Strange Phenomenon On Google And Loss Of Rank

[tramadius]

My client's restaurant site has been hit hard by the bourbon update and has yet to return to the very high rankings that it's had for the past five years. We were number one on Google for several different key phrases for Philadelphia Restaurants. We still hold the top positions for the same phrases on MSN and Yahoo. Google crawls our home page every day but only crawls the rest of the site on a monthly basis as the site content does not change that often. I've already submitted a reinclusion request to Google but have yet to hear back. Not sure if it was necessary since we're still in the index.

 

I've added a permanent 301 redirect, absolute links, removed all duplicate content. As I was reviewing the site, I discovered a few things that seem strange. FYI: The site

 

1. Google indexed back in January, some pages that do not exist on my site' server. eg. http://www.lafamiglia.com/Awards.html?PHPS...235fb95b2021529

 

There a handfull of these dyanamic URLs that are still showing up in the index. Any idea where they came from? I have two valid PHP pages on my site that ask the user to reserve a table or send in a comment. They contain an image verifier script via a formmail.php file that I downloaded from tectite.com.

 

2. I have noticed that there are countless restaurant/wine related Web site directories that have hijacked a lot of my site's content/wine list/menus, and posted on their own site (which, in turn, back link to our site). Could this duplicate content on these other Web sites be a contributing factor in my site's severe loss in page ranking?

 

Thanks for any assistance.

[Deverill]

Hi Tramadius.

The mystery url's may be dynamic ones generated by a script such as your validator - they may have been temporary addresses that Google picked up on.

The other sites with duplicate content, if it is nealy exact, could be considered as a scam by you to get unwaranted traffic, but anyone who did that on purpose would only risk diluting their ranking anyway.

The actions you have taken with the 301, absolute links and removing dupes are all good and should pay off in the end.

 

With search engines you must be patient, do the right thing and wait for it to turn around for you. We are at their mercy so do the best you can and don't be tempted by the fad-of-the-day to try to "fix" it.

[tramadius]

Thanks for the response Jim.

 

I found this article last night, http://www.elixirsystems.com/seo_tips/avoi...ent-penalty.php

 

They recommend using an online app, http://www.copyscape.com/ to see who's stealing content. It works gloriously.

 

After running copyscape, I noticed that there is a lot of my site's content that hasb been indeed hijacked. Looks like I need to rewrite my content as there are too many sites that have hijacked content from several pages from within my site.

[Deverill]

Thanks for the link, that's an interesting service.

You probably will benefit from fresh content anyway so that sounds like a good plan to me. Good luck with it!

[guita01]

Thanks for the response Jim.

 

I found this article last night, http://www.elixirsystems.com/seo_tips/avoi...ent-penalty.php

 

They recommend using an online app, http://www.copyscape.com/ to see who's stealing content. It works gloriously.

 

After running copyscape, I noticed that there is a lot of my site's content that hasb been indeed hijacked. Looks like I need to rewrite my content as there are too many sites that have hijacked content from several pages from within my site.

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Thanks for the link. Turns out several sites copied my entire front page when they added my website as a link. So I did some re-writing.

Edited July 21, 2005 by guita01