VIDEO - Official Google Paid Links Warning in Place Since July

Today I was reading Loren Baker's blog post about how just this week Google made it official on their Webmaster Help Center that buying or selling links can harm a site's ranking in search results.

Well guess what? That warning wasn't made this week. That warning has been official since July this year, LONG before the infamous PageRank slap down. View my video to see the proof.

UPDATE: After studying the before/after pages a little more closely, I've found the exact wording on the Paid Links page that has been updated by Google at some point after 9 July 2007:

Wording as archived on 9 July 2007:

"Buying links in order to improve a site's ranking is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."


Wording as at 24 November 2007:

"Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."

I've highlighted the additions in bold. Note also that the wording "in order to improve a site's ranking" has been removed in the later page version.


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Major PR Update - Sphinn Now PR 6!

Looks like some of us jumped the gun with assumptions about those directory PR penalties. I'm seeing major PR changes across scores of sites right now. Sphinn is now a PR6! Am I seeing things or did Sphinn not even have PR 24 hours ago?

Maybe my toolbar is crapping itself, but I'm seeing PR changes all over right now. Were the Google manual PR penalties not penalties at all? Could we have merely been looking at sites on datacenters that shifted PR first?

Some existing client sites have gone backwards an average of 1 PR point. A couple of our sites have also gone backward by 1. In all these cases, the sites are ones we haven't made any major changes to or built any additional links on. The sites where we HAVE spent time have stayed the same or gone up 1 point.

Even Adobe's News Aggregator has dropped from PR10 to PR9. Which suggests to me that this update is all about Google readjusting the benchmark for PR levels since the introduction of social media and the addition of so many new sites to the Internet. This was already predicted by many Sphinnsters (am I the first to use that term?).

Just noticed that some client blogs developed in the past 6 months have gone from PR0 to PR3 or 4. Nice! {cough}Not that PageRank matters or anything{/cough}

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Q and A: Will changing my web site layout affect my Google PageRank?

Dear Kalena...

I have a page rank 2 website now I am going to change only the layout of the site, not the content of the site. Will this effect on my Google page rank or not? Secondly advice me how I change the layout of the website.

Regards,
Qamar

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Qamar

Let me take your questions one by one:

1) No. Unless of course you uninstall the Google Toolbar during the site update, (which I highly recommend).

2) Sure. How about I teach you HTML, PHP, Adobe PageMaker, Dreamweaver and ASP from scratch? Each will probably take you around 30 hours to learn, so that's 150 hours at $120 per hour = $18,000 please. You can PayPal the cash to me via the Buy Me a Coffee button on this page.

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Q and A: What is a search engine ranking algorithm?

Dear Kalena...

What is a search engine ranking algorithm?

Sahar

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Sahar

It's late here, so I'm going to point you to three excellent sources to answer your question:

- Wikipedia's definition of algorithm
- Wikiepedia's definition of search engine
- Matt Cutt's article How Does Google Collect and Rank Results

Combined, these will give you the answer.


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Q and A: How long will it take our new page to rank on Google?

Dear Kalena...

I've added a new page to our site, what is a realistic expectation of timeframe when this page will rank organically on Google? The old page ranked about 78 so we change the page URL and content hoping it will help it rank better. It has been indexed.

May

Kalena's Answer:

Dear May

What makes you think that changing the URL and content will make it rank better than before? Google has to consider the page to be highly relevant for certain keywords and phrases to rank it highly for related search queries. The URL of a page has very little to do with this.

The content of the page should certainly be optimized for any search queries you are trying to rank for, but it's how relevant other sites consider the page to be that will most impact the page's ranking on Google. Unless there are other sites linking to the page or other pages on your site linking to the page, it is unlikely to rank highly. The anchor text used within the links to the page is also important. If the anchor text contains keywords or phrases relating to the search query, that will boost the page's relevance for such search queries. Unless you cover all these factors, the page's search ranking is unlikely to change.

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Q and A: Why has my Google PageRank dropped to zero?

