My rollercoaster relationship with Google
A wry smile spread across my face today, and I gave a little chuckle.
I’ve come to realise that I need to hire a full-time SEO expert to keep me on the straight and narrow.
Yep, once again my Google search rankings are down the pan.
Chapter 1 — paid links and Google-bombing search rank penalty
Back in September of last year I learned a lot when Google penalised my website for paid links and Google-bombing. Thankfully, my Google penalty was reversed after just 10 days.
Chapter 2 — Gmail hack leads to domain name theft
Then in December a Gmail security loophole allowed a thief to steal my domain name, resulting in the loss of my website. Yet again, before the month was out a collective effort restored my online business.
Chapter 3 — content disappears from Google search results
During the domain name saga, I re-launched my blog on davidairey.co.uk, enabling me to inform my readers about the theft and temporary change of web address. As soon as my .com domain was returned, I had a choice to make — do I keep my .co.uk active, or direct it back to the .com?
Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Spam Team, kindly stopped by to give his advice in this comment:
“David, congrats on getting the domain back!
“You’ve gotten a look at how the UK domain ranks for your name for the countries that you care the most about. It sounds like the .co.uk might eventually rank even better for you (I guess every cloud has a silver lining).
“But you also want to move a little slowly to make sure that you get everything back to normal first. My advice: go back to the .com like you were using it before. Leave the .co.uk domain alive but keep separate content on it (e.g. why not leave up the story of getting cracked on the .co.uk site?). Then give everything a month or so to settle, let Googlebot recrawl your site, etc.
“Then after everything has settled in a month or two, that’s when I’d consider switching to the .co.uk. Remember the first rule of debugging (and it often applies to SEO too): if you can get away with only making one change at a time, that makes it much easier to see the impact of your change.”
Sounds like great advice, and I’m pretty sure it would’ve been, had I implemented everything in Matt’s intended manner.
What’s gone wrong with my SEO?
I kept my davidairey.co.uk site active, with just three blog articles (those detailing the website hack, the Gmail security flaw, and the restoration of my domain. I set it up to look just like my .com site, and had all navigation links and categories pointing to the .com. I thought that was the best way to do things as any visitors to the .co.uk would experience a seamless transition to the .com if they wanted to contact me, or view my portfolio for instance.
The .co.uk has a lowly Page Rank of 1/10, much lower than the 5/10 my .com has, so even though today I still show up in a Google search for David Airey (due to my .co.uk being in the search results), I’m no longer top of the list. What’s more, all those 250+ articles that were appearing in search results have vanished.
To sum it up, my 250+ articles in the PR5 .com domain have been dropped from Google’s search results (although they’re still indexed), and all that remains are the 3 articles in the PR1 .co.uk.
Possible causes of the Google search rank loss
First thing I did was check on my Google webmaster tools (something I’m not nearly familiar enough with).
Both sitemaps seem okay. So far so good.
Here’s where the trouble starts (click the image below for a larger, more legible version):
For a website with less than 300 pages, it’s a concern when there’s over 3,000 web crawl errors.
I should really have picked up on this earlier, but as I say, hiring an SEO expert would be very beneficial.
The content analysis doesn’t make pretty reading either.
The image above shows that the .com domain has 22 pages with duplicate title tags, and 259 pages with duplicate meta descriptions. I’m not sure which pages hold duplicate title tags, as I thought that all of my pages inserted either the article headline in the tag, or the page name / blog category.
I wasn’t aware that having a duplicate meta description on each page was a problem, although this now seems blatantly obvious from paying attention to the content analysis above.
There’s also a duplicate content issue, as those same three articles on the .co.uk are here on the .com, but then I’d imagine the newer site receiving a black mark rather than the more established one.
Possible Google ranking remedies
At first I thought about removing the .co.uk site, and directing that domain to the .com, but that won’t help those thousands of web crawl errors that were most likely caused by the theft of my domain name.
