Slapped by Google for no Good Reason

January 24th, 2008 | 41 comments

Google Slapped OK, I’m sure there’s a good reason, but so far I haven’t found it. The penalty isn’t on this blog, it’s on the “Article Marketing Domination” sales page.

What’s odd is that it’s still indexed and ranking for several keywords, but it’s completely dropped out of the SERPS for it’s two main keywords.

I had the #1 spot for “article marketing ebook” and the #2 spot for “article marketing,” which combined were bringing in a few sales a day (at full price usually without an affiliate) so I’ve been enjoying those ClickBank checks for sitting on my butt.

My first thought was that the consistency of the keywords was too great ie. too may instances of the exact same anchor text, but after looking into it I realized that there is actually a good deal of variation – article marketing, article marketing ebook, article marketing domination, article marketing guide, etc. etc. The phrase “article marketing” is consistent in just about all of them, but there are various other words attached making it natural.

It couldn’t have been “sand-boxed” because the links increased slowly over time and I’ve held those positions for several months now.

I would say that there was just an algo change and they just couldn’t hold their weight anymore, but from #1 and #2 to NOTHING? No, that can’t be the case!

Although it’s a sales page it’s not a “dangling page” at least not from what I think I know of “dangling pages” because although it only has one internal page linked to it, it has several external links. In other words, the spiders have several ways out; it’s not a trap.

I did change the sales page a few days back, but nothing too drastic and definitely nothing that would deserve a penalty.

The only thing I can think of is that its the result of an algorithm hick-up (hopefully) and that it will move its way back up in the future.

You know how people are always telling you not to base a business off of Search Engines? This is a good example why.

Of course “AMD” is only a small part of my business as a whole and a few keywords dropping isn’t going to kill it’s profits. Affiliates drive most of it’s sales anyway, but money’s money, so I’m going to bitch about it :)

What do you think? Have you had a similar experience?

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41 comments

  1. Andy Beard (28 comments.)
    24th January, 2008 at 9:40 pm 

    When I first started reading I thought this might have been the slight decrease in this site on the make money online keyword (yeah I have been watching) – you were up to 6 at one stage.

    You are certainly not a dangling page or site, in fact you have tons of external links… probably too many, I am not sure if affiliates use the same landing page, I would probably let them use one without the leaks or split test it.

    Your affiliate page should have a link back to your home page, and nofollow that link to clickbank.

    I have always found the article marketing SERP to jump all over the place, at one time one of my comments somewhere was ranking, and the guy offered to add my affiliate link – I just got him to sign up as an affiliate under me on Article Marketer.

    I used to drive a lot of traffic via PPC on those keywords to affiliate offers, and rankings were never stable.

    How long has the change been for?

    There are 2 pages indexed which maybe shouldn’t be indexed, your affiliate landing page and one other, both should be meta noindex follow

  2. Josh Spaulding
    24th January, 2008 at 10:13 pm 

    Thanks for stopping by Andy.

    I recently added an “articles” page to the homepage of ez-onlinemoney.com without a nofollow. The internal linking of that page should make up for good amount of authority draining into that page though, I hope. I hope that’s why it went back down to 10. I’m working to get more links pointing to it though, so hopefully it will get back up to 6 or higher.

    I believe it was Mark over ar 45n5 who wrote something about getting the link juice from your affiliate links ie. salespage.com/?hop=cbnickname I’ll have to look into that. I’m not sure if I’m getting that juice or not. I know I know I have a few big affiliates with my hoplink on some A list sites. There are only a few affiliates that I’ve given permission to copy the source code and those have META nofollows.

    Thanks for catching the gigs on the affiliate page and the other page. I inserted the link, but unfortunately the ClickBank link is hard-coded into the PHP of Sam Stephen’s “HopGuard” that I’m using.

    I saw an affiliates hoplink showing up as an internal page. I suppose I could restrict the hoplinks through robots.txt

    I noticed the drop sometime yesterday, so maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll jump back up after the next algo change.

  3. Chuck (6 comments.)
    24th January, 2008 at 11:03 pm 

    Ouch.

    Must have been some sin you committed in a past life. ;-)

  4. Elliott (8 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 12:58 am 

    Josh, a few of my niche sites were doing really well, and then a couple of the keywords I was using disappeared, much like yours. Not sure why, but the other keywords are still there.

