Hi all
I created my site in late June this year on a dropped domain. Everything was as expected, I used to add articles, started gaining some traction, in September got TOP-1 on a low competition keyword, around 20 users from google each day. Time from time I checked indexed pages with site:mydomain.com and there was a thing at the mid-end of September when number of pages dropped from 170 or so to 120. I got a bit nervous but later it went up over 200 pages (at the site there was over 250 pages, but it's ok, my competitors have also around 50-70% of indexed pages).
And now in October it goes down again, but this time killing off my site completely: my page that was in TOP-1 got deindexed, number of pages dropping constantly (now at less than 70) each day and I'm fucked up. Traffic from Google went from 20 to zero, obviously.
It's not the first time when I have this kind of stuff, but previously it happened in a span of a few days to a month and it was mostly related to Amazon (last time in April when I got the same penalty and pages got sort of de-indexed, but even with that I still have around 30% indexed and in TOP-20/30 of my main keyword). This time it completely different.
At first I thought that someone has copied my content and searched in this direction. Although some parts of the content here and there were copied, it didn't look like site was cloned, so I dropped this thought.
This de-indexation happened almost right after I bought some links from Fiverr. I know some of you will say 'AHA!', but:
1) There are only few of them, site already had over 300 referring domains, including wiki, reddit, my links etc
2) Most of them are semi-decent, I picked sites that do have some traffic
And here goes my third assumption why this sh*&t happened. When I first checked my site with "site:mydomain.com" google included page that was on this dropped domain, but wasn't present now. Nothing weird, right? But the thing is, in google serp it has title and description of mydomain2.com that is located right at the same server! And when I clicked it I got on the homepage of mydomain.com whereas in Google Cache it shows the content of mydomain2.com.???????????????
I asked support wtf was that (thought some problems with VPS), they answered that everything is fine and ask google. I didn't bother since everything apart from that bug (?) looked alright and knowing google answers asking them is like talking to the tree.
But if the third assumption is correct, why this de-indexation happened right now? Thing is, at the end of September I tried to improve site loading speed and figured out that I didn't redirected all old pages to the homepage (and I thought I did). Did this on September 27 and this weird bugged (?????) page was included.
From my experience, penalties do not happen in an instant, but require some time. So it makes sense:
September 27: 301 redirect - >October after 9: pages start to disappear.
But why penalty from 301 redirect? That mydomain2.com was sort of an experiment, I recovered all pages (it is also a drop) changed homepage and added 1 new to see how it performs. Semrush picked a few keywords, but that was it so I abandon the project. After my main site started to disappear from the serp I checked it again and all keywords were gone and number of indexed pages is 18 now. At the beginning, google indexed around 500-800 (in total there are around 3k pages).
At the moment I removed redirect from this page and will see how it goes. What are your thoughts?
I created my site in late June this year on a dropped domain. Everything was as expected, I used to add articles, started gaining some traction, in September got TOP-1 on a low competition keyword, around 20 users from google each day. Time from time I checked indexed pages with site:mydomain.com and there was a thing at the mid-end of September when number of pages dropped from 170 or so to 120. I got a bit nervous but later it went up over 200 pages (at the site there was over 250 pages, but it's ok, my competitors have also around 50-70% of indexed pages).
And now in October it goes down again, but this time killing off my site completely: my page that was in TOP-1 got deindexed, number of pages dropping constantly (now at less than 70) each day and I'm fucked up. Traffic from Google went from 20 to zero, obviously.
It's not the first time when I have this kind of stuff, but previously it happened in a span of a few days to a month and it was mostly related to Amazon (last time in April when I got the same penalty and pages got sort of de-indexed, but even with that I still have around 30% indexed and in TOP-20/30 of my main keyword). This time it completely different.
At first I thought that someone has copied my content and searched in this direction. Although some parts of the content here and there were copied, it didn't look like site was cloned, so I dropped this thought.
This de-indexation happened almost right after I bought some links from Fiverr. I know some of you will say 'AHA!', but:
1) There are only few of them, site already had over 300 referring domains, including wiki, reddit, my links etc
2) Most of them are semi-decent, I picked sites that do have some traffic
And here goes my third assumption why this sh*&t happened. When I first checked my site with "site:mydomain.com" google included page that was on this dropped domain, but wasn't present now. Nothing weird, right? But the thing is, in google serp it has title and description of mydomain2.com that is located right at the same server! And when I clicked it I got on the homepage of mydomain.com whereas in Google Cache it shows the content of mydomain2.com.???????????????
I asked support wtf was that (thought some problems with VPS), they answered that everything is fine and ask google. I didn't bother since everything apart from that bug (?) looked alright and knowing google answers asking them is like talking to the tree.
But if the third assumption is correct, why this de-indexation happened right now? Thing is, at the end of September I tried to improve site loading speed and figured out that I didn't redirected all old pages to the homepage (and I thought I did). Did this on September 27 and this weird bugged (?????) page was included.
From my experience, penalties do not happen in an instant, but require some time. So it makes sense:
September 27: 301 redirect - >October after 9: pages start to disappear.
But why penalty from 301 redirect? That mydomain2.com was sort of an experiment, I recovered all pages (it is also a drop) changed homepage and added 1 new to see how it performs. Semrush picked a few keywords, but that was it so I abandon the project. After my main site started to disappear from the serp I checked it again and all keywords were gone and number of indexed pages is 18 now. At the beginning, google indexed around 500-800 (in total there are around 3k pages).
At the moment I removed redirect from this page and will see how it goes. What are your thoughts?
