A long history of Google woes...

I also posted this over on forums.seochat.com, so I apologize if you're seeing the same content twice. Considering I am primarily using vBSEO for in-band SEO optimiazation, I figured it would be appropriate to post this here as well.

Site: Tactical Gamer - The PREMIERE online community for mature gamers!

Tactical Gamer is an online gaming community, the site is forum-driven using vBulletin. We have about 800 or so new "pages" (which include new threads and posts) added per day.

About 16 months ago, my site was rather well indexed in Google. We were on top of our game (no pun intended) in terms of SERPs for our targeted keywords. At the end of last summer, we took a serious nose-dive. Everything in the site went supplemental and stayed that way for a couple months. We eventually came back into the normal index and our SERPs were where we wanted them to be.

About two months ago we took another nose-dive. Once again, our SERPs were in the toilet. This has been followed up with most of the site moving back into supplementals. Around this same time, I was reading up on the negative effects of running the Digitalpoint Co-Op and I ceased using it immediately. The end result was a decent drop in IBLs but we still hung on to a lot of relevant IBLs that were part of natural content-oriented link building.

The site is several years old, has all the appropriate 301's to redirect non www. URLs over to our preferred www. URLs. We also used to have several domains all pointing to the same site, these too have been 301'ed to our main URL. These 301's were put in place about a year ago.

Other than the DP Co-Op, we have been running vbSEO on the site for about a year to provide URL rewrites and dynamic keyword and description meta tags.

I'm not sure if my problem lies in the fact that I'm still doing something really wrong with the site, or if Google is just taking its time getting me back in the main index after the removal of the DP links. At the very least, I would expect the keywords "tactical gamer" to get us on the first page of the SERPs rather than the third or fourth page. Considering I have a couple other sites that just mention Tactical Gamer and provide IBLs to the site that show up on the first page, I would think that the main site would show up simply because of it's natural keyword density for "tactical gamer" within the site content and the number of IBLs that point to the site using that text as the anchor.

I've searched for solutions and info, but most of the problems I've seen are more short-term related or can be directly attributed to specific dates. I do notice that the cache date for our main page is September 28th, which is a date that has stood out in several other posts/threads, but I'm not sure if that's really relevant or not.

16 months ago, Google would hammer our site daily indexing content. That has dropped off over the past two months to a couple hundred pages indexed per day, although the past three days have shown ~5,000 pages or so indexed. Additionally, 16 months ago we were seeing 2,500-3,500 referrals per day from Google. As of a few months ago, we're hovering around 150 per day.

I am using Google Sitemaps, which are re-generated nightly and submitted to Google. There are 10 sitemaps, each with 40,000 URLs, and an 11th with about 6,000 URLs that grows on a daily basis. I have never been involved with any cloaking, scraping or black-hat SEO practices. My revenue is based on subscribers rather than Google Ad-Sense, so I've only been targeting keywords that are relevant to the bulk of the content on the site, rather than keywords targeted towards advertising.

I have submitted a re-inclusion request after I removed the DP Co-Op text links, that request was submitted about 2 months ago. I have been considering looking at my meta descriptions and keywords again. But I believe they are varied enough from page to page.

Does anyone have any feedback/suggestions or anything of that nature? Even if I just need to be patient, I'm fine with that, but I would like to confirm that I'm not doing anything wrong. If any professional or semi-professional SEO types see any glaring issues that I should remediate, that would be quite helpful.

Regards,

You have a PR of 6 and 207,000 pages indexed.

What you are dealing with is the same thing that many of us are dealing with. It isn't your site, it is google. They have had continual problems since September of last year and don't listen to anybody who tells you what the problem is because they are all simply guessing at this point. I am convinced that google isn't really sure what their problem is.

I monitor my indexed pages pretty closely, and have crazy changes constantly. I can rank in the top 20 for one major keyword for a couple days, then not be in the top 200 for the next week. Indexed pages change constantly, often showing pages with a "cache" of 2004. The next time I check, those pages have disappeared.

I have thousands of pages showing up when I check indexed pages under a certain directory that no longer exists, but when I do a site search including that directory, I return no results.

Bottom Line - You just can't worry about it at this point. Just keep doing what your doing, building content within your forum, and don't change any structures to try to fix anything, because most likely nothing is wrong with what you are doing.

Indeed, it's google.

We're all going through the same thing.

That said, your site could be cleaned up some.
there s abunch of simple fixes in your code, all the uppercase XHTML elements, <br\> tags that are obviosuly typo'ed. script langauge is depreciated, use type="text/javascript"

The MM menu is also old school, not accessible, and SE's can't follow it.
perhaps try looking into something like this:
CSS Menu Tutorial - Horizontal and Vertical CSS Menus

Thanks for the info guys, it's all appreciated.

I am aware that the menu is old school and broken, that's on my agenda to fix, but I wasn't too worried about Google following that as the content I do care about isn't driven off that menu. It does cause issues with IE7 though, so it's a priority fix for me.

