Posted by John Mueller on 11th May 2007
There are many reasons why a site could suddenly drop in ranking in Google’s index. In the most cases, these changes are due to natural causes - most commonly because the value of the inbound links has dropped, leaving the site without enough value to merit the old indexing and ranking. Sometimes, however, there’s more to it than just that.
This list is a community effort - feel free to add to it in the comments. We’ll move items up into the list as required. Links will be provided to debugging tools and to reference (official or just wild guesses). This list should contain only items that have been known to trigger indexing/ranking issues - the rest is in The unofficial crawling, ranking, indexing speculation post and The confirmed non-issues with websites. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Penalties | 4 Comments »
Posted by John Mueller on 11th May 2007
Just as there are issues with websites that are known to cause problems (and things that are still unconfirmed), there are also issues that are known to be completely irrelevant. This list is for those items. Feedback via commenting is desired.
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Posted in Penalties | 1 Comment »
Posted by John Mueller on 11th May 2007
The first step is always speculation, from reading between the lines in forum or blog postings or even in patent applications. What do you see as possible, unconfirmed reasons for problems with crawling, ranking and indexing on Google? Post your ideas in the comments, we’ll move them into the posting as necessary. As we can confirm or deny the items, we’ll move them appropriately to the The unofficial “why did my site tank in Google?” checklist or The confirmed non-issues with websites.
As items become more detailed, they may receive a separate posting.
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Posted in Penalties | 1 Comment »
Posted by John Mueller on 7th May 2007
Many people have a lot of meta-tags in their pages. These meta-tags in the head-section are usually luggage that they carry around from revision to revision, only to have new tags added as friends and “experts” recognize that some are missing.
Which meta-tags does Google really look at, which ones do I need and which ones should I drop? Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in SEO, Technical, Sitemaps | 1 Comment »
Posted by John Mueller on 6th May 2007
The Google Webmaster Tools console can display the known links pointing to your site. In many cases, there will be countless links from “bad” sites like “scrapers” or web-spammers. Can these harm my ranking? Since I have noticed them in my webmaster tools console, my rankings have dropped. What can I do to have those links removed?
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Posted in Penalties, Link Management | No Comments »