• You have messed up – maybe blocked the page by accident in robots.txt
• Google have made a major algorithm change
• You have some kind of general penalty or your site has been hacked

It could also be argued that it can be caused by duplicate content, and enter the supplemental results through lack of pagerank. Honest duplicate content could be on your own site, or due to poor syndication (lack of links back to the original document).

There are however other very real scenarios that could cause a web page to drop in rankings overnight.

A Major Bug in Google Algorithms

Google have stated, officially, that if you are syndicating content, you should ensure that in the syndicated content, there is a link back to the original. I achieve this by requesting sites like WebProNews.com to include a link back to my original article rather than just a link back to my domain.
If splogs pick up my full content, they normally also grab the link in my author box at the bottom of each article.

For a number of weeks Google link attribution has been, to put it bluntly, royally screwed.

Google’s Adam Lasnik stated on the Webmaster Central Blog:-

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.

Google… it isn’t working

For a couple of months my list of dofollow plugins was ranking 3rd for the fairly innocent uncompetitive search phrase “dofollow”. With more blogs talking about dofollow, it does become more competitive, but a large number are linking through to the page, in fact Google’s main index reports 58 links, Google Blogsearch reports 185 individual blogs have linked through.
All of those links were topically relevant, but a fair number were from various lists of supporters, thus maybe given a low weighting.

For over 1 month the syndicated copy of the story on WebProNews which linked back to the original, replaced it in the SERPs at #5 – by replaced, I mean Google decided that was the original article, and the original disappeared

Yahoo site explorer reports that the syndicated copy only has 6 links pointing to it from other pages, and my original has over 1000.

In the last couple of days, even the syndicated copy has disappeared from Google results.

There is no “Google Bombing” activity on the page, all the links were editorial, relevant, and in fact a huge number (for the lists circulated) of the links used my name as anchor text.

Google doesn’t get it wrong all the time

In fact this scenario is the exception rather than the rule. A good example (though slightly contrived) is the charity link meme that so many SEOs are taking part in. I have seen great improvement in search position for my selected listings that have now appeared on a few SEO sites.

A search in Google for the term also is a fairly good demonstration that my “trust” with Google isn’t doing too badly (no global penalty), because I outrank Andy Beal for the term, though there are lots of factors such as additional internal linking.

Maybe there is a penalty for too many editorial links to good content?

My dofollow plugins list isn’t gaining as many new links per day as it was, but the number and quality of many of the links shouldn’t give a penalty.

Google is meant to support high quality content that encourages people to link to it

Selective Page Filtering & Web Spam

Google want you to report paid links.

When Matt Cutts most recently caused an uproar it was actually a different form. The instructions were clear, include “paidlink”.

So what did I do?

I reported myself to Google for Paid Links

It should be noted that the intent of the report to the web spam team was intended to provide them with data to test their algorithms.

I provided them with details of 3 reviews I had written that I regarded at the time as good paid reviews. The reviews were not being written for search engine benefit.
The amount of time I could afford to spend on each review was commensurate with how much I was earning, but still exceeded what would be regarded as a good hourly rate for the time invested.

The reviews were

Search Engine Glossary
Volusion Shopping Cart
Sponsored Reviews

I am biased certainly, but it is my belief that none of those reviews, whether I was compensated or not, should be classed as web spam.

They are consultation generally for sites that don’t even need the links. All the links were editorial, though as I am SEO aware, I give SEO friendly links to things.

As I chose to link to the site, and I was linking to highly related content, I didn’t use nofollow – I wasn’t being paid for links, though I am not sure how an algorithm is meant to determine that.

My Volusion Review Has Been Kicked Out Of Google

It might well have been manually removed by a monkey who wasn’t trained enough to determine the quality and value of the content he/she was looking at.

The monkey was probably programmed a little like this…

• Receive web spam report
• Check for word “paidlink”

Now at this stage there is either going to be an AND or an OR operator in the logic, and that might be where some kind of error took place with individual URLs, although I submitted 3 at once.