Dear Kalena...

A couple of weeks ago our Google PageRank was 6/10. Not bad but room for improvement. This week I'm finally ready to work on this and my Google tool bar says the PageRank is 0/10. What happened? The only change I made was some contact info for our http://dmoz.org/ directory listing.

Diane

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Diane

Rest assured, your dmoz listing change has nothing to do with a drop in PageRank. It is more likely to be a toolbar glitch. I've seen my Toolbar show a PR0 for every site I visit, I've even seen a 10/10 for every site! It's just a bug that sometimes occurs if you upgrade your Browser version or use the tabbed browsing option. Closing down your browser and starting a new session should fix it, or simply re-install the toolbar.

In fact, I've just checked your site and it's showing a very healthy PR6 again. Panic over!


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Q and A: Why has our Google PageRank dropped to zero?

Dear Kalena...

Can you please help us? I just came across your site and you seem very knowledgeable.

Our problem is Google! Our site has been active for a few years now at www.theforeverrose.com We were once #1 for the search "the forever rose" (and ranked well for a few others as well). But we have been gradually slipping, now we are in position 90 for "the forever rose" and off the charts for others?

Our PageRank was once a three and gradually dropped to now 0. We cannot figure out why and things keep getting worse. We strictly follow all of Google's rules and ethics, we rank fine in Yahoo and MSN. I am tired of hearing the obvious; more links, more pages, better content, SEO.... etc, we have been doing that. I feel like we are just missing something really simple, something right in front of our eyes, something that is penalizing us!

Can you please help? Any of your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You,
Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mike

A quick check of your site with the Google Site Status tool shows that pages from your site are included in the index, but that Google may not know about all your site pages. The site was last indexed by Googlebot on 25 April and you have one backward link displayed by Google but 81 backlinks shown on Yahoo.

Your home page has a Google Toolbar PageRank of zero and some pages have greyed out PageRank and no cache, suggesting they haven't been indexed. Curiously, Google is showing 46 pages from your site in their index, while Yahoo is only showing 25 pages indexed. The fact that the site has already aged and used to have a much higher PageRank may suggest a penalty of some kind.

But there could be a few explanations for your poor PageRank and lack of rankings:

1) You are using a black page background but you then have a table on it with a white background and black text. Some search engines will see this as black text on a black background. It's possible that this may be tripping spam filters.

2) Your site is built using old technology and contains a lot of code bloat. Tables are clunky and difficult for search spiders to index and Googlebot may have tripped up on your code and not indexed all your pages.

3) Your home page contains keyword repetition for the words "rose" and "roses". I don't think the repetition is excessive, but it may have triggered some type of suppression filter in Google.

4) Your site has poor link popularity and the sites that link to you tend to have a very low quality score and no PageRank e.g. cufflinksdepot.com/dir-gifts.htm and escapesportif.com/resources/gifts.html. You don't have enough incoming links pointing to your site from what Google calls "trusted sites" - popular directories, portals and authoritative sites in your industry. Your internal links could also use some work from an anchor text angle.

5) Most of your site pages might be stuck in Google's supplemental index, colloquially (but unfairly) known as Google Hell. Google's Matt Cutts explains why some sites have the bulk of the pages moved to the supplemental results:

"If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit)."

Here's what you should do to address the problems:

1) For better indexing, consider upgrading the site design away from tables to clean HTML and use CSS for formatting. Until you do that, change the background of all pages to white to avoid any potential hidden text penalties from your table layout.

2) Run your site through a text-editor such as Lynx to see what search engines see when they index your site. Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and check the diagnostics for potential indexing problems.

3) Optimize your site from scratch. You should make sure your site is search engine compatible and optimized for a wider range of target search keywords and phrases rather than the obvious ones.

4) Create and upload an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps or use the new Sitemaps Protocol in your robots.txt file to tell search engines where to find your XML sitemap. I like to use the free XML Sitemaps Generator to create my sitemaps.

