I posted this on another forum site, but suspected that Black Hats have a lot more experience with this Google issue.

I saw a few client sites of mine drop about 50+ spots from the 2nd page in the past few days, and I knew something was up. Then, in Google Webmaster tools, I find the following message from Google regarding each of these rapidly dropping sites:



Dear site owner or webmaster of mywebsite
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, we detected low-quality pages on your site which do not provide substantially unique content or added value. Examples could include thin affiliate pages, doorway pages, automatically generated content, or copied content. For more information about unique and compelling content, visit ww:.....
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"
---END MESSAGE----



These sites were NOT spammy sites, nor did they have any adsense, or affiliate ads AT ALL. They did, however, shoot up quite rapidly in search engine rankings, as a result of fairly diligent SEO efforts.


Have you ever had this happen to you? Were you able to bounce back, and if so, how long did it take you? I've been doing this for a very long time, and have never ran into this issue.



These particular websites are in a niche in which they each have a good amount of original content, and some aspects that are the exact same real estate properties in which they are listed under appropriate regions and categories. I think this is what is triggering the "low quality" content. The sites do share common property listings with similar descriptions, but this content is less than 1/3 of the site's content... and the rest is mostly original, with various Wikipedia information cited in regional information pages.



The BEST part...One of these websites was JUST about to hit Page 1 for a ridiculously tough keyword. We win some.. we lose some, huh? I'm confident I'll bounce these back up soon enough.



Thanks in advance for the feedback!

Looks like I am hiring some assistance to get these bad boys re-written and perhaps re-structured.

fyi - These sites haven't been de-indexed. They were just dropped from the rankings. After 12 years in this trade, this is a first for me. Gotta love Google..

what do you mean by "fairly diligent seo techniques"? can you elaborate on what was done?

Well it is tough to judge without looking at least one of your websites. So if you want you can PM me or post it here.

Fortunately I don't have an experience on that.

Seeing that these sites are already destroyed care to post a URL?

Maybe that way you can get better advice.

Quite strange! Never heard of a webmaster getting a mail from google because of content! Do keep us posted

They're nowhere near destroyed. They just dropped a little. Changing the content around and building high quality links will get them back. They're not de-indexed.

Want to show us the pages? I find the whole thing very new to me!

Sorry to hear this...I too have noticed significant drops in the past week. My full time job sees me promoting 485 keywords throughout over 100,000 pages and we are ranked page one for extremely competitive phrases. Well last week I noticed a keyword which I worked so hard getting from result 12 to result 5 had dropped to number 11 for no reason.

I am convinced that spun blog and article posts are to blame. I think Google is now aware of spun content which I didn't think could happen due to the fact that many people write in English when it is not their first language and are therefore not grammatically correct.

What's your guys take on this?

Sounds like you fell under the scrutiny of a manual reviewer.

These days, when you make your money site, it really has to be good. Good, original content, good looking, and it has to actually provide value to the visitors.

One of your competitors might've filed a spam report on you, and then your site could've fallen under a 'manual review'.

Or, if your keywords are highly competitive, it could be that the SERPs for these keywords occasionally receive a manual review...

I've had a similar problem with a site of mine that was in slot 3 but after doing some backlinks with a provider that had excellent reviews on bhw I somehow vanished out of the top 100 spots.. I assumed it was the normal google dance but seems something else is wrong as this has been a problem for more than a month now and it's starting to freak me out bigtime.. the only solution I can think of would be to add more content... the existing content was good quality and there was plenty of good info on the site.. I guess i need more.

UPDATE*****

I have a HUGE answer to why this happened. This website was climbing very quickly for a very competitive key phrase...

Lo and behold, someone hacked some unassuming gaming website's domain name and CLONED our website in it's entirety to this hacked domain name. It didn't look like a mirror either... it was seriously an exact clone of our site. No added content, ads, or anything. (we didn't have any ads on the site yet anyhow). I only found it when I starting wondering if our content had been copied elsewhere, so I Google'd some main paragraph's text and content. There it was... ranking on page TWO for a pretty decent keyword, after only a few days of boasting our exact website and it's content. I contacted the site owner through his gaming site's facebook page and let him know what had happened. He immediately took our site down from his domain and put his site up. I don't think he was aware of what had happened.

Whoever hacked this domain name and cloned our website on it had NOTHING to gain by doing it, except for KNOWING that Google would totally penalize our site for duplicate content... or in this case "low quality" content. I checked the domain name's Google Cache version, and deduced that this happened the day BEFORE our best rankings dropped 50+ spots, and then subsequently off of the grid altogether.

So now, we're NOT de-indexed, but our high-rankings for two of our main keywords are gone, and they still exist for one of these keywords. We now have to ask Google to "reconsider" our website, and explain what happened.

Has this happened to anyone here, or have you ever done this to wipe out a competitor for a tough keyword?

I'd love your thoughts/opinions on this one!

Originally Posted by LinkOil

Quite strange! Never heard of a webmaster getting a mail from google because of content! Do keep us posted

you should start reading here

http://www.google.com/support/forum/...d9491af8&hl=en

Welcome to Googles world they do what they want when they want - Theyre the big dog. But like many have said they re not de-indexed so just start pushing links to them.

I definitely have been pushing links to them. I did post an update above as well... figured out what the issue was!

I believe I'll still have to ask Google to reconsider these sites though... because two keywords have dropped off altogether, and I am not sure if they will allow them to come up again unless they are "approved" by them.

Originally Posted by frappertank

Sounds like you fell under the scrutiny of a manual reviewer.

These days, when you make your money site, it really has to be good. Good, original content, good looking, and it has to actually provide value to the visitors.

One of your competitors might've filed a spam report on you, and then your site could've fallen under a 'manual review'.

Or, if your keywords are highly competitive, it could be that the SERPs for these keywords occasionally receive a manual review...

My thoughts exactly, well put mister!

I have completely stopped using spun content for my web2.0 backlinks this year. I am also linking out to authoritys in my articles as much as I can.

Very smart, for sure!

Will be resubmitting tomorrow to Google for consideration. I will post the outcome here. Hopefully Google is understanding about the fact that our site was cloned and uploaded to some random gaming website... (the clone is down now)

UPDATE: I resubmitted this to Google with a nice explanation of what happened, and how we are not currently profiting from the site (there are no ads of affiliate links on it)... just providing an "information" resource. The domain was approved and has almost regained it's former rankings. It only took Google about 5 days to respond and approve the site.

Not too bad...

This proves that not all hope is lost when Google penalizes a domain.