back log of new content to keep adding. I've also got a web designer working on a new theme.

wonder_lander · Feb 18, 2013

Just checked GA and traffic lept up at the weekend and that got me excited! Avg of 30 a day and then 250 yesterday!

Digging into the search terms it looks like there must have been a quiz question somewhere about a pier built in 1896 as I've got about 30 different variations of those search terms just for yesterday! That doesn't help my bounce rate!

Adem · Feb 18, 2013

Just wanted to say thanks for this info as I have a couple of sites that have had a massive drop and upon checking I hads lots of crap pages being indexed, so I've added a Robots file (which was missing) and will see if that helps.

If not, no further harm done.