One thing I have been wanting to do is to customize the meta description and keywords for the SHOWTHREAD_SHOWPOST pages as they all have the same page description which could contribute a bit to Google pushing those pages into the supplementals, although that's not confirmed. However; I'm having trouble with that. vBSEO doesn't seem to build dynamic descriptions for the showpost pages. I've tried using RR's, but they don't seem to get parsed on my showpost pages.


Thanks for the direction on the CSS Menu Tutorial. I've been using some canned package to build my main menu in the past, but I'm looking to move away from that.

I'd recommend turning off re-writing of showpost.php, and adding showpost.php to your robots.txt file. I don't run my sitemap with that either.

Duplicate contnet. Send the user to the thread, not the post.

Google sucks it is not just you

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

Google sucks it is not just you

I reiterate what people have said, Google is bust!!! While for certain sites, Google can be working great, for others, things are horribly bad. And I don't consider that it is anything that the website owners have necessarily done wrong. Google's algos are so complex, that they are not even aware of the implications of what each part does.

Test to Run

One of the tests that I do for a site is to see where it ranks for its domain name. Google has been ranking many sites very high, solely because the search term is its domain name. Your root domain does not rank at all for the "Tactical Gamer" search phrase, rather, an internal page. Therefore, Google is bust for your site.

Another test is to check that the text around your main search phrase on your site has not been copied on other sites. Google search, quotes around intro paragraph words containing search phrase 'bla bla search phrase bla bla". Duplicate content can get your site booted on Google, and can create a cancer that spreads through your site. Given that your site does not have a consistent intro paragraph, I don't think that is the issue here. If it was the issue, you would need to change your intro paragraph and again hope for the best.

The Digitalpoint Coop can certainly be an issue. Too many links, and rotating links/link churn can be seen by Google, and a black mark be put against your site. You mention telling Google about it. Have you used the Google webmaster/sitemaps reinclusion request form??? Making specific mention of you using the coop, then taking it off is worth a try.

Some sites that have not enough Google PR can be seen as not important by Google. Sometimes, just adding more Google PR into the site can make a difference. But your site has a Google PR of 6 (home page) so this should not be an issue.

The end result - because of something that you have done (digitalpoint coop), or something that someone else has done against you (duplicate content), or some other undetermined glitch in Googles formula, Google has a black mark against you.

The biggest issue, is that even once you have put things right, Google has a long memory of that black mark. It seems to be a batch process that puts a black mark against people rather than an ongoing recalculation. You just have to wait it out.

Recommendations

That said, you need to make sure that you have done your best with the seo of your site, so that when Google finally ranks your site properly, that you stand the best chance at ranking well.

Some pointers:

• well done on the non www and multi domain issues - can be an issue for many sites
• main domain page -
  • you need an intro paragraph section that stays top of the page.
  • That section needs an h1 to tell google that your content is starting, as well as that the phrase in the h1 is important for that page.
  • It needs to include all your main search phrases, and best to mention any one phrase twice within 156 characters (being Google's snippet).
  • One link in that paragraph needs to be to the main forum page.
  • If you note your current main page, its not the easiest for people to know where to go, since the first paragraph is promoting something other than your own site.
  • note that the Google PR of your domain is pr6, but the pr of your forum is rather low. Need to rel=nofollow all the outbound news links, and check over any other links you have on that page.
• inner pages -
  • I have the rule - search phrases in title, meta description, h1, and opening paragraph.
  • So I recommend that you consider the recommendations in my seo vbulletin thread (see my signature).
  • You have the title and meta description not too bad, but no h1 or opening paragraph. How is Google to see that your pages are relevant for a certain phrase if that phrase is not prominantly on the page.
  • Have another look at your meta description. It looks good, and probably best to keep it as is.... But, generally, you need two instances of some of the words in yor search phrase. With the forum name mentioned as well as the thread title, you have the two instances - but only where the forum name contains one of the words in the thread title. Consider repeating the thread title twice, some sales pitch, and finish with the first say 30 words of the thread. Its ok to have a meta description longer than the snippet that Google uses (156 characters). But make sure that you have two instances of some of the search words in the search phrase within 156 characters. Google will highlight the first two instances of words in the search phrase.

I wish that there was an easy solution. I have a client that is all supplimentals, and trust me, I have seo'ed the site real well!!!!! And it has great Google PR... In my clients instance, I consider it was the opening paragraph issue. But site still in supplimentals.

Google is bust, but still some things that could be done for when Google decides to like your website.

So how about that?

Thanks for all the great info, T2DMan.

I must say that everything I've done with vBulletin is a result of your work and guides from your site. Before I found vBSEO, I relied on your site and guides VERY heavily to optimize my site and your suggestions always worked wonders.

Thanks again for taking the time to type all that out and take an in-depth look at my site. I'll make sure to get these changes made so as to not have wasted your time doing all that typing!

Thanks Juan for asking me to post, and all the best for your site Plarkin.

Originally Posted by T2DMan

Thanks Juan for asking me to post, and all the best for your site Plarkin.

You didn't have to give that away though - t2dman had been offline for a little while and I threatened to remove him from the staff if he didn't post meaty content anytime soon...... j/k - Michael is a genius, and I'm always glad to see his spectacular knowledge shaped into posts via these forums. Thank-you Mike