Then I thought about simply changing the title and description tags on the .co.uk, so they’re not identical to that of the .com. Am I leaving myself open to a removal from Google’s search rankings for having two websites with identical tags?
A call for SEO help
I’m probably beginning to sound like a broken record, all these requests for help, but if you have any input here, I’ll be very grateful. Also, if you can recommend a solid SEO expert, please leave a comment with their contact details. I have a few in mind, who have kindly helped in the past, and sometimes it’s best to hire a professional rather than dodge the minefield alone.
These past four months have been a bit of an online rollercoaster, but I guess I’m hooked on the ride.
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40 appreciated comments on “My rollercoaster relationship with Google”
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David if you need help let me know, its late now but I will be able to sort you out in a few hours tomorrow.
What you should have done as soon as you got the .com back was get all your articles up and running again exactly as they were before.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for responding. As far as I was aware, all of the .com articles were running fine when my domain was returned, but I neglected my webmaster tools panel, and therefore the web crawl errors.
I’ll send you an email.
No doubt there’s a burgeoning need for freelancers to provide remote site / blog SEO first aid.
It’s easy to find people selling e-books telling how to do SEO – but how many people can adequately learn and maintain the SEO ropes AND still have the time & juice to keep their site / blog alive and well with content?
Certainly makes the case getting a hired SEO gun. I wonder how hard it would be to create a term contract for same?
I bet it was an unpleasant ride on the roller-coaster. I am a BIG fan of Google. I believe they always try their best to meet everyone needs. Plus, it is FREE. But flaw is not what all of expect because it might be the last time we use the service provided.
Above all, I wish you have safer journey years ahead with your website and Google products. Cheers
Hi David
Don’t worry… things come in 3′s – this is the last of your problems! (crossed fingers).
I think you need to start by taking away your duplicate site design from davidairey.co.uk. I know that you don’t have any complete duplicate pages now, but you need to be extra careful about a duplicate content penalty – especially when both sites have the same first 4 digits as your IP address.
At the moment most of your content on your home pages (davidairey.com and davidairey.co.uk) is the same.
You’ve got the same page title, meta keywords, meta description and site design.
You have to make sure that this is all substantially different on davidairey.co.uk.
I would make your page davidairey.co.uk completely different – not the same design at all. What I think you should do is make davidairey.co.uk a ‘squeeze page’ and offer a free report with some top tips about logo design. If people ask for this report, then it gets delivered by autoresponder and then you can tell people about your main site davidairey.com after they subscribe to your list.
Because of your history of problems in the last couple of months I wouldn’t even have a link between the sites at the moment. Just tell people about yur main site through the autoresponder process.
Once you remove the relationship between the sites you can go down the re-submitting process – but it may take several weeks. Unfortunately you’ll have to grin and bear that.
D
You should really consider a 301 redirect from your co.uk domain. But your real problem seems to be the duplicate meta description and the fact that your site have been down. I would recommend not having a description if you do not have the ability to customize it on all pages. Send me an email if you want more detail on any of this
I think it would best to go with someone who is maybe a reader, preferably one that blogs and understands whats your trying to archive.
I was once told, never go with a SEO that hasn’t been ban from Google!
Jamie
Sounds like some good tips there David.
While I am far from an expert, I reckon David’s suggestion is the best…
I am not an expert in this SEO thing and I don’t think that you really need to hire one.
Here are some thoughts:
You may be aware of this. There is a thing called “google sandbox” which is used to keep new domains. For instance, when your site was hacked and transfered, Google automatically put your website in the sandbox. Then you got it back and transfered back, so you are still in the sandbox. Sandbox is used to keep new domain names from causing big impacts in the search results.
The domain is allowed out of the sandbox only after google makes sure that the website is genuine and not a spamming or phishing site.
So there is a chance that you may be in the sandbox and after some time, you will be OK.
You could also try and redirect the co.uk to .com.
I don’t think this duplicate content thing is a big issue. It does not seriously affect search results considering the fact that you have only three duplicate articles. But I am not sure of this. You may consult experts.
