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@heimdall 188994 wrote:
So basically the site that had the EXACT same structure 6 weeks ago, and actually for the previous 6 months, is now being penalised, has google changed there algorithm or something?
Yes. This year alone Google had over 350 changes to their algorithms; some major but most were small. This is when you see your SERP’s change and then come back to settle – whether higher or lower.
I know there may be things which are wrong but what I don’t understand is why all of a sudden they are penalised when nothing structurally has changed.
Because they are trying to filter out your type of site and provide more genuine content that users can actually use. Directories are not what Google considers to be a good site. The fact that you have duplicated content/tags and your URL structures have stop characters in the such as ‘ ? ‘ is not helping you.
Can you tell me how you discovered all of these points so fast, do you have some special tools?
Xenu and a few others
I have no idea what you mean by changing the site from html to php without redirects but I can agree with the looping and the duplicate title tags and descriptions, although there’s only about 30 duplicates of each and Google has stated that it doesn’t even penalise this. The duplicates aren’t in my opinion proper duplicates but are for example
high-rollercasinos.com/Portugese/Artigos/?start=14
and
high-rollercasinos.com/Portugese/Artigos/?start=16
i.e they are dynamic pages in a list
I don’t know how to fix this but would appreciate some advice please.You need to do a 301 redirect for all of the old html files to the php files. Any boost you were getting from all of those bookmarks is gone.
Then you need to do a mod_rewrite that will pull your page titles (once you get them unique) put in place, into the new file names. (you may also want to switch this around and do the titles, then the mod_rewrite, and then the 301 on the old html pages.
Is using social bookmarking a bad thing then or am I just doing it wrong? I’m confused on that point.
SBM is fine, you just renamed all of your file names when you converted o php and now all the links are broken.
I would love to know how to stop the looping, how do other multi language sites get around this problem, I was told that interlinking was good for a site but maybe that was bad advice or I misunderstood something.
Interlinking is fine if used right. You need to sculpt the link juice through to the words (by HAND) that you are targeting in the SERP’s using nofollows. Here is an excerpt from a session I gave at the GPWA conference at G2E in Vegas;
Optimise Internal Link Structure and Use Nofollows to Boost Positions and Kick-Start New Niche and Longtail Phrases – Internal link structure is a lot about getting the end-user to the conversion point. It can also be used for search engine optimisation in several ways. If you are using a content management system (CMS) that has a keyword tagging feature you can have it search for keywords within the content and link to other pages. This will increase conversions and increase the time the end-user spends on your website. Robots also like internal links within content that point to other, unique relevant content and they follow these links. WordPress and other applications like VBulletin with the SEO upgrade can also accomplish this. But, as I mention above, don’t over do it and don’t confuse the spiders using the same keyword to link to similar, but not matching anchor text.
This is also where the use of a “nofollow” attribute comes in handy. According to Wikipedia, the nofollow was intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen from Blogger created it around 2005. What it does is tell the search engines that you do not endorse the page you have linked to. Using this on internal links like the About, Contact and other pages will increase the “linkjuice” that is passed on to the important pages. A good example of this is if your template navigation is always the same; add nofollow attributes to all of the links beyond the front page so that the key word links I talk about in #2 and #3 that you place in your content will get all of the benefit of the “linkjuice”.
UPDATE! – I would also now add a second instance of the same keyword on the page but add a nofollow to it as well. Recent case studies have suggested that this may be helpful in rankings to, and it can’t hurt. Internal and external links pointed from other websites that have both nofollow’s and dofollow’s may also help, so keep this in mind when acquiring links to your website from other websites.
Just be sure not to confuse the search engines by using the same keyword anchor text as the key word you are optimising the page for (don’t link “buy blue widgets” in anchor text on your “buy blue widgets” page and link out to the “blue widgets” page.
Hot Tip #2 – Another great way to use this tip is when you are creating new pages based on the keyword selection I mentioned above, you can link to them from the front page or an internal funnel page built for ‘closer-to-the-root-file’ navigation. A funnel page is a page that you feed linkjuice to from the front page. The front page is typically the highest ranking page in your website. This funnel page has nofollows on every link except the actual content, which you build to hold any new keywords (such as a new ‘buzz’ word). Put nofollows on everything except your anchor text that points to these new pages. If your homepage carries a good Page Rank (PR) it will pass it down to the new page and will give you a boost in the SERP’s. The goal is that you want to find a niche or longtail keyword phrase, build an optimised page for it, add a link to it from a well ranking page and suddenly you’re ranking at the top for the term.
