During the October 31st update, I had a few BANS sites that either got penalized or did not fare well with the Google algorithm shift. I took a good hard look at the situation and concentrated on just one site to work on to see if I could get it back. The highest ranking page, the front page, dropped out of site from page 1 Google. Everything looked great on the site except for the fact I did have product listings on the front page and other pages still had 20 product listings as well. The site has it's fair share of unique content and has some good backlinks as well. The meta tags were fine as well. The changes I made, were to remove the product listings from the front page, changed to closed navigation and changed store pages to show only 9 product listings. That was it and I hurried up and waited. Google has since been back and updated rankings and the site reclaimed its spot in the rankings for quite a few of it's target phrases.
So was this Google Claus rewarding for not having product listings on the front page? Did Google just maybe clamp affiliate sites a bit harder during the Christmas buying phase? Well I do not believe the second question to be true as I have several BANS sites that held great rankings through the shopping season. Some have blogs, some do not. I do think that showing the eBay listings on the front page might have had something to do with it though. I am now running another more exact test on another site that was out of favor to see if indeed there may be a correlation. Remember too that the eBay product listings are ads and are nofollow links as well. Could it be that Google has a thing with nofollow on a home page or maybe a set amount of nofollow links per page. One thing I will be testing is just putting 20 nofollow links on a front page to other like sites, just to see if I can trigger something. The recommendation I feel I can make right now though is to to not show eBay listings on your front page, especially if they page was ranking well before the October 31st update.
Oh, and thank you Google Claus!
6 comments:
Soggy,
Is that you celebrating Christmas already.Learnt a lot from you during the year..2008..thanks a million... Merry Christmas..
Dave
Nope not me. Coffee will not do that to a person. I gave up alcohol years ago and my diet consist of only coffee, crystal light lemonade and cigarettes. Sometimes all at the same time.
Dave, if there should be no ebay listings on the front page...what about it you have WP on the root and are using PHPBay Pro to display a few ebay listings on some of your posts? Would that be a problem?
I did the same thing Soggy and got the same result.
I suspected for a while that it maybe home page products that were causing a problem, and I finally tested it. I also made my welcome message much longer and keyword relevant of course, added a nice image with keyword alt tag and my site is back page 1, position 1.
@anonymous,
Nope, I do not see it as a problem in WP Post if the post keep moving every now and again, but really the testing thus far is BANS only so I hate to lump another product in with that. I have another site that I am leaving just 3 product listings on the front page to watch what the results are.
Dave
I've seen the same thing on my sites. Taking the listings off of the front page has improved my rankings significantly.
I've also noticed that any of my inner pages with listings (even 6 to 8 listings) now rank very poorly while pages with a comparable amount of unique content continue to be fine.
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