But basically I think this SEO thing is just a hype and we just have to make sure that our websites have good content and is fairly SE friendly.
One of my friend is an SEO guy: http://www.dailyseoblog.com/
As I told you, since I am not much inclined to SEO, I don’t know if he is any good. But I saw “best SEO in India” in his blog. :)
Here is an article from google:
“What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?”
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291
Hi Regan,
A first aid service would be handy. It seems like I’ve received some stellar advice here already, which is great.
Rafie,
Thanks for that.
David,
Good of you to take the time reading. What you say makes a lot of sense and I’ll work on it later today. Again, it was a pleasure meeting you yesterday.
Thomas,
Thanks for offering your help. Much appreciated.
Jamie,
I’ve been in touch with a few SEO experts who have visited and helped in the past, so I’m confident I’ll have this all sorted in the near future. Like David says though, might take a few weeks.
Jermayn,
I met up with David here in Edinburgh, and he certainly seems to know his stuff.
Niyaz,
Cheers for the links. I’ll head over to Daily SEO Blog and read that Google support article.
David, sorry to hear about your problems. But you know what they say – we all learn from our mistakes, in your case we’re also learning from yours, so when you’re sharing your problems with your readers and asking for help, you’re in fact helping everyone else.
Why don’t you set up your co.uk site as a completely business like website, with a new design, and have one of the pages there linking to your .com blog?
I have a question to everyone regarding the duplicate meta tags: is this a problem when the meta tags are duplicated on two different websites, or it is still an issue if they’re duplicated on the same website’s pages? WordPress doesn’t have an option of customizing meta tags for each article, so if this is a problem, then WP developers need to consider that in their future WP upgrades.
Hi Vivien,
Have you installed the All in One SEO plugin?
I just installed it, and you can then set specific tags and descriptions for each blog article. A custom field is added in your admin panel.
One good point about the installation is that it took a while getting it sorted – I was missing the standard WP head function – and now the Ajax Edit Comments should work. Can you now edit your comments here on my blog? Hopefully it’s not just me who sees the option.
As for my .co.uk domain, I’ve been busy changing it so it’s totally different from my .com. I picked up a free minimalistic theme, and will keep it like that for the meantime.
Hi inspirationbit
By default WordPress doesn’t include meta keywords and description tags. you can find out more about that here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress
It shouldn’t be a problem with regards to search engine penalties if you’re using the same keywords and meta description for each page, but it’s not a good idea because you’re not differentiating your pages – so search engines are less likely to rank multiple pages on your site highly.
If you want it shouldn’t be too expensive to include an automated meta tag generator which depends on the content of your posts.
(e.g. your post categories are inserted as keywords and the first two lines of your post is inserted as your meta description.)
I’m not aware of a free plugin that does this – but there may well be one available.
D
Thanks David A. and David B. :-)
I remember checking out All in one SEO plugin once and found it confusing and not working properly. I’ll give it another try.
David A., I’ve actually edited my previous comment, so your AJAX Edit plugin works fine. And I just saw the new design on your .co.uk – looking good so far. Good luck with restoring your records on Google.
David B. I realize that it’s better to have different meta tags on each page, but I also noticed that whenever Google returns results from my site it’s rarely displaying my site’s description, most of the time it picks up the paragraph with the matched search keywords. And I do get 56% of traffic to my blog from search engines, especially Google.
But I’ll definitely look into populating appropriate meta tags for my blog’s pages/posts.
David,
As inspirationbit suggested, it will be a good idea to use your co.uk for of your more business uses.
I just tried “David Airey” and your co.uk domain is coming up. But I see that 750+ pages are indexed from .com while only 60+ pages are indexed from the co.uk. It is indeed strange that this happens.
I went through a similar experience. One of my websites ranks high for some keywords and is usually in the first page of results for those keywords. But about a week ago they strangely dissappeared from the results, and as far I know, it was not even in the first 100 results.
But luckily today the website is being shown in the first page again.