5) Commence a link building campaign pronto. This campaign should include submitting your site to all the major and minor directories and search engines where the site doesn't currently feature, as well as niche directories and portal sites in your specific industry. Where possible, anchor text incorporating your target keywords should be used within the links. My consulting company can take care of link building for you if you like.


Once changes to your site code have been made and you have achieved some good quality links, most of your problems should disappear. If the problems persist, file a re-inclusion request with Google, explaining what might have triggered penalties and what changes you've made to address the issues. Although technically your site hasn't been excluded from the Google index, this should prompt a review of your site by Google's anti-spam team and hopefully result in any suppression penalties being lifted.

Good luck and let us know how you get on!

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Q and A: Why has my blog PageRank dropped to zero?

Dear Kalena...

I have several blogs and sites. All of them do pretty well with all search engines. Lately I have noticed that my page rank on a particular blog dropped from 4 to 0. Also no backlinks show up in Google, although they do show up on other search engines. I tried adding keywords to help. It hasn't. What is Google doing?

Michelle

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Michelle

Google's not doing anything. You shouldn't take any notice of the little green PageRank bar in your Google Toolbar. It is a very inaccurate approximation of your true PageRank score, which is only known to Google. The little green bar is also anywhere from three to nine months out of date, because it only gets updated sporadically to reflect Google's current algorithm. Quite often, the toolbar gets a glitch in it and shows a zero PageRank score for every site, even Google! So just ignore it, or better still, switch it off.

A more accurate measure of how your blog is performing on Google is to check your search rankings for your target keywords. Have these changed recently? If so, that could indicate a problem. Google will never show you all your site's backlinks. Yahoo does a much better job of showing those if you're interested. If you still suspect a problem with your blog in Google, use their Webmaster Tools to verify your site and investigate potential indexing problems.

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Q and A: Why does my site rank in MSN and Yahoo but not Google?

Dear Kalena...

My web site www.narenmunna.com appears for some keywords in MSN and Yahoo in the first page itself, but not for the same in Google. What is the reason?

Webmaster Naren

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Naren

Simple. Your site has no link popularity and zero PageRank right now. Is it less than 9 months old? If so, then the site is probably still suffering from the Google Aging Delay. Even if it isn't, then you'd better work on your link popularity pronto.

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Q and A: Is it better to use more text on a single page from an SEO perspective?

Dear Kalena...

Having just bribed you with a coffee, I have a question which might be interesting to other readers. Say a web site has 500 words of text. Would the site have a higher Google PageRank if all the text was on one page (using scroll bars) as opposed to spreading over 5 pages?

For example the home page of the Oz site (http://www.lowercall.com.au/index.html) is currently spread over 4 web pages. The latter pages do not have any PageRank whereas the first page does. Is there any reason why we should not put all the text on one page and use a scroll bar?

Kind regards
Mike

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mike

Thanks for the coffee top-up, I really need it this week! Let me make some comments on your situation:

1) I seriously hope your entire site contains more than 500 words of text. For pages to do well in the search engines, they usually require around 250-300 words of text each, as a minimum. In my experience, a web site with less than five text-heavy pages does not perform well in search engines.

2) I'm assuming you are looking at the green bar PageRank in the Google Toolbar? Let's just get one thing straight here. That little green bar is NOT a true indication of your site's Google PageRank. That figure is known only to Google. It's not even a close approximation these days, because it is only updated when the Toolbar software is updated and by then your site's true PageRank score has changed dramatically anyway. So it's always out of date. You shouldn't be looking at that green bar at all.

3) Generally, a page with more text on it will perform better than a short page with very little text. This is because a page with more text provides more information to search engines about your site. It also generally contains more keywords and keyword phrases so it can be compared to search queries and found to be a more relevant match to a wider range of search queries. But the PageRank of a page is not dependent on the amount of text on that page, it is dependent on a wide number of on-page and off-page factors, only some of which are within your control.

