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mercila

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We suspect we are under filter/penalty but we don?t understand what the reason is and how to solve it.
****INTRO
We are B2B internet marketplace for sale of commercial vehicles from Europe. We are in business since 2003. We are multilingual, 18 language versions, separate domain for each language.
Main language versions (domains):
Truck1.eu ? English, main domain (works many years)
Alle-lkw.de ? German (works many years)
Truck1.es ? Spanish (works many years)
Truck1.fr ? French (works many years)
Gruzovik.com ? Russian (works many years)
Truck1.net ? Arabic (works several years)
Truck1.pl ? Polish (works several years, first it was truck1-pl.com, then in February 2012 we bought Truck1.pl and migrated)

Recently established domains (October 2011):
Truck1.it (Italian), Truck1.nl (Dutch), Truck1-lt.com (Lithuanian), Truck1.com.ua (Ukrainian)
Newly established domains (April 2012):
Truck1-cz.com (Czech), truck1-bg.com (Bulgarian), truck1-dk.com (Danish), truck1-no.com (Norwegian), truck1-se.com (Swedish), truck1-fi.com (Finnish), truck1-tr.com (Turkish)


PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
New language versions: Almost all pages of these domains have disappeared from SERP. Traffic fell from 100-300 uniques daily to 0-20. Judging by Analytics this fall took place for new domains on May 7th-9th, for recent domains on May 16th-19th.
Truck1.pl: Seems that all pages became out of SERP. Traffic cut from 400-600 to 30-60 daily visitors. It happened on May 16[SUP]th[/SUP]-17[SUP]th[/SUP].
Older versions (.de, .fr, etc.): Smooth traffic fall in the last month. All keyword positions decrease.
We suspect that our server?s database failure (which occurred on May 16th-17th judging by number of 404 errors) could be the possible cause. But this failure was fixed on May 18th and it does not explain severe traffic fall on May 7th-9th on the new versions.

Please advise how do we solve this problem or at least help to find the reason of this situation.
 
were you on a same host with the same IP for all the sites?
 
Yes, we were. the project is common so we didn't split it this way
 
Having a set of related sites on the same IP isn't really a problem.

The updates that would have affected you around those dates are:
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/search-quality-highlights-53-changes.html
http://searchengineland.com/googles-april-search-updates-120370

in partiular, there were changes to the way G handles language specific results.

I'm a bit sleepy atm, but my guess is that you need to do more to indicate the country/language targets of your websites (do you have country and language specific meta tags? country and language specific backlinks?, etc)
 
Having a set of related sites on the same IP isn't really a problem.

in partiular, there were changes to the way G handles language specific results.

I'm a bit sleepy atm, but my guess is that you need to do more to indicate the country/language targets of your websites (do you have country and language specific meta tags? country and language specific backlinks?, etc)

We know about the google updates but we can't understand why it effected mostly the new sites. We haven't thought yet about the backlinks to the new language versions but we have all country and language specific meta tag on them etc. We don't understand the logics of the new algorithm: the site is new, it is not over optimized but all the necessary content/meta/structure are on, there are almost no backlinks on it (because it's new!) so why should it be penalized?
the old versions are still in serp but also declined
this is very serious situation for us
 
We are really hoping that anybody look at our case. Probably we missed some obvious issues. Today we've received a standard answer for the reconsideration requests (We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking...)
I don't see any reason why we are out of SERP, we didn't make any black hat or over optimize our whatever. We really hoped that the reconsideration letter would clear up the problem but after this standard answer I don't understand what we should do.
 
If the pages translate to the same thing then that is probably your issue. This was one of the factors in Panda. I recommend making sure your content is unique, because Google is smart enough to translate.
 
It was translated by professionals so they didn't translate it world by world but according to grammatical and stylistic rules in each language. Also our project is common on each language version so isn't it normal that texts are similar?
 
There is one more issue that we discovered and we suggest it also could influence. As we have numerous versions of our site we tried to link them all. Like there was a link from every page with appropriate anchor to the same page in different language domain. As there are thousands of pages on each domain that caused the appear of a huge amount of links to the new domains at one moment. The PR of each new version grew up very quickly because as we have 18 versions of services each page of which has links to other versions. That didn't bother the older versions but it could effect the new ones.
What do you think of this? We put off those links last week. I wander if it will cause any change.
 
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