So I think your problem is also a temporary problem. And I wish it to be. :)
Jeez it’s one thing after another isn’t it..? LOL
I use a plugin which creates meta descriptions based on the first sentence or so from my post. It’s not very clever SEO in terms of targeting keywords but it at least avoids duplicate meta tags. I have another plugin which meta keywords out of my wordpress tags.
If I were you david, I’d stick with .com. I don’t think .co.uk offers you anything that .com doesn’t – even if the UK is a target market – and everyone knows your site as .com. I wouldn’t know how to resolve your current problem of not being indexed but I suspect given a bit of time Google will right itself anyway.
David,
I think you’re already on top of one of the major issues (duplicate descriptions across multiple pages) – the All in One SEO Pack is a perfect fix for that.
RE: the domain name
I’m a “.com” lover myself, although you don’t want to let the “.co.uk” go to waste(or cause issues)
You could (A) 301 Perminant Redirect your “.co.uk” domain to your “.com” domain, the simplest/cleanest solution, or (B) leverage the “.co.uk” domain more by providing unique content there. Using RSS sidebar widgets you can always cross pollinate traffic from/to either site with-out duplicating post content.
I’m not sure if you have the time or desire to operate a second site with unique content, but it could be a detailed portfolio, static UK-centric content or personal blog for more personal posts – (IE family, vacation pics, rants & other non-design related stuff)
Sounds like too much hassle to me – heh, I’d lean towards the perminant redirect.
I have a love/hate relationship with Google also.
All was fine until their update last year….I got slapped on the hands for three way link swapping (I swear I didn’t know that it was ‘that’ frowned upon and I was only responding to requests!).
So I went from Google PR4 on most pages all the way down to PR0. They didn’t change my s/engine ranking though, that was still as good as ever and traffic higher than ever.
Nonetheless I was afraid the lack of PR would make me look like a new business to would be customers and it played on my mind for a month or so whilst I waited for it to ‘fix itself’ after I had stripped all links off my site.
It didn’t fix itself and I grew more and more anxious about it no matter how many blogs I read telling me that PR isn’t important.
Then I found out that you can go to the almighty Google with cap in hand and so I went to them apologising over my naughty acts and three days later they gave me my PR back.
BUT actually my blog is now PR3 and it used to be PR4 and only my homepage is PR4 and the rest are P3, whereas they used to all be PR4….. so perhaps they won’t fully forgive me for years yet, lol.
My lesson? Don’t pee off Google …no matter how tempting, just concentrate on content and forget about tactics.
Google, don’t you just love their monopoly, I called them ‘Google God’ to someone once. I think its apt in the online business world.
Just when I think I know at least a little about SEO, something comes along that demonstrates I know zilch. What a minefield this whole SEO thing is. Anyway, pleased your sharing this with us, and though I can give you no sound advice, I do hope that things improve beyond the status quo ante.
OMG, David. I think you should change your name!
I was just sitting here trying to explain what has happened to you in the past couple of months to my husband. You know what, I find it hard to believe this all happened to one person.
I would suggest Andy Beard for help with what to do with co.uk and .com. Jill Whalen is a good person and has been doing SEO for years.
God bless you. I will try to send some design business your way.
Our site: http://broadcast-weather.net/win/ has six (6) pages that were flagged as having duplicate meta tag descriptions on or about 12/14/2007. We fixed the problems around 12/17/2007, but webmaster tools still shows the same six(6) errors today?
Google has crawled and indexed all six (6) of the pages, many times since we corrected it, but it still shows the errors?
From the outside, it looks as if Content analysis (duplicate meta description is broken).
Worst of all, it appears these pages have a penalty!
Being that “/win/” is our base page and was one of the six (6) pages having duplicate meta tag descriptions, our entire site has slipped out of google’s index because of this new feature.
Are you seeing the same thing?
Thanks,
Larry
David,
Thanks for replying to Vivien. The All in One SEO plugin for WordPress does just what you suggested with the keywords and description.
Vivien,
Glad to read my edit comments plugin is now working.