Before writing this article, I have waited a fair amount of time observing what was happening.

Google had a mess with their toolbar pagerank export April 30th. Toolbar pagerank is even more inaccurate these days because a grey bar can mean multiple things.

1. The page is new
2. The page is regarded as duplicate content – even if a page is PR3 or PR4, enough to keep it out of the supplemental index normally, if it is detected as being duplicate it will have a grey bar – this is both a good and a bad thing – it might mean that such pages are also not draining Google Juice from your original content for those that aren’t careful about external links on such pages.
3. The page is banned or deindexed – what might be looked on as a bad neighbourhood

Fairly confusing for the average webmaster to know what is going on

The Volusion review was giving a grey bar, as were the tag pages leading from it because they were duplicate content.

This didn’t concern me, the page was still ranking high for the single term “volusion”, and first for “volusion review” (without quotes), despite having a little competition from other blogs who reviewed Volusion at the same time, under similar terms.
I was still seeing traffic to the review.

Syndication of the Volusion Review

One website requested permission to syndicate my review for their new shopping cart review site. I publish my content under GPL, but look on correct attribution as a link back to my original content.
They complied completely with my wishes, and their CMS pinged me. I did think about deleting the trackback, but my review had already been published and index for over 1 month, had already received some links, and was featured prominently in my linking structure 2 clicks from the front page on a page that eventually will receive lots of links, even if it is just from me.

In addition, they didn’t have the comments on their review that made my own permalink page unique from the syndicated copy.

The website owner requested syndicating the content because it was a high quality review.

My ultimate decision to leave the trackback was that he asked permission for syndication. I get splogged a fair amount, and I wanted to give Google a signal that that content was legitimate.
As I use a dofollow plugin, my trackback links hopefully give a little bit of juice after my editorial decision to leave the link on the page.

His syndicated copy has also been kicked out of Google SERPS.

Just that one specific article, that is linked from his sidebar on a PR3 site – possibly the page would be looked at as having some purpose.

That site isn’t the only one that syndicates my content, some of my best articles are also picked up by WebProNews.

On WebProNews I have 2 author profiles

Andy Beard – Static Profile – yes that is a nice PR5 backlink, sometimes it is worth being syndicated on high profile sites.
Andy Beard – Articles – As far as I can see, WPN intend this to be indexed, but it has been kicked out of Google.
The page might be looked on as a search result, but on the domain there aren’t any similar, the page is very much unique compared to what is on my site, and I would suggest it is useful content.

Lets look at individual entries:-

I have 30 articles syndicated on WebProNews
26 of those articles are in Google’s index
4 of those articles are not indexed

The 4 articles not indexed is because they haven’t got any links, and they haven’t got any links because the search engines are not indexing the “category like” search pages.

It should be noted I don’t have to give Google a positive indication of any kind to have my articles indexed on their site.

Conclusion:- In normal situations Google Indexes and ranks syndicated content.

The syndicated copy of my Volusion Review (with permission) should be in Google’s index even if it is in some ways duplicate content – it isn’t 100% duplicate content because it doesn’t have the comments, just like WebProNews.

Duplicate Tag Content

My Volusion review was given 4 tags that were on topic

Volusion – Indexed in Google
Volusion Review – Not Indexed / Banned
Volusion Shopping Cart – Not Indexed / Banned
Shopping Cart Review – Not Indexed / Banned

At this time I haven’t gone to a lot of effort to make those pages unique, and until today those pages had links from a single article so would be quite low on pagerank.
In the future I intend to use some of those tags multiple times, for instance I will probably tag this post with “volusion”, but not with the other tags. I would also like to spend some time looking at other shopping carts because it is relevant to my niche, and I find most of the reviews on the internet quite poor, or overlook many things.

I quite expect pages like that to go into the Google Supplemental index until such time as as they have been made more unique, though I would look on it as a little harsh to have them totally removed from the index.

