Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Given the timing, our best guess is that we messed up our white label search program and Google now thinks we're spamming them with duplicate content. Here's what we've done to try to fix our mistakes:
- On our site and every white label, we've set all our alternate browse paths (beyond category) to nofollow, so there's just one way to walk through each category
- On our white labels, we've added a ban on /search/results pages in our robots.txt file to ensure that only the first page of the white label is available to be indexed
- Ever since we started, each one of our white label pages included a link back to our original site, so Google would be able to figure out what the original content was (and what was a white label).
We're trying to figure out (a) if these steps make sense given current best practices, and (b) if there are other things we should be doing to make it 100% clear that we're trying to stay on the right side of the law.
Outside of white labels, the only other thing I could think of that might possibly relate to SEO is that we have a widget program which allows external web sites (blogs, typically) to grab a widget and place it on their page, giving their readers access to current information. We then use these widgets to know when an outside site has written a review to include a snippet and link in our site. Could these have any negative impact on our SEO?
Thanks!
Ian
[edited by: tedster at 2:54 am (utc) on July 29, 2009]
[edit reason] remove some specifics [/edit]
Also, consider the timing. If you read the current July Updates discussion [webmasterworld.com], you'll note that many -50 penalties have been appearing and disappearing in recent weeks. The best guess from the community is that an algo factor is trying to automate a penalty for suspicious backlinks, but it's not quite right yet.
So, if your five page drop is within this time frame, be prudent about making any extreme changes.
My Best,
Ted
--
Administrator
WebmasterWorld
We'd be happy to make any changes to get in line with best practices with this regard. The most important thing to us is that we use widgets as an input to our system, not necessarily the SEO benefit. Would it be best to:
(a) remove the link back to our site entirely?
(b) make each link specific to the product the widget is talking about, and link directly to the product detail page on our site?
(c) make the link just our site name?
Thanks,
Ian
The fact that your links are visible is a plus. The fact that you do not compensate the linking site is another BIG plus.
The easiest way to be certain you're not causing trouble would be to add a rel="nofollow" attribute. But before you do that, I'd also consider mentioning your widgets in a site reconsideration request, and pointing out what your widget practices are. It's possible that your site was algorithmicallly detected as a false positive, and it that's so you might get the penalty reversed.
Before doing anything extreme (and before submitting a reconsideration request) I'd also suggest studying your backlinks thoroughly. Look for evidence of anyone building malicious backlinks from really off-topic sites, bad neighborhoods, etc -- the practice called Google bowling.
If you find such things in any quantity, you can mention that in your request and disavow any connection to those backlinks. Check out Reconsideration Request Tips [webmasterworld.com] for more guidelines.
In addition, I'd survey all your outbound links, just to make sure they are still pointing to the good pages that you originally intended. Nothing can kill a site more than linking out to a bad neighborhood.