Niyaz,
I’m pretty sure the problem is a temporary one, and that it’s just a matter of waiting now. That’s good that your issues were resolved.
Aaron,
Cheers for your opinion. I think the .com has served me well up until now, and most of my clients are international anyway. When things are back to normal I might just direct the .co.uk here, although I get a fair bit of traffic to the .co.uk from people searching for GMail hacks.
AzAkers,
The permanent re-direct would save hassle, but I’ll see how things turn out in a month or so. I’d not update the .co.uk at all, but what little content that’s there is quite popular.
Having used the All in One SEO plugin for a day now, I can see how much it’d benefit search engines.
Amanda,
Sorry to read about your Google mishap, and that it hasn’t fully resolved itself. I certainly had a bit of back-tracking to do after the paid links penalty, so I know how you feel.
Johno,
I bought that logo book you recommended. Superb.
CyberCelt,
I appreciate your support, and offer to send work my way. That’s very kind. I know Andy Beard, and how knowledgable he is, but I wasn’t aware of Jill Whalen. Thanks for the recommendation.
Larry,
Interesting to read about your issues with the ‘content analysis’ in webmaster tools. Sorry to read about the possible penalty your pages have. I’m not sure if it’s the same thing I’m seeing, given that I have over 250 pages that have slipped out of the search engine rankings, whereas about 30 / 40 had duplicate issues.
Hey David,
I started an SEO/SEM firm (Tech Solution) four years back and would gladly help you through your issues. I will be back in the office Monday morning, so email me if you want and we can chat.
Oh, Tech Solution’s url is http://www.techsolutioncentral.com.
Hi Jason,
It’s been a while. I hope everything’s going well for you.
I’ll send you an email, thanks very much.
Hi David
I would recommend Darren Moloney, All Things Web http://www.allthingsweb.co.uk/index.html
Not only is he a fantastic SEO consultant but he is a really nice bloke. He always makes time to help me with things, however small. :)
Toni
David – In general you don’t have to do any of these tricks to make it work; with a bit of time, this will resolve itself.
If you want to do something, one think you could do is file a reconsideration request. The content shown on your domain has varied considerably since the domain was originally taken from you — who knows what was done in the meantime. By filing a reconsideration request you can make sure that the content shown during that time is not associated with your website as it is now. It generally makes sense to do this anytime you buy a website / domain name and are weary about what was done with it earlier. In your case, you know that it was used by someone you don’t trust, so a reconsideration request would make a lot of sense.
How cool is it to have Matt state not to worry, he’s looked at your site, and that it will turn out alright. (paraphrased from Matt’s blog)
Benn through a similar story, but without the stolen domain name, and it all turned out just fine.
Nice recovery!
dk
Hi Toni,
Thanks for the recommendation. That’s appreciated.
John,
Cheers for offering your advice. You know, I think things are moving in the right direction already.
dk,
Matt’s kindly responded to a few of my questions, which has set my mind at ease somewhat.
I can’t really offer help, but I’m glad I just read this.
I was thinking of using meta tags in the head of my new theme, but I’ll have to make sure that I put them only on the homepage or something. Now that you’ve written this and I think about it – of course not every page on my site is going to be about all the things I would tag/describe my blog with.
Will also have to check out that webmaster tools thing.
Good luck!
I’m dealing with a similar thing on my site. Suddenly I checked and I had gone from PR3 to PR0. Not sure why yet, but I did have quite a few pages published that were really junk…like unfinished pages I never got around to finishing that I had published for some reason. So, Google has been seeing all these, and maybe they had enough…or maybe it was a recent article I wrote that got the Google hound on my tail. Who knows.
Kris,
I highly recommend taking a look at webmaster tools through Google. It can help iron out any issues you’re having, and also gives an insight into how well you’re progressing.
John,
Sorry to read of your PR drop. I don’t think that having comments enabled on your site would’ve been the cause, unless perhaps you had your comment links using the ‘dofollow’ tag, and that they were all going to bad neighbourhoods.
