Oh, No!!!

A sudden drop in Google rankings is terrifying if you rely on traffic from Google to bring in a significant portion of visitors to your site. When it happens, your traffic almost always takes a proportional hit. And that affects your revenue – very negatively.

What’s most terrifying about this is that you almost never know why it happened — and Google isn’t about to tell you. So how do you know what to fix?

As it turns out, Matt Cutts (The Google Guy) has answered that question in a video. He outlines some concrete steps you can follow to figure out what went wrong so you can fix it.

We hope it never happens to you, but if it does we think Matt’s suggestions will help.

Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all. Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

• Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
• Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
• Proper use of 301 redirects
• Paying close attention to their page speed
• Constantly building backlinks.
• One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.

CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve  been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant. Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought. And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

People get all a-twitter every time Google makes a significant algorithm change. Most changes are pretty tiny tweaks, but the new one over the last two or three days is supposed to be a more significant one. (See Google’s announcement here.)

Not to worry! This one is designed to filter out crappy web sites, not yours. It’s believed to filter out link farms, sites with little or no content (like “Made For AdSense” sites) and sites that copy significant content from elsewhere. It’s been unofficially dubbed the “Farmer” update in recognition of its effect on link farms.

If you have a good site with high quality content that provides value to your visitors, this is good news. Any lousy web sites that used to beat you out in the rankings should be dropping out of site.

Website Magazine cautions:

Without question, the focus is now on producing original, quality content. So-called scraper sites are doomed. But even bloggers need to be careful about posting content that could be considered “low-quality” or that which could be viewed as being a simple re-publishing of existing content. In other words, if you don’t have anything original to say about an existing story … be careful. Now more than ever, the focus seems to be shifting toward quality, not necessarily quantity.

On the popular WebmasterWorld forum, many webmasters have reported that all of their web pages except for their index page have been moved to Google’s supplemental index.

What are supplemental results?

Supplemental results in Google are from an alternate index. Google usually only uses this index if they can’t find sufficiently relevant results in their normal index, so the supplemental index is only used for very obscure queries.

Google augments results for difficult queries by searching a supplemental collection of web pages. Results from this index are marked in green as “Supplemental.”

Being in the supplemental index generally means that your web pages won’t be included in the result pages for normal queries anymore. Uh oh!

How can you check if your web pages have gone supplemental?

Perform a Google search for site:mysite.com (replace mysite.com with your own domain name). If you see “supplemental result” next to the snippet then your web pages are supplemental. If soeone searches on your keywords then, they may not find your listing unless they check the supplemental results. For a breakdown of where they would see that (as well as what allt he other stuff in Google resulrts means, see this explanatory page.

What can you do if your web site is affected?

In the WebmasterWorld forums, a Google employee who posts under the name Googleguy asked webmasters to send their feedback to Google:

“I’m happy to ask someone to check this out. Please send an email to sesnyc06@gmail.com with specific domains and the keyword ‘gonesupplemental’.

I have a theory about this, which I’m asking the crawl/index guys to check out, but I’ll need 5-10 specific examples to check if my theory holds. If my guess is right, I’ll try to get the crawl/index folks to get things back to the previous behavior.”

You shouldn’t worry too much if your web site has been moved to Google’s supplemental index. As soon as Google has rebuilt the new index, your web pages should be back in Google’s main results.

If your web pages are still in the supplemental results in a week or two, contact Google at the email address mentioned above.

Google wants to make its search engine results pages more relevant by removing some of the spam. It seems that the following elements are the most common reasons that some web site rankings have dropped in Google:

• hidden text on your web pages (especially text that is hidden in invisible CSS layers)
• paid links or other links that are considered outside of Google’s quality guidelines
• overuse of internal links or anchor text as the sole source of optimization

Of course, Rank Magic utilizes “best practices”, so none of our clients have been adversely affected by the recent update.

You may have noticed that Google is currently updating its ranking algorithm. This seems to be a major update because many people are reporting significant in their rankings. The PageRank of www.MSN.com dropped to PageRank 2 in this latest update so there really seem to be some big changes in the new algorithm.

Google engineer Matt Cutts more or less denies that this is a big update in his blog:

“These days rather than having a large monolithic update, Google tends to have smaller (and more frequent) individual launches. [...]

My point is that more than ever, we are constantly working to improve our algorithms and scoring. Some changes are hardly noticed at all. Some changes (e.g. user interface improvements) are more visible. Some changes have nothing to do with spam [...] Some changes do try to decrease spam or increase core quality. [...]

And again, these PageRanks and backlinks have already been incorporated into scoring a while back (Google updates PageRank continually and continuously), but some people just love to look at PageRanks.)”

There are a few factors that seem to be important in this update:

• Hidden text spam seems to be more penalized. While most search engines consider white text on white background spamming, it seems that Google now also recognizes text that is hidden in invisible CSS layers. (CSS is a technical web coding protocol. Invisible CSS layers work like white text on a white background: they show some text to the search engines that normal people visiting your page can’t see.)
• Links from automated link exchanges and text link advertising systems seem to count less.
• As with every algorithm update, Google tries to remove the spam from its database with this update.

How should you react?

First of all, don’t panic. If your web site rankings have dropped, wait another week to make sure that the index update is over. If your web site is still not listed, take a look at what you might have done wrong.

If you use CSS to hide text on your web pages, remove it. Google doesn’t seem to like that at all. If you use other techniques that might be considered spam, remove them from your pages.

If you have a links page, do not use a link exchange system with a central server but host your link pages on your own web site. Being part of a centralized system makes your web site vulnerable if the centralized system is considered spam.