I’ll also be speaking on this at CAP and CAC in London and Amsterdam.
Ultimately what I don’t understand is that if this site is as bad as you are telling me,
Well believe me….Its bad.
and I have no good reason not to believe you
Search GaryTheScubaGuy or Top 12 SEO Tips for 2007 or Top 12 SEO Tips for 2008. I write articles and speak at all the gaming conferences, but also SES, SMX, and a dozen others, and I’m a moderator over at SEO chat, as well as the Head of Search at a top 5 SEM firm in the UK. Or you could just open the last 4 iGaming Magazines or the last one that CAP did, or search SEMPO. Or meet me face-to-face at any of the CAP, CAC, ICC, IGE conferences. I’ll be speaking at them all again this coming year.
why is it number 1 for my search term in nearly every search engine apart from google like yahoo, msn, alltheweb etc etc?
The niche term you are targeting and the fact you have very very few sites optimising for secondary SE’s because they provide >10% of their traffic. Plus the fact that those SE’s are about the easiest to rank for.
Finally a challenge to any seo experts out there, I clearly need a lot of help so give me a good price for fixing up my site and I’ll consider it.
I can’t take on a job this small but I can offer a detailed report and recommendations that you can give to someone that can;
Apply for a free Geek Critique here
Thanks it is clear that you know what you are talking about and I apologise if I gave you a wrong impression there, that was not my intention.
I have not changed from html to php or vice versa so I’m still confused about your statement on that.
Where are all these broken links that you are talking about I have just run Xenu myself and can’t find any plus almost all my pages have proper names and don’t use stop characters. I would also argue that the titles are about as unique as I can make them, although I have noticed that I need to fix some of them. According to Google duplicate meta descriptions and titles are not penalised, do you disagree with this.
Could changing my IP address have an impact on my site’s serps or is it that Google finally realised that my site is no good and dropped it like a lead balloon?
You still haven’t explained how I can solve the issue with the robots following my links around and around.
I don’t quite understand what is wrong with having a site with casino and poker reviews as well as loads of unique articles, is this not what Google wants, how else could I structure the site apart from having directories?
For your information the site is based on MODx which as far as I understand it is a good cms system and should be built for good seo, is this wrong, if so which system would you recommend?
I can appreciate that you are very busy but could you maybe refer me to someone who could help me fix what I still consider to be a good content site.
Also maybe give me an example of one of your sites so that I can see how it should be done, that would also be useful.
You must have done something I pulled another to identify a few things and it came back with 2/3rd less pages.
be sure you are both looking at/talking about the same url?
@GaryTheScubaGuy 189163 wrote:
You must have done something I pulled another to identify a few things and it came back with 2/3rd less pages.
Oh I’ve been taking a good long look at the site (high-rollercasinos) after your first email and I’ve changed a few things already, I took out all the social bookmarking stuff as I’m not overly convinced by that stuff anyway. I also changed the internal linking a bit so that all the country flag links, at the top of the page, now point to the home pages for each language instead of interlinking between categories and individual reviews. I did this is an attempt to get away from the circular link problem you mentioned. BTW the site should have about 750 pages in total.
I’m still a bit curious about what’s wrong with the structure of my site though, I thought I was supposed, from an seo and usability point of view, have a clear hierarchy which is what I think I have.
Plus still a bit curious about why you think my site’s pages have the php extension? or indeed think its been changed, if it has then it wasn’t deliberate on my part. The sites pages shouldn’t be canonical as I have a plugin in place to prevent that, can you please tell me how it is canonical?
BTW Thanks a million for all your help with this, it is very much appreciated and has been a real eye opener to me, as I genuinely thought the site was ok.
I didn’t receive that PM though, that would be very useful thanks.
@elgoog 189166 wrote:
be sure you are both looking at/talking about the same url?
Yepp, that always helps :3eyes:
