Regaining Lost Google Ranking

So you all heard me whine about my one big mamma site – all 15 or so pages of it – that’s been making my living for about 7 months now (and then some, it really took off last November). I’ve had nothing but anxiety since about the 14th of May when I discovered it had lost just about all its Google ranking (traffic and rankings dropped sitewide for 95% of my site, I have a few “winning” keywords but nothing like it was)…

The pattern? None, really – this is the only site I’ve had take a hit so far as I can tell.

The one thing I did that might be the culprit was send just about 500 links to the site as a whole for around 25 keywords. OK, that’s a big piece of the puzzle, maybe, but consider the site’s been published since fall of 2009 and it has plenty of link diversity…

I also chose a number of anchors and yes: they were all longtails, drip-fed the links out over a month and didn’t index any of them myself.

The links appeared on largely WordPress sites with various PageRank, thanks to PaidBackLinks.com. This is why I think my site was penalized – and according to another site, my website is enjoying a “-30 penalty” sitewide.

If you’re interested, that site is http://tools.seomoves.org/penaltychecker/ and they have no affiliation with Google far as I can tell – so they’re a 3rd-party voice when you lose rankings in Google. Thanks to Carrie for reminding me about it.

I’d start off at http://tools.SEOMoves.org/penaltychecker if something happens to your site.

Google, on the other hand, is mum about their penalties…

[Why, BTW? Ever thought of that? It's not hard to email a webmaster why you penalize them...and it sure would help "clean up" the search results if that's really something Google cares about.

I mean - c'mon - "We want you to guess..." vs. "Here's what's going on..."

It's like Google is a police officer handing out tickets with no listed infraction, just a dollar amount you need to pay, then your car insurance goes up and you have no idea what just happened. It's completely and utterly stupid, Google.]

How I’m Trying To Get My Google Ranking Back

First off, this isn’t meant to be some rule book I’m writing, just a diary of sorts of what I’ve done because I know it’s going to happen to plenty of others out there.

If you haven’t read it yet, my initial plan can be found in my WTF GOOGLE? post – written when I first discovered the loss in rankings.

I’ve removed Google Analytics but put up AdSense – the reason being that I no longer want to give Google free access to my sites’ data.

I can use other statistics tools for that, I don’t trust them nor see the point of that (giving data for nothing to the web’s biggest potential tyrant). Anyhow, the site started out as an AdSense site and I used to use it on my supporting pages.

Since then I’ve taken AdSense down and replaced it with my own affiliate links (because, let’s face it, Google has enough money and I don’t feel like giving them more…).

I also wonder what would happen if I did just put up AdSense. Nothing to report just yet, but here’s an interesting thought:

If you find your content has been plagiarized by someone online, like I DID, then you can report it to Google as an “AdSense Issue” under their DMCA complaint form. More on that at the end of the post.

So check it out – I went to CopyScape and ran all my pages through it…I found about 10 cases of blatant plagiarism. This put me on a bunny trail of thinking, “OK, maybe I’ve been hit with a dupe content Panda filter…”

The whole thing about the Panda update was to aim at “low quality content” and those sites with “duplicate content” on them, etc. So I’m glad I checked.

Do This When You Lose Rankings

Now I am officially taking a stand and forming a plan to get myself out of this mess, but thought the plan would help others so here goes…

1. Check for 404 errors.
This is something that I did immediately, and if you have Google’s Webmaster tools then it’s easy, they’ll tell you about any crawl errors. If you’re like me and you want to stop giving Google all this analytics data for free (sorry, I’m now jaded and suspicious of them) – I’d recommend two things.

The first is a link checker plugin, aptly named Broken Links Checker for those using WordPress. Thing works well. Just remember to check it!

The other tool I use is used by a ton of SEO’s worldwide from what I’ve read – I found it through Jeff Smith at http://seodesignsolutions.com, called Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

There just is no comparison for that tool, it’s free and it gives you a report you can use to crawl your or any site to check for broken links. Next step is, of course: repair them.

That’s beyond the scope of this post, but to make that easy for me (since I’m on WordPress), I use Smart 404 in addition to SEO Ultimate, the former redirects broken links to a page that makes sense in most cases, the latter records 404′s for me and I can handle them from there.

Why bother? 404 errors will hurt your rankings if left unchecked and if they get out of hand, simple as that. I used to use a few mobile phone plugins, too – thinking I’d get some iPad traffic or whatever – the result?

A barrage of 404 errors and duplicate pages in Google’s index…not good. I removed the plugins ASAP, haven’t found a good alternative yet.

2. Check your backlinks.
Sometimes there’s a devaluation – so if you’re using one type of linking mainly, it could be you’ve lost rankings because these have been devalued in Google.

That’s why I use link diversity (on this site and all my sites) – I get links from everywhere I can. I’m not too reliant on one single link type, or try not to be anyway.

In my case, there is ONE thing I suspect, and that’s the use of PaidBackLinks.com. I’ve removed my affiliate links for them and think in general I was too aggressive: about 500 links in a month to a site that was pretty quiet as far as gaining new links…

Not exactly “brilliant” on my part – but it’s also not like this is never done (have you read Michelle’s backlinks PDF yet? Get it at http://passiveincomeonlineblog.com and see what I mean.)

The thing is that my site was sitting fine – if that’s the case (i.e. you have achieved #1 across the board like I did largely), then leave well enough alone.