4) In my opinion, you should concentrate on fleshing out the pages of your site dramatically. The site is not performing well in search engines because there is so little content available to visitors and bots. The site is also not very search engine compatible in terms of navigation and tag optimization. You should implement text links to make it easier for search robots to find and index all your pages and you should have an SEO expert review your Title Tags, META Tags and visible copy.

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Q and A: Is the Google PageRank update over?

Dear Kalena...

Is the google-pagerank update over? Or its still going on. Can you tell us something about it?

Thanks and Best Regards
Avik

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Avik

I've no idea. I don't spend a lot of time tracking database shuffles and PageRank updates. I'd rather spend my time working on my site to make it more user-friendly or up to date.

That said, I did notice a change in the Google Toolbar PR ranking for each of my sites over the past week or so. I don't know if it's a permanent change but I don't spend too much time fixating on the little green bar. It's not an accurate indicator of your true Google PageRank, only a very broad approximation. Don't sweat the small stuff Avik - just make your site a better place for your visitors and the search engine rankings will follow.

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Q and A: Why has our site suddenly dropped out of Google?

Dear Kalena...

Hi there, I have done a lot of work optimizing my wife's web site and succeeded in getting the site to number one on Google, Yahoo and MSN for the search term - "childminder milton keynes" - It took me 3 months to do it and her business has boomed. She is now completely booked up. I do regular checks to ensure the site is still no 1 for the search term and on Yahoo and MSN the site is still at number 1, however, on Google the site isn't even listed in the first 15 pages whereas 2 weeks ago it was indeed listed number 1. I am completely baffled, can you help please.

Thank you very much.
Mark

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Mark

First up, thanks for the caffeine contribution, it really helps! Now, about that site.

I've run the site through Google's Site Status Tool and according to the results, it is still being indexed, with the last visit by Googlebot on 14 January. However: the current Google cache of the site is completely blank and the Google Toolbar PageRank for the site is zero out of 10. Both these things indicate a major problem.

Now, I know the site is over a year old and that you last made changes over a month ago, so my guess is that rather than the aging delay, an algorithm penalty or other such manual suppression, Googlebot encountered problems when indexing the site last, which resulted in zero pages being indexed and stored. Naturally, the site has dropped off the charts because there is zero information stored in Google's datacenter as a result of the indexing and caching issue.

However, I'm not surprised Googlebot had trouble indexing the site. It breaks all the rules for search engine compatibility by using outdated Frames technology. Honestly! Frames are sooooo 1996. Search engines have always had trouble indexing frames-based sites and haven't gotten much better at it over the years. Search engine spiders generally only see the master frame-set (the page pulling all the frames together), not the individual frames. Consequently, there is no content for the search engine to index, apart from the content of the NoFrames element.

Because search engine spiders index sites by following links and because there are usually no links within the frame-set HTML code, search engines are usually unable to index frames-based sites beyond the home page. If you insist on using such dated design technology, you absolutely need to give the search engines a juicy No Frames tag to suck on. Yours currently states:

"Sorry, the Little Steppers website is only veiwable (sic) through a frame compatible browser. Please upgrade to a frame compatible browser."

What does that tell a search engine about your business? Zero, zilch, zip. The only reason your site was ranking on Google for "childminder milton keynes", was because you used that phrase within your Title Tag.

Ideally, a short keyword-filled description of the site should be included in the NoFrames element, as well as a link to the site map or main links page, which acts like a signpost for search engines so they know where to find and index further site content. Danny Sullivan wrote a terrific tutorial about how to optimize frames-based sites. Make sure you read it. But if you are really serious about optimizing your wife's site for search engines, you'll update the technology to a design that is search engine friendly.

To fix your immediate problem, here's what I suggest:

• Verify your site with Google's Webmaster Tools, check for site errors and study Googlebot's indexing patterns.
  
  
• Create and upload an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps and study the results via Webmaster Tools. See the free sitemap creator that I recommend.
  
  
• Use Danny's tutorial to reestablish the Frames Context for each page on your site so search engines can jump from one page to the next when indexing.
  