    I don’t think it is the sandbox, but maybe the specific keywords are getting more popular and the amount of links, etc. to your site might have triggered something.

  5. Chuck (6 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 1:03 am 

    So…should we start up a “get Josh back to the front page” campaign, where everyone links to you? Or…are you now considered a “bad neighbor” who shouldn’t be linked to at all? LOL…

    I’ll tell ya what…for what it’s worth, I’ll throw up a couple links to your AMD site. Might not do nuttin’…but it couldn’t “hoit”, either!

  6. Chuck (6 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 1:08 am 

    By the way, Josh…no title tags on the page? No H1, H2? Not sure about the theory behind that…but that’s just basic SEO stuff.

  7. Josh Spaulding
    25th January, 2008 at 1:15 am 

    @ Chuck – I can’t imagine myself being evil in any life :) Any link is always appreciated ;) It has a title tag. No h1 or h2 because it’s a sales page. I’ve gotten some pretty good results with loads of competitive keywords and I’m convinced h1’s, h2’s etc. don’t do much!

    -edit- The entire main directory of this site didn’t have 1 h1 tag for over a year. I inserted h1’s and it didn’t do a damn thing. I’ve done similar tests with niche sites and one of my article directories with the same results, nothing. I don’t think google even cares about h1’s anymore.

    @ I don’t think it’s the amount of incoming links because it was slow 35,000 links really isn’t that much. Sounds like a bunch, but most of them are sitewide links etc.

  8. Chuck (6 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 1:19 am 

    Hmmm…you must know something I don’t. I can’t imagine ANY kind of page without H1 title tags. I didn’t realize there were types of pages where it wasn’t considered necessary or best practice.

    Anyway…two new links in place as of about 5 mins ago. I won’t post them here, because I don’t want to dilute them as reciprocals.

  9. Josh Spaulding
    25th January, 2008 at 1:35 am 

    -edit- forgot html works :) replace *’s with < and >

    When I say “title” tag I refer to *title**/title* Then theres the heading *h1**/h1*. The title tag is DEFINITELY important and I do have a title tag on the AMD sales page.

    I don’t have heading tags because that would be a mammoth of one and I just don’t think they make much of a difference.

    Thanks for the links :) I’ll give your brain dump some more link love sometime in the near future.

  10. Vlad (1 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 4:55 am 

    Hi Josh,

    I am completely out of the loop these days. Was there another PR downgrade lately???

  11. Josh Spaulding
    25th January, 2008 at 5:09 am 

    Hey Vlad, nice to hear from you! There was a toolbar update a few weeks back, but I’m just talking about the serps in this post. Just one of their regular algo updates I guess.

    Speaking of PR; I’ve had the same lousy PR3 on this blog for most of its life. PR is really out the door these days. I don’t even know why they keep it around. Average, non-marketers don’t even know what it is. We’re the only people who look at it and it doesn’t mean anything to those of us who know better, so I really don’t see why they don’t get rid of it.

  12. Stock Market Software (2 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 4:52 pm 

    I’m always scared this will happen… hopefully you just got sandboxed and traffic will start to pick back up… but yeah… scary… makes me want to try less hard a t building up bigger more powerful sites and focus on quantity

  13. Anthony Chambers (1 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 9:19 pm 

    I am no SEO wizard by any stretch, but I had a similar experience with my prosperityinmotion.net website for one of those ‘almost long-tailed keywords’. My site keeps fluctuating between the bottom of page one to the top of page two to nowhere. Perhaps yours will re-appear in a few days. By the way, your site is pretty clean. I’m impressed.

    Anthony

  14. Rip
    25th January, 2008 at 9:28 pm 

    Hi Josh. I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t start to worry until a week or two has passed. According to Jon Leger, sites will do this periodically while Google updates their rankings.

  15. Ksenija (1 comments.)
    25th January, 2008 at 9:33 pm 

    I think that PR is not that important anyway, what really matters is Alexa number and yours is 68,563 :)
    Good job

  16. Allen (10 comments.)
    26th January, 2008 at 12:11 am 

    That Alexa rank is a little different though, it seems to me, because it ranks a domain, not a page. If I go to the main page of this domain, it reads exactly the same as the blog main page.

