Error in Judgement
Over the past few years, I have enjoyed excellent ranking and indexing for my articles, blogs and articles on Google. Most of my content were original, and it would generally be indexed and displayed on the 1st page of Google for searches relating to that particular topic. PERFECT.
Now … a few months ago, I was being greedy and I agreed to publish someone’s blog post on our site for a fee. OMG! What a mistake! DO NOT do what I did … you will be penalized by Google and you’ll suffer the consequences.
At first, it was fine … the blog posts would be published and I would receive some cash for it. There wasn’t any noticeable changes to my traffic and my pages were being indexed on Google (1st page) as normal. THEN … about a month ago, using Google Analytics I noticed my traffic drop like crazy, by almost 75%.
I thought that was odd, so I randomly searched some of my pages/content on Google and guess what? None was to be found on the 1st page of Google.
In fact, all of my pages were being indexed and displayed way down the ranking on page 4 or 5 of the search results. Needless to say, this is one of the reasons why my traffic dropped like 75%.
I did some more research and I realized that some of the blog posts were in fact a little “spammy” in the eyes of Google, and there were some links within the posts that were “off topic”. This is not good! And there’s nobody to blame except myself … it serves me right for being greedy.
Possible Solution
Now, I need to fix this and do some damage control. Here’s how I did it …
- Remove ALL questionable blog posts – In fact, remove anything you might think could be causing the issue.
- Re-Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- Allow at least 3-4 days for the robots to crawl your pages again (hopefully, your pages will be re-indexed again)
Remember, what I’ve said so far may or may not be the answer to why your pages are not being indexed anymore (or ranked lower than before). For me, I found the reason why (see above) and I fixed it. But there are plenty of other reasons why Google could have done it.
- Site was banned by Google
- A website that’s made for Adsense (MFA)
- Low quality and/or duplicate content
- Pages that appear to look like SPAM and Phishing sites
- Pages that include BAD backlinks and links to RISKY sites
So here’s the moral of the story … don’t be GREEDY and only deal with people (and content) that you trust. I learnt it the hard way … Let’s hope my experience will help others who are in similar situations.
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