  
• Give Frames the flick!
  

Oh and one last thing, you are using keyword-stuffed ALT IMG tags on your home page. That is a real Google no no. Better nip that in the bud before you DO get penalized.

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Q and A: Why isn't my site in the top 2000 results in Google?

Dear Kalena...

I just created a new site, its dead basic and mainly an affiliate site. I have linked to it from a couple of my other sites that have a Google PR of 4 & 5 but of course I need loads more links yet as it's in a very competitive sector (www.autoinsurancedeals.co.uk).

Its been indexed by Google this week but of course its not even in the top 2000. In your opinion Kalena, without a ton more links is that where it's likely to stay, outside the top 2000?. It seems to be a catch22 situation, if I don't have a decent PR, why would another site want to exchange links? I seem to find this concept of asking other sites to exchange links akin to begging :-)

Graham

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Graham

If your site is brand new, you won't be able to find it for your target keywords for up to 9 months. Why? Because nearly all new sites are subject to Google's aging delay. That explains why you can't see it in the top 2000 results right now.

As for exchanging links - reciprocal linking is soooo last year. Every link you place pointing away from your site is diluting the value of your incoming links somewhat. That doesn't mean you shouldn't link to other sites or swap links - as long as the outgoing links are useful to your own site visitors. But you shouldn't pursue reciprocal link exchanges solely for search engine value.

The most valuable links to build up your site's PageRank are non-reciprocal links from high-quality, high-traffic sites that have a similar theme to your own. How do you find these? Do a Google search for backlinks pointing to your competitor's sites by entering "link:http://site.com" in Google's search box. Take a look at the type of sites linking to your competitors and see if you can get those same sites to link to you.

Look for niche directories, portals and search engines in the insurance industry. Submit your site to those. Write some articles about auto insurance and submit them to ezines and article annoucement lists for re-publishing on other sites. Make it a condition of re-publishing that they include a link back to your site in the Author Resource box.

Hope this helps!

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Q and A: Why did my site have a better Google PR when it was on another domain?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks for your answer to my last question. What's curious is how my *other* site (tony.thehungs.org), where my content resided before I transferred evreyting to its current domain, got a PR in the SAME amount of time (and still does).

Sure, its a PR of 2, but at least its not zero.

Have any idea why this is?

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Tony

Ok, couple of explanations:

1) The old site content was actually on a sub-domain and that site would take it's Google PR from the main domain http://thehungs.org. Although I see that site is password protected so it can't be indexed by search engines - has it always been this way?

2) The old domain was .org. Some people swear that .org and .gov sites are given a slight boost in the rankings and/or are not subject to Google's aging delay. No idea if this is currently true.

A final comment - If you have moved your blog to a permanent location, you should get rid of that old blog content or use Permanent Redirect 301s to point it to your new domain, because it *may* be considered duplicate content (same name, titles etc) and might be affecting your PR at the new site or causing Google to ignore the new site.

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Q and A: Why does my site have a Google PR0?

Dear Kalena...

My site (http://www.deepjiveinterests.com), after being live for a month and a half, still has a pagerank of zero. I know that there's recently been an update, but still -- nothing.

Its gotten some pretty good inbound links from some pretty reputable sources (mostly tech related) -- Cnet news, the guardian unlimited (a british newspaper), techmeme, blogherald, valleywag, and most recently crunchnotes, for example, all with decent PR, in the short time its been up.

Now, I was wondering if this was all because of the "sandbox" effect? If it was, I thought it had to do with how well the site ranks in the actual searches -- which it doesn't do too badly for, I suppose.

That is to say, I don't purposely target keywords / phrases, but I do get traffic from google, and for some phrases, like "digg history", which has over 26M results (if it means anything), I do rank #3 .

Anyway, its a bit of a ramble, but the question is straightforward enough -- why the PR0 still?

Thanks!
Tony

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Tony

the answer is simple: Google's Aging Delay for new sites. Best explanation is here. It can last up to 9 months, if any of my recent client sites are a good measure.