Google have stated in the past that when they have duplicate content, they will choose which one they think is most relevant to display. I have read nothing stating they will choose one copy, and de-index all the others.

Other sites use indexed tags, and even have such “orphan” single item tag pages, as an example Techcrunch on 1000tags

Google Pigeons

Google joked about their pigeon rank back in 2002 for April fools day

• The category like pages on WebProWorld need to be indexed, or their content that doesn’t have other subject based links just drops out of the indexes of all search engines.
  The fact that most of it is indexed suggests that content that is duplicate isn’t meant to be kicked out.
• There is something clearly wrong with their current handling of link attribution
• It seems like the pigeons are kicking random pages that have been reported to contain paid links out of the index, contrary to what has previously been stated by Google (well actually Matt Cutts)

Here is what I have written in a fresh report to Google:-

Volusion were not buying links, they were buying reviews from experts, so does that mean consultants aren’t allowed to link to their clients, and shareholders can’t link to their stock holdings?

All the links were editorial.

If you can find a better review covering the same topics on the web for Volusion I would love to see it.
I was working to some time constraints, and didn’t have access to the full version of the software.

The review was also syndicated with permission on another site a month after it was originally published – that review has also been kicked out of the index.

Google need to fix their algorithms or we are going to see a lot of good content disappearing from the SERPs

$180 Payola – Isn’t The Standard Term Prize or Competition?

A little while ago Blogcatalog awarded a free “premium listing” for 6 months. I should note that Blogcatalog is a highly reputable directory and social network, and every member’s blog is vetted by a human before inclusion, yet they still have free listings, unlike Yahoo.
Matt Cuts has already stated in the same paid links thread that it is ok to purchase links in reputable directories, thus buying a premium listing at Blogcatalog in theory is ok, unless the job description for the pigeons changes at short notice.

I turned down the opportunity for the paid listing suggesting one of my readers would like it instead. I already have high listings in my selected categories.

Tony from Blogcatalog loved the idea so much that he doubled the prize

Win A 12 Month Premium Listing On Blogcatalog

I want to make this as educational as possible, both for some of my readers and Google’s algorithms.

I was thinking about closing the comments on this post so that it could only be responded to with a link and trackback, but I am a community blogger and thus switching off comments would be a little evil.

What I want people to do is to write a post on their blog discussing what I have talked about here. Speedlinking posts won’t count.

The premium listing will be awarded to a random reader and the number of tickets will be awarded based upon trackbacks.

• One ticket will be awarded for linking through to this post from your article
• One ticket will be awarded for linking through to my Volusion review
• You can link through to both from the same post and receive 2 tickets

You can use rel=”nofollow” for one or both of the links should you choose, if you truly believe that my Volusion review is web spam (and state that in your review), or that my offering a prize for linking through and making your readers aware of the issues is web spam.

I am not offering the prize for links, I am offering it for real opinion, and I am going to count the number of links, and which ones were followed or nofollowed.

I know many readers are using Blogger and Blogger by default doesn’t provide trackbacks. Recently I wrote 2 tutorials on how to use trackback with blogger. The first uses Greasemonkey in Firebox, and is the best way to add trackback for blogger.
The second option is to use Haloscan but please read the instructions carefully, and don’t convert to using their commenting system. Haloscan as far as I am aware cannot be made Dofollow.

• Entries will close on 7th July
• One entry per blogger
• No anonymous bloggers (so I can ensure only one entry per blogger)
• No entries from multi-author blogs of which you are not the primary editor/owner

Also, if you want to combine it and are not a member of PayPerPost, you can combine this with their “Review My Post” offer and make $7.50 for your praise or criticism. See link in comments section for details.

You also might find this article on payola interesting if you missed it when first published.

I set very specific rules, though I broke them slightly

Just for arguments sake, I am going to say that 1 aggregator link is worth 20 visitors. I am going to look at the total benefit over the next 3 days.

Lets take a look at the poll results, and compare the results to the actual results.