  17. Josh Spaulding
    26th January, 2008 at 4:51 am 

    @ Stock – That’s the nature of the beast (Google) I guess. I’m always more for quality than quantity, but alot of content is always good.

    @ Anthony – Glad to hear I’m not alone :) No, actually, sorry to hear you’re having the same problems. Thanks for the compliment. Just wait for the new them, it’s much better :)

    @ Rip – You’re absolutely right and Jon is certainly a good person to be listening to in regards to SEO!

    @ Ksenija – Neither toolbar PR nor Alexa traffic rank matter. What matters is traffic. I explained Google PR and Alexa traffic rank in a previous post that you may be interested in.

    @ Allen – That’s right. Google’s toolbar PR (which is EXTREMELY worthless) ranks individual pages, while Alexa’s traffic ranking ranks sites as a whole. However, neither are accurate.

  18. Steve (1 comments.)
    26th January, 2008 at 4:30 pm 

    Josh,
    I was just clicking through some of the bonus material that you have on you amd, and I wanted to check out your blog. I read your material last night and it was quite interesting. I have a new site dog bed mattress that I am trying to rank for. I am going to start your am campaign and use the techniques you described in you amd book. I am hoping for good results, we shall see. I have been I guess doing it wrong using submission (isnare), but do use the apr, but was submitting to around 300 of them. That will change. Thanks for the info and keep it up.
    Steve

  19. Franck Silvestre (10 comments.)
    26th January, 2008 at 5:02 pm 

    Hey Josh,

    Don’t freak out!

    Your site should come back next week at the same place.

    My website is on Google first page for “affiliate marketing” (btw, article marketing is the very first thing I do for any of my sites), and guess what?

    I have an ebook telling about Hi I rank pretty high for all my website with a screenshot of my affiliate site on Google first page… When I disapeared someone asked me “Why you tell you are on the first page and Google and you are not…”

    Imagine how I felt… But the site came back within a few day.

  20. Josh Spaulding
    26th January, 2008 at 6:27 pm 

    @ Steve – Thanks for your support. I’m glad you read and absorbed everything. Far too many people buy products and let them sit on their system for ages and never really sue them.

    If you take my advice you will see great results. I’ve been using that technique for over a year and I’m still seeing great results. It never ceases to amaze me!

    @ Franck – That’s what I’m hoping will happen :) If not I’ll live though. Thanks for stopping by and leaving feedback.

  21. Empowering Success (1 comments.)
    26th January, 2008 at 6:36 pm 

    Well, I know over the years I have come across the same type of thing happening to my sites. Not sure what it is, spiders or what, but usually in a few days to a week things will get better.

    Like anything else, I just think there is a time and a place (top five) for everyone, and with all the thousands, millions of sites out there, everyone should get their turn. NAH!!! lol

    Ronnie

  22. Josh Spaulding
    26th January, 2008 at 6:38 pm 

    @ Ronnie – Don’t be silly, that spot’s mine! :D

  23. FixingTheProblem (1 comments.)
    27th January, 2008 at 12:31 am 

    Great info. I hope I can get my blog going strong with some of your techniques. I think it’s a really great business and I hope to keep improving it.

  24. Terry Heath (3 comments.)
    27th January, 2008 at 11:00 pm 

    Hey Josh,

    I’m not even going to pretend to be up on this sort of thing, but I did notice you have article-marketing, article-writing-tips, article-writing, article-tips, and article-marketing-domination listed as meta keywords but while “article” appears 57 times and “marketing” appears 42, “writing” only appears three times and “tips” (or tip) doesn’t appear at all. Therefore, “article writing tips” and “article tips” do not appear at all, and “article writing” only appears once.

    Am I totally off base here, or shouldn’t your keyword phrases be on your page? Like I say, I am not up to speed on SEO issues right now.

  25. Josh Spaulding
    28th January, 2008 at 12:04 am 

    @ Fixing, (odd name) I hope you do as well ;)

    @ Terry, META keywords are next to worthless. Google doesn’t consider them and even the SE’s that do don’t put much weight on them.

    Keyword density is pretty unimportant as well. The main keywords should appear on the page, but this is a sales page, which I don’t optimize for SE’s. When it comes down to it the number, quality and anchor text of links is what’s important and I have that going for me with that site, which is why it was ranking very high.

