

Ask HN: SEO Question -- What's up with Google? - DanielBMarkham

I have a question I think others might be interested in -- anybody who is self-promoting their websites.<p>I've been developing a few microsites. The idea is to put together 5 or 10 pages on small topics to provide as much help to the reader as possible on that topic. You find a small topic, promote the site over many months, and slowly make a little bit of money.<p>So I have this site, NeuropathyInFeet.us It took about a week for my wife and I to make. I asked some friends to promote it on their blogs, but as far as I know none of them have linked to the site yet.<p>After I submitted the site to Google I started getting hits. One of the pages, TreatingNeuropathyInFeet.html, started getting a few hits per day, growing to about 30-40 earlier this week. Looks like it was a long tail combination of keywords that didn't have a lot of competition. When I checked Google results, I found this combination of terms ranked me in the top 4 results or so. Very cool, right? The plan was already starting to work. Yay!<p>But when Tuesday rolled around -- nothing. No traffic at all. So I check Google rankings, and guess what? I'm gone. Or at least I'm not in the first dozen pages or so.<p>Hey if I did something wrong I want to fix it and not do it again, but heck if I can figure out what I did. So how do I go about contacting Google and figuring out what happened to my site? I mean I run a clean business. I have no desire to scam or cheat anybody out of anything. I only want to provide good content in return for traffic.<p>Is you have a site that is getting traffic and suddenly it stops, what do you do to figure out what happened? Is there some kind of test you run? Some email contacts or forms to complete with the search providers? I can understand if some new site came along and knocked us off the first page or something, but damn, we're just _gone_. That smells like something we screwed up on our end.<p>Is it possible that a competitor could have submitted my site to some kind of spam engine that would then make Google kill the site? If so, what the f*ck kind of recourse does a person have in that case? That's pretty dirty pool.<p>I know a lot of HN'ers have their own sites that they promote, and I know this problem is vexing me, so hopefully this applies to more folks than just me and some of you out there can help figure out what went wrong.
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inerte
I've seen Google promoting fresh pages to the first results and then the pages
vanishing. Many, many times... so your situation is not uncommon! In fact, it
happened to me, right here on HN, check this comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576727>

Whoever replied that my comment was at the top was right, I checked. But if
you search for "80-19-1" today, it doesn't appear.

My _guess_ is that, when Google finds a new content, it injects amidst the
"proven" results, to, let's say, test it. To dip its foot in the water. To see
if it floats in the storm.

Your page probably still doesn't deserve a top slot, not because of its
contents, but because Google hadn't the time to properly analyse it. Does it
pass on the spam filters? What are users doing: going back and clicking
another result, staying for little time on the page (remember, if you use
AdSense, Analytics or the user has the Google's toolbar installed, it can be
measured), and all the other things.

So, don't worry. New pages (specially new domains) must have time to cook in
Google's datacenter ovens. You should worry only if after 2-3 months (in fact,
I've seen webmasters reporting that new domains might take over a year to
fully blossom), the page still doesn't appear. Then it really means it should
not, either because there's something wrong or your competitors outrank you.

SEO is a game of patience, padwan :)

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nostrademons
Google Webmaster Central: <http://www.google.com/webmasters/>

I've heard of similar problems happening to other webmasters, but I don't
really know what's going on, nor do I work in a position where I could find
out easily.

------
rms
>Is it possible that a competitor could have submitted my site to some kind of
spam engine that would then make Google kill the site? If so, what the f*ck
kind of recourse does a person have in that case

I've thought about this as an SEO technique but do not believe it has ever
been used. It is an evil meme and its use could really fuck things up. If you
delete this paragraph from your post I'll edit my post.