This is often incorrectly referred to as the Sandbox but the Google Sandbox is applied to sites that build links quickly rather than new sites. A good explanation of the difference between the two is here.

More info on both phenomenons can be seen here. A good way to avoid the aging delay is explained here.

Nothing for it but to wait in limbo and work on your links while you wait.

Hope this puts you out of your Google misery!

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Q and A: Why isn't Google displaying our product page for related searches?

Dear Kalena...

A client of mine has a site with many different pistol holsters. He was ranked with a certain holster (galco holster), and when you click the site, it takes us to the home page and not the sub page where that particular brand is at. Is this normal? I would give you the link but he is buried deep in Google, page 41 or so, but shouldn't it bring up that subpage or are they only posting the main page?

I have always thought the subpage would be categorized as per the keywords on that page.

Let me know if I am dumb or if they changed it or if it is just a freak of nature :)

Thanks,
Chris

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Chris

Google displays whatever page/s on a site it believes is the most relevant match for the search query. Although it sounds logical that a page dedicated to a particular product or brand should be automatically displayed by Google for related searches, it doesn't always work this way.

This is because Google uses a complex algorithm made up of over 100 factors to determine which page is the most relevant match. Important factors include the density on a page for the search query in question, the number of links pointing to that page with anchor text containing the search query and the reputation of those linking sites. My guess is that your client's home page probably mentions "Galco holster" and has less text on it than the page dedicated to "Galco holsters" so the density would seem higher, plus the home page would have more incoming links from trusted sites than the sub-page does.

You can learn more about how Google collects and ranks pages in this article by Matt Cutts.

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Q and A: Why does my site rank well on other engines but not on Google?

Dear Kalena...

I have a website http://www.sawestcoasttourism.com/
I am not able to get this site to rank any where decent on Google.
My primary search term is South African West Coast under that term I am ranked No.1 on MSN No. 10 on Yahoo ands No.13 on Dogpile On Google I am no where to be found.

I have followed every guideline provided by Google and as many SEO Forums as I can read but nothing works. I have not transgressed any of the Google No-No's as far as I know .

I am desperate as my whole business depends on this site more and more.

Kalena - please help!

Lucas

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lucas

I've reviewed your site and here's what I've found:

1) Your site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 2 out of 10, which either means your site has not been online long enough to build up link popularity, or it may have been given a manual penalty of some kind (doubtful).

2) Your site has 9 backward links showing in Google (other sites pointing to it), but this is misleading as Google doesn't generally show all backlinks pointing to sites, especially on sites with a PageRank of 3 or below.

3) Your Title Attribute and META Description tag are not well optimized for peak search engine performance. They could benefit from a complete overhaul by a professional SEO company or you could overhaul them yourself by following basic SEO principles. If you want to learn these principles quickly, I highly recommend taking up our SEO Starter Course at Search Engine College. You could also look at the HTML code of some of your competitor's sites and follow their lead in terms of Title and META tags.

4) Your HTML code is filled with unsupported and non-existent META tags such as < name="robots" content="revisit after 2 days">. These tags are not supported by search engines and are simply taking up valuable indexing space in your HTML code that would be better utilized by body text.

5) The text on your home page is not optimized for target keywords and phrases that your potential visitors will be searching for.

6) If your site has been live for 9 months or less, it is highly likely it is still experiencing Google's aging delay for new sites.

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Q and A: Should I buy expired domains with good PageRank?

Dear Kalena...

I'm hoping you can educate me about buying expired domains. I am aware about Google's expired domain filter and pageranks dropping on new contents.

My curiosity is about buying domains with good pagerank without backward/related links. Is it worth it? Thank you in advance.