  26. oriental rugs (1 comments.)
    28th January, 2008 at 10:06 am 

    Google is weird sometimes, thats all I can say.

  27. Stephen Cronin (34 comments.)
    28th January, 2008 at 2:06 pm 

    Josh, seems to be back, you’re at number two for Article Marketing.

  28. Josh Spaulding
    28th January, 2008 at 4:22 pm 

    @ Oriental – They sure are!

    @ Stephen – Looks like you’re right. They’re all back and I’m on top of a few other good keywords now as well :) Looks like I just over-reacted.

  29. Chuck (7 comments.)
    28th January, 2008 at 5:31 pm 

    Two…? Did someone say TWO?

    Musta been those TWO links I put up for ya, Josh. LOL…

  30. Josh Spaulding
    28th January, 2008 at 7:12 pm 

    Oh Chuck, I was #2 for Article Marketing before :) I’m sure the link will help it maintain though :) Thanks

    btw, I did see your email and I will get to it. Sorry, just way behind right now. Just installed a split graphics card and I’m running on two monitors now though, so I’ll be caught up soon :)

  31. Life Plus (1 comments.)
    28th January, 2008 at 9:35 pm 

    Josh,

    Glad you’re back.

    My understanding is G just did a update last week. I noticed Saturday that one of my long-time page one, position #3 to #5 white hat sites dropped to position #10 and #11 for my main keywords.

  32. Josh Spaulding
    28th January, 2008 at 9:47 pm 

    Hi Life (odd name,)

    Year there was a couple algo tweaks within the last week, but nothing out of the ordinary that I noticed, other than this little hick-up.

    This one just came out of nowhere and surprised me. I just “jumped the gun” and over-reacted. :)

  33. Amanda (10 comments.)
    29th January, 2008 at 1:28 am 

    This is probably a dumb question, but how do you know when Google “updates” itself? Is it always on a set schedule or does it just happen randomly? Is there a way to tell when your site was last visited by spiders?

  34. Josh Spaulding
    29th January, 2008 at 2:29 am 

    Hi Amanda – My Mother used to tell me no question is a dumb question :)

    Any time the search results change, Google’s updated their algorithm. I have several Websites, so I normally give the more competitive keywords I rank for a search or two everyday. They do update their algorithm quite frequently. Sometimes every week, sometimes every day, sometimes several times in one day.

  35. Todd Morris (7 comments.)
    29th January, 2008 at 6:01 am 

    Hi Josh,

    Glad to hear that your site rankings came back. I just got done reading your ebook for the 3rd time. Excellent information. I hope to find a little time during lunch breaks this week, and should have a few articles to submit this weekend. Thanks … I appreciate your help .. lol, even if I did pay for it :-)

    Todd

  36. Josh Spaulding
    30th January, 2008 at 3:40 pm 

    Hey Todd,

    Thanks, me too :) I’m glad you enjoyed “AMD.” Let me know if you have any questions at all along the way.

  37. The Google “Sandbox” is Real but not Definitive
    22nd February, 2008 at 8:50 pm 

    [...] I mentioned in a prior post my Article Marketing Report was ranking very high for a few relatively competitive search terms [...]

  38. Rick (2 comments.)
    28th May, 2008 at 9:40 pm 

    Hello Josh,
    Again great to hear problems were just a hickup. I know this is off subject but do you use an article spinner?
    Rick
    zbikenut at hotmail.com

  39. Josh Spaulding
    28th May, 2008 at 9:46 pm 

    @ Rick, well it turns out it wasn’t just a hickup, the site never recovered, but not a big deal :)

    I’ve been using Instant Article Wizard Pro lately.

  40. Yoshiko (1 comments.)
    18th July, 2008 at 4:36 am 

    Hi Josh,
    I really share your pain!

    I have a site dominating page 1 for a while but since 2 weeks ago one sunny tuesday, when i ran a google search on my keyword, my site disappeared to page 10! I guess this is the notorious sandbox. It has since recovered back to page 6 but still not a great consolation to me…

    Wonder if anyone has tried and tested ideas how to do google sandbox disaster recovery. Now that would be a very very good article topic indeed!

  41. Josh Spaulding
    18th July, 2008 at 1:04 pm 

    @ Yoshiko – Here’s one http://ez-onlinemoney.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/the-google-sandbox-is-real-but-not-definitive/

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