I’d bring the comments back, but keep the links ‘nofollow’. Don’t be afraid to delete a comment if you think it’s spam, and good luck getting your previous PR value back.
Whichever domain you keep, how about making the other one redirect to the other using 301 permanent redirects? That may transfer any pagerank benefit from links from the one site to the other, and it will certainly be better for human visitors!
Jonathan,
I’ve been thinking of doing something different, and of using the .co.uk site for another purpose (perhaps a static collection of logos or design work).
They’re totally separate for now, and will stay that way until I have a little time on my hands.
Cheers.
Hi David
I’ve recently received the duplicate meta warning. Thanks to your article and the comments attached I hope I’ve sorted it now!
Bookmarked you too!
Hello Jim,
Great news how you sorted your duplicate meta warning. Thanks for the bookmark.
I think you had an unfortunate series of events. I also think you did not know that Google regularly changes the rules to suit themselves.
That is my Google rule number 1. Google is an ad company making money is their rule, if you are making money its not good for them, so the rule of the game is change, change everything every three to six months.
My Google rule number two. When all else fails remember my Google rule number two.
My Google rule number three. There is no substitute for consistent hard work in SEO. It also helps to know a little about what people want and what they search for.
Your current page rank is 3 and with the advent of Facebook and such the only way that you can get a higher than a 5 is to have between 500 000 – 1million unique users or hire someone like me to manage your reputation online.
You are doing all the basics right, regularly writing original articles. Responding to your non-spammers and providing unique content for both domains.
But there is one thing you are not doing and that is partly what is causing issues for you still today. Making the content uniquely British on the .co.uk and the international stuff for the .com.
Interlink them both so for your clients that are international put those and the testimonials for them on the .com site and the UK only companies on the UK only site.
Good Google Hunting.
PS you should focus on Bing for a while.
sorry for the Typo>>
My Google rule number two. When all else fails remember my Google rule number one if all else fails try number three.
I’m curious what you use to measure Page Rank, Hilary. I see my site as PR5 at present, with the Search Status plugin for Firefox. Do you know of any resources that show Bing usage? I’d like to see that (and some Bing ranking tips that differ from Google). Cheers.
Hi David, Thank you for asking.
Unlike most SEO pro’s I look at the people who look not always what is good for Google. This can be seen very well when you look at Facebook, twitter, wikipaedia.
The other thing you need to remember is that Google rank where you are is almost always different to the one I see. Google shows you different search results to what it shows me. Somewhere in the middle is the truth.
Bing does not do things the same way but, all the search engines scan each other and notifying bing and getting them to scan your site will have surprising results. I have not mentioned Yahoo as they have lost the plot completely. People forget there are still over 300 other search engines and one of the biggest is Yandex and of course there are the golden oldies such as Altavisa.
at all times (and Google had best remember this), its about the people and when they stop looking after their market they will start shifting, a trend I have already noticed helped on by Facebook using Bing instead of Google.
Page rank is only important to Google as it is used by Google as a measure if that pages importance to Google, but Google is no longer the only game in town.
Social media has been and will continue to be a game changer. Some of the other professionals here have given you some good basic advice, such as change the look, for vertical search you must change the focus of the different web sites and always do the basics, keywords, title , header semantics etc correct.
As always it boils down to consistent hard work and getting to know who your target market is and who is looking for your services. That is the basis from which I work.
As to what I use to work out the PR, I use a range of Firefox tools and WEB CEO as well. Of course I also use Google and I use a new open source tracking PIWIK which is more accurate than Google. Combined with the server log file analysis and of course Google analytics and you get a better idea with all these things as to what is needed.
One client i have in the UK ( i am in Cape Town) started off with a hit rate of only 289 hits and 150 uniques, they now have nearly 20 000 uniques. The important thing is they are relevant for the clients industry.
Its very easy to get a million hits for nappies but what is the point if you are a graphic designer?
Be seen to be the Web Authority and G, Bing and Y will follow after.
Be a leader not a follower and all will find you.