Build other satellite sites like Dave suggests in Niche Domination, and link to those – that’s what I should have done to be honest. I’m still not sure it was PaidBackLinks.com – so to rule it out, I just sent 250 links to one of my other sites to test the theory…and another 250 sites to another site entirely…

More on that later.

3. Check your on-page SEO.
I’ve been using SEO tools for a while, and I know what a good keyword density is from a reader and search engine perspective (hence my rankings were great)…so I don’t think it’s that for me.

But Google changes so often that it’s good to keep abreast of what they consider “foul ball” and taking a second look is a good idea…

4. Check your on-site text-ad ratio.
Now this is something that I know Google has been discussing for a while, at least if you read their best practices and all their jazz about quality.

So what I did was remove a lot of my sidebar ads: not entirely, but I took out a few blocks. Bottom line: it looks better anyway.

I’m also taking cues from HubPages, which recently just went haywire over Google’s slapping them off the map with their Panda update…HubPages and other places like it took action. I got a few hubs flagged by their editors for being too “commercial” or whatever term they used.

Their new rule is to have no more than 1 eBay or Amazon product displayed per 50 original words of text per Hub – so gone are the days of shopping hubs that sell well. That was a clue for me, though – I figured I could take a similar action on my site and followed suit.

5. Send your site in for a reconsideration in Google.
This is something you may or may not want to do – be sure to read Google’s Webmaster guidelines first, but to do this, visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration and you’ll need to set your site up for Google’s Webmaster tools first. This means verifying ownership by adding in a meta tag or uploading a DNS record to your website…

I say you may not want to do it because you’re giving Google access to your site, and also you might not be following Google’s ‘play nice with our index’ rules.

Once you do it, though, at least you can tell yourself you’re doing what you can to rescue your site. Just don’t hold your breath for a response – one thing Google doesn’t do well is respond to customer service issues…

6. Check CopyScape for plagiarism…
This is where I recently hit the jackpot. This is the year of the Google Panda algorithm hissy fit thing – the one we’ve heard about all year about “low quality, unoriginal content” and the like.

I didn’t think of it at first because I write all my own stuff – of course it’s original!

It was disturbing (not surprising) to find that Google had indexed about 10 pages of utterly duplicate, copied content from a few pages of my site. What I’ve read in a few forums is that Google will often send the original source into the “supplemental index” while the copycat sites rank well enough…

I’m not sure the rankings of these other sites that copied me, but I felt utterly powerless to do anything. You’re not, though.

This is what I did and fully recommend as a course of action if you have websites published and making you da moniez:

Join CopyScape and DMCA

CopyScape has a “sentry” service where they look over the web and see if anyone is copying your content. If so, you get an email…but then what?

Well, then you follow up with a “DMCA Takedown” process which involves sending a DMCA copyright infringement notice to the offending plagiarist, and it all sounds too complicated to me – so I joined DMCA.com. This is an affiliate link, but it’s something I’m doing and feel 100 x better for doing so…

First off, they’re cheap (I have the $10 a month plan) – but better than that, they give you the tools you need to protect your content (CopyScape is tops for identifying the problem, but they don’t do anything on your behalf after that).

With CopyScape, I joined their “pay quarterly” and get the reports every week vs. every day – it cost $15 every three months.

Why get both?

Because there is NO comparison with CopyScape when it comes to scanning for plagiarism – and I know of a handful of services out there that showed nothing…the DMCA.com has a scan like CopyScape but it showed me links that I put out there, like directory links…

So I needed CopyScape to identify the offenders, and DMCA.com allows me to act on what I find.

With DMCA.com, you have a choice: either file a $199 professional “DMCA Takedown” service (they do all the grunt work with a 100% refund if the offending sites don’t remove your content)…

OR you can do it yourself, but you get the “DIY Takedown Kit” which helps you organize your efforts and gives you a formal letter you can send out to these jackasses.

The net result is you have control over your content – and rights, too – so why not kick ‘em where it hurts and get your content and website rankings protected?

If Google’s new algo is as stupid as it’s proving to be (ranking scraped content higher than the penalized original source websites – it’s happening all over the place) – you have to do something about it.

CopyScape’s Action Plan For Protecting Copyrights

This is too good to pass up, so I’m posting this from the source: http://copyscape.com/respond.php (click the picture to read it):

What to do if your content gets hijacked by a hijackass.

Did you catch that? There’s a link on there you can follow that will allow you to file a DMCA complaint with the search engines – like Google…not sure how far that will go, but I am sure of this:

I want Google to know my original content is exactly that: original.

I also want these offending sites taken off the Google index, period. I found that when you file this through Google, they don’t help you if you find your content has been plagiarized unless there’s a Google-based product or service involved, like Blogger, AdWords, AdSense or the like…

This is why I’m glad I started the site with AdSense and put AdSense back up on it – Google doesn’t offer help to those webmasters who have no ties to Google in any way (WTG, Google)…so it’s a catch-22.

I don’t want to remain an AdSense publisher on this site, or really in general at the moment – but I figured I’d put AdSense back up and see if they have my back or not.

Time will tell.

I’ll keep you all posted on what happens here on out with the site, but I’m largely planning on moving forward with other sites and letting this one get a few links here and there as I go along, nothing too drastic.

Thanks for readin’. Hope this post helps those who want to get their Google ranking back, and mind you it’s not all I’m doing (I’m adding more content and backlinking using various means).