Well, donloper.com has been penalized by Google, but I’m not sure why.
Up until June 16th, 2009 the site would get between 130-300 visitors per day, depending on the day of the week and how frequently I was posting. On June 17th the traffic dropped to 99 visitors, 73 visitors on June 18th, 25 on June 19th, and since then has hovered between 10-15 visitors per day. Considering that virtually 100% of the traffic to this site comes from Google and the precipitous decline in traffic, it’s obvious that something went wrong and that it isn’t just a matter of the site not ranking as well as it used to.
After seeing my stats, I did a site:donloper.com and saw that while certain pages are indexed, only 11 are indexed with the title tag content being displayed. If you view the omitted search results you get many of the pages on the site, but only the urls are indexed. The title tags and descriptions are nowhere to be found.
I then did some keyword searches for terms that donloper.com previously ranked #1 for and what do you know? Donloper.com doesn’t rank for anything anymore. Nada. Zip. Not a single ranking to be found.
In other words, the site has not been completely de-indexed (Google ban), but it has been entirely dropped from search results (Google penalty). The question now is why, and what can I do to fix it?
But perhaps I’m being too hasty. Is there some technical reason the site is having problems? I tried out the WP Super Cache plugin around that time, but I also tried it out on another site with the same settings, and that site hasn’t had any problems. I also noticed that my Google XML Sitemaps plugin hadn’t rebuilt the sitemap in a very long time, but again, the same thing held true on other blogs that haven’t had any problem.
I then started looking to other factors. I have links to websites that are completely unrelated to the content on DonLoper.com because on all my blogs I have a list of links to my SEO firm‘s clients. But there you go, they’re on the other sites as well that haven’t had any problems. If donloper were picked up by an algorithm you would think my other sites would have been picked up as well. Any other practice I can think of on donloper.com is being done on several of my other sites that aren’t having search engine performance issues. So why donloper?
The only thing I can figure out is that I was ratted on by somebody. Google provides means by which somebody can notify Google if they think the site is doing something unseemly. But who would do such a thing and why? And wouldn’t Google somehow check my site before penalizing it? If they did, I don’t know what they would have found.
