Let me first say that those who know me realize that I'm not new to this business, and rarely post SEO/SEM questions. I feel this is a good puzzle to look at. I'm sure others have similar scenarios, but I have a feeling this may be very unique and a great example to discuss.
Some brief history...
Those who have known me may remember the large content site I produced with family over the past 6 years. www.surviveoutdoors.com. Survive Outdoors has 14 DMOZ listings that I know of, some of them are great where our anchor text is only "Sunburn", "Frostbite", and "Dehydration". We have always ranked well on MSN/Yahoo. Our Google rankings have always been understandable for the past 6 years (not in the past 6 months though). Ranking anywhere from the top 10 to the top 20, moving around in the top 50 sometimes, nothing too horrible. Our DMOZ listed articles were often ranked in the top 10.
Also, given that our site is called "Survive Outdoors", all of our incoming links have the anchor text "Survive" and "Outdoors". Therefore, we used to jump around in the top 50 when you would search Google on just "outdoors". It was a fun side project of mine to work on ranking better on that. We're now not in the top 300.
So basically, for years we were always ranked fairly well for our articles, jumping around from time to time.
In the winter of last year, our rankings dropped for all our articles. Topics like "brown recluse spider" aren't even in the top 300 on Google. Our DMOZ listed articles aren't in the top 100. We get basically 0% Google referrals.
My plan was to analyze the site, make changes, and email Google with a reinclusion request asking that we be unpenalized. I logically thought we were penalized based on our demolished rankings for a veteran website.
So in the winter of 2005, I sent an initial email requesting to be unpenalized. Google replied assuring me we weren't penalized or banned. Okay, so what next?
I discovered the site was indexed twice, with surviveoutdoors.com and www.surviveoutdoors.com. I setup automatic 301 redirects to force www.surviveoutdoors.com. I began to think maybe Google saying I'm not penalized only means there are no MANUAL penalties in place? So automatic dupe content issues that lower your rank may not be considered penalties anymore? Just some thoughts....
Survive Outdoors also had an affiliate shopping section which I just recently took down (3 days ago). I also this past week sent my 2nd reinclusion request (remember the original was done ~ 6 months ago). I told Google "i believe I found the reason we are penalized. our affiliate shopping section, blah blah blah, company bio's obvious duplicate content, blah blah, mentioned the 301 redirect and double indexing, blah blah".
The reply I got, "Please be assured that your site is not currently banned or penalized by Google."
Conclusions I have come up with...
- We have been re-sandboxed, and can expect understandable results in the next 6 months. I know some of you may not believe in the sandbox, but it's fairly obvious. I have 3 documented sites now which randomly appeared in the top 10 one morning after not ranking for 6-9 months in the top 100. And, all incoming links for that given site were obtained in the first month of launching. So the rank boost was not because of gradual incoming links being obtained.
- surviveoutdoors.com is still indexed without the www after setting up the 301 redirects a little while ago. Google has been changing their search engine system, I don't remember the names given to these changes, but perhaps that put a delay on my ability to 301 redirect and remove non-www pages. Perhaps this is still a huge factor. Perhaps this re-sandboxed us.
I'll post more thoughts as I remember them. Sorry for the typos, this is a long post dont' feel like proof reading.