Mural

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Mural

My opinion is that buying expired domains for the purpose of exploiting their PageRank or any other reason unrelated to the domain name itself, is a bad idea. You should buy a domain because:

1) you like the domain name
2) the name relates logically to your business/service
3) your customers could relate to the domain name
4) your customers could easily remember the domain address
5) the domain extension (e.g. .com.au) directly represents your regional target market

Also remember that a domain that has a high Google PageRank but doesn't have a lot of backward links most likely achieved the high PageRank from the content itself and/or the amount of traffic it was getting. As you would be adding completely new content, the PageRank would be completely recalculated and you would most likely be caught up in the aging delay anyway.

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Q and A: Why has my design change had a negative impact on my Google rankings?

Dear Kalena...

I just came across your site after several weeks of cruising google and my old favorite, webmasterworld to no avail. If you have any insight to throw my way, I'd really appreciate it.

Urban Lowdown ( www.urbanlowdown.com) is about 4 years old and has gone through many growth spurts over the last year and a half as I've been making the site as optimized as possible, including changing the fundamental structure of the site, including navigation and design several times.

Every update I've made so far has, after an initial dip, has resulted in an increase in traffic (99% of which is driven by search engines, primarily google...)

Until the last update which I made a month and a half ago. I made a substantial design change, with some navigational changes, but nothing fundamental. The url structure is the same, my tags (h1 etc) are the same - there is nothing I can see that I've done which is
beyond cosmetic.

The result has been fairly disastrous. Two months ago I was 600+ unique visitors a day and 2,000 page loads. Since the last update, I am down to 150 - 200 uniques a day and holding there.

I am pretty baffled by this, although the main culprit seems to be my indexed (google) pages. I have sitemaps for all of my main sections and have several thousand pages which used to be indexed and are reflected by the sitemaps.

Over the last few weeks, my indexed pages have dropped to 200, up to 600, 900, and in the two hundreds again. Articles which used be rank in the top 5 don't even show up in the indexes any more. Urban Lowdown has been my pet project that I have done totally on my own time and money, and it's so depressing to watch what's been happening.

If you can shed any light on where exactly I may have screwed things up, I would be eternally grateful.

kind regards,
Gordon

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Gordon

It sounds like a typical case of Sandboxitis to me. Google almost always places an aging delay on newly launched sites, but sometimes existing sites that undergo a design change can trip a filter that places them in the Google Sandbox for an undisclosed period of time. While in the Sandbox, the site seems to disappear from the Google SERPs for related keywords and can sometimes only be found for the domain name or site name.

Naturally, this can cause webmasters to panic, but it usually wears off after a few months and the site re-emerges in the rankings once again. As for your site, you are showing a healthy Google Toolbar PageRank of 5 out of 10, over 11,800 pages indexed by Google and 74 backward links pointing to your site from other sites, indicating no serious damage. I think you simply have to play the waiting game for a few weeks and things will naturally revert to normal.

In the meantime, you might want to lessen your reliance on Google for traffic and start marketing your site via other channels.

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Q and A: Why has my site got a PageRank of zero?

Dear Kalena...

Hi there, I need a quick tip. I have set up a site called : www.readxml.com. The site is listed on google but it hasn't got a rank. I have upload the XML map on Google Sitemap service. I have also traded some links... not much is happening. I am aware that this takes time but it will be nice to get at least a rank 1 ! Thanks a lot and I am looking for your answer.

Frances

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Frances

You shouldn't place so much importance on your site's Google PageRank. As I explained in a post earlier this week, the green PageRank bar displayed in the Google Toolbar is not your true PageRank, it's only an indication. Your site's true PageRank is only known to Google. Switch off that PageRank bar and concentrate on your site content instead.

If your site is fairly new, you will still be experiencing Google's aging delay for new sites. This ranking limbo can last up to 9 months. In the meantime, your link popularity needs attention as Google is not showing any backlinks for your site as yet. To improve your site's link popularity and ultimate ranking for search queries, you need to gain more incoming links pointing to your site from popular sites that have a similar theme to yours.

While you're waiting for the aging delay to end, submit your site to a lot of minor and niche directories, portals and search engines relating to your site content and/or geographic region. Start your search here. Also consider adding more content to your site. Google has only indexed 7 pages of your site so far. Whenever you add new content, be sure to update your XML sitemap and ask Google to re-index it.