[poll=2]

Sanjaya

This got me a fair amount of traffic (comparatively speaking) , but no backlinks, thus there wasn’t a huge amount of coverage for the keyword compared to the amount of searches.
If I had written something relevant, it might have actually gained a few links.

Joost

A few will certainly be shocked at so little traffic on this keyword. One of the reasons is because of the amount of blog posts covering the topic, thus supply exceeded demand, and my content quickly disappeared from view.

Twitter

Twitter was a hard one to analyse, because I get a fair amount of traffic for Twitter related keywords. I had close to 200 unique visitors related to Twitter over the last 2 weeks, but very little of it was due to Technorati directly, and most of it was for content posted before this experiment.

Dell

I can’t even recall why Dell might have been searched for at the time of my post, I don’t follow Dell news. Looks like the people searching for Dell weren’t exactly keen to click through on what was obviously not Dell news, but it is surprising that what I would look on as a “money keyword” wasn’t being splogged by someone.

Habitaquo

This is the Spanish Language SEO contest – not much traffic but a registered link from an RSS feed widget. I also had a comment left which is more than I received from other keywords.

YouTube

This one is interesting – whilst I had no traffic from Technorati, I gained lots of long tail search traffic simply because the word was in my sidebar.
If you have content that is even vaguely related to YouTube, it would be good to include the word on every page, even if it is a nofollow link to an affiliate product.

Dana Vachon

Not a lot of search traffic, even though there was relatively little competition for the keyword.

Myspace

A very similar situation to YouTube – no Technorati traffic, but some from Google, caused by just having the words in the sidebar.

Harlan Ellison

Hardly a blip on the radar

Iran

Absolutely no traffic at all, almost suggesting that the search volumes weren’t real.

Habitaquo Was the Clear Winner

The reason it was the winner was because it provided me a link, which was worth 20 visits. It might not have been a permanent link, but it was registered, and the site it was on wasn’t a splog.
I broke the rules slightly mainly because of this one link – it created such an inbalance and thus I left things running a little longer.

It is obvious that people are not creating splogs for the terms that most people are search for (at least the top terms). You won’t find that conclusion in any of the “official reports” that get published about splogs.

Continued Testing

The UMBC eBiquity Blog a couple of months ago published the top 20 keywords being used by spam blogs. Now if those blogs were really spam blogs, and they don’t really define a spam blog, then they have to be getting their content from somewhere, based upon those specific keywords.
Some of these are actually money phrases, so it will be interesting whether will will pick up some traffic, or whether the blogs are blogging purely for the SEO benefit.
Another thing to note is that if these are the most spammed keywords, then this post will disappear fairly fast, as I am going to use the keywords in my tags.

adult auto big buy california cancer card casino cheap college consolidation credit debt diet digital discount dvd equipment estate finance florida forex free furniture gift girls golf health hotel info insurance jewelry lawyer loan loans medical money mortgage new online phone poker rental sale school sex small software texas tits trading travel used vacation video wedding

One thing I find remarkable is that all of them are single words, and I am sure some of those words should be joined, for instance “credit cards”, and they are all money phrases. Do people search for money phrases on Technorati? Maybe Technorati is just a holding station to recycle content on these keywords.

Anyway no poll this time, but I will publish the top 10 results in a week or so.

Feel free to leave a comment if you want to try to predict the winner. Remember about supply and demand.

Vlad was one of the people who decided to do some experimentation with the method, and at the same time also decided to give submitting paid press releases a try.

He had some success in the past, but you know how things go – new ideas for promotion come along, and PPC advertising doesn’t require the same kind of time investment up front.

Today Vlad has written about the results he has achieved using press releases to promote a site.

I should also point out it doesn’t only provide links, but also content in raw form, plus hot stories that are news stories that haven’t happened yet.

P.S. I did check out the links, and they do show up in both Yahoo and MSN. I would have expected a Google link to show up as well but I wouldn’t worry too much. It is legit.

Update: Sorry I just corrected the link