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Q and A: How do I increase my site's Google PageRank?

Dear Kalena...

I have been reading your blog for a while and I find it very useful. I own a site called : www.topbazar.net currently rank 3. I have been trying to get to at least rank 5. Do you have any specific tips? I have found hard to trade links with competitors or other sites. I recently bought a link from a "non related" site for 1 month. The site is rank 7. What should I do ?

TopBazar

Kalena's Answer:

Dear TopBazar

It seems as though you are placing a lot of importance on your site's Google PageRank. This is unecessary! For starters, the green PageRank bar displayed in the Google Toolbar is not your true PageRank, it's only an indication. Your site's true PageRank is only known to Google. Switch off that PageRank bar and concentrate on your site content instead.

If you want to improve your site's link popularity and ultimate ranking for search queries, you really need to gain a lot of incoming links pointing to your site from popular sites that have a similar theme to yours. Reciprocal linking will generally not help you. To best way to gain non-reciprocal incoming links is to submit your site to a lot of minor and niche directories, portals and search engines relating to your site content and/or geographic region. Start your search here.

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Q and A: How does Google PageRank work?

Dear Kalena...

I found your page and you seem to know what youre talking about.

I have recently started a site with game related downloads (www.gameupdates.org). The site has only been around since January but have grown fast.

Now to the question.

Google recently updated the pagerank but I don't get it how it works. The only page with PR before the update was the main page www.gameupdates.org with a PR of one. After the update the index page still have a pagerank of one but almost every other page got a pagerank of five. I'm confused here, why don't I get a higher PR on the index page? ..

Thanks
Tomas

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Tomas

First up, you should never rely on the Google Toolbar PageRank to be an accurate indicator of your PageRank. Your true Google PageRank is known only to Google and does not necessarily reflect the PageRank you see in your Google Toolbar. You can learn more about how PageRank works here.

That said, it is a little unusual for your home page PageRank to show a lower score than inner pages, but it's not rare. It simply means that:

1) More sites are linking to or talking about inner pages such as http://www.gameupdates.org/browse.php

2) Google believes your inner pages are more relevant to particular search queries than your top level home page.

Given that most of your audience would bookmark or navigate straight to your inner pages such as downloads and updates and skip your home page altogether, this makes total sense.

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Q and A: Why has the Google PageRank for our home page dropped?

Dear Kalena...

I was working on a ecommerce site for the last 2-3 months and was able to get a GPR (toolbar) of 3 on the home page and 3-4 on the internal pages. However recently we have seen that the home page PR has dropped to 1 but the internal page PR remains the same. We have not lost any IBL, to the best of our knowledge. I know the toolbar PR hardly means anything and thats not the actual one but I am sure you understand that it is really difficult to convince the client and also I find it quite strange to see that the home page PR has dropped while the internal page retains its position.

As the site is just 2-3 months old we have not achieved any rankings in Google. I would like to know your opinion and thoughts on this.

Regards
Saptarshi Roy

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Saptarshi Roy

It's not unusual to see fluctuations in the Google Toolbar PageRank. I know of cases where the PageRank has displayed differently for the same site when viewed at the same time by people in different locations. So don't rely on the Toolbar PageRank score as being anywhere near accurate.

What is more concerning is the fact that your home page PageRank has dropped while the PageRank for your internal pages has not. This is a little strange. Without seeing the site in question, I'm only guessing, but in my opinion, this could be caused by:

1) a glitch with the Google Toolbar (do you have the latest version installed?).
2) your incoming back links are mainly pointing to internal pages.
3) you have recently changed content on your home page and now Google sees it as "less relevant".
4) you have recently obtained a lot of new links pointing to your home page from lower quality sites.
5) Googlebot struck a problem while indexing your home page during his last visit.

If you have submitted an XML sitemap for the site to Google Sitemaps, the data collected should give you some clues related to any indexing issues.

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