What's up with Google? Can you explain this?

So, I have an affiliate product site, market and niche are not important.

The structure is setup like so.

brand-name.domain.com/product-name

I have multiple brand-name based sub-domains and each has multiple product-name pages.

Most pages used to rank very well for their individual products. In the top 10.

Now for some reason none of the product pages rank at all, they are still listed in a site: search but I cant see them in the first 100 listings for a product. But the site's main domain "domain.com" ranks for the products...?

Not well either, siting around 20-30 mark.

This is very frustrating, I was just starting to get some decent results with this site and now the relevant pages for a search for "product-name" are not listing. And the main site is, which is not usually as relevant to the search terms is showing up.

It's similar to searching for a electric razor on ebay and getting the main page of ebay rather than the product you had searched for. It's shitty.

So now, traffic to the main site is up as it had very little before, my CTR is in the toilet and total traffic is way down since none of the product pages themselves rank any more.

I can't really figure out what might have happened.

The main site, domain.com has zero inbound links. All my linking has been to the product pages so they would rank for their products. Site is pretty much white hat.

What should I check? I've made no significant changes in the last couple of weeks other than adding new products.

Could it be that all my linking has finally pushed the main site higher?

How old is your site?

started it in 2008, built it up, left it, then started to build more onto it the last few months.

New Google favors productname.domain.com/ with exact matches and no hyphens

You need to have 100+ keyword matches in your HTML source or more depending on competition.

You need to link build to at least PR3

dmoz link if you can...

Thats 99% of Google's algorithm anymore.

Found the issue,

seems the big G did not like a 302 redirect I had on my site. Yahoo and Bing still had me first page but Google had pushed me way down. After fixing the redirect it took a week or so to start seeing things reverse themselves.

Back on page one now....

RoscoeT said:

Found the issue,

seems the big G did not like a 302 redirect I had on my site. Yahoo and Bing still had me first page but Google had pushed me way down. After fixing the redirect it took a week or so to start seeing things reverse themselves.

Back on page one now....

Click to expand...

would you mind elaborating on what it was that you did so that others here can learn from your mistake and not repeat it?

ipopbb said:

New Google favors productname.domain.com/ with exact matches and no hyphens

You need to have 100+ keyword matches in your HTML source or more depending on competition.

You need to link build to at least PR3

dmoz link if you can...

Thats 99% of Google's algorithm anymore.

Click to expand...

no hyphens you say? Why do they always have to be mixing up they way they like things? Silly google.

ipopbb said:

New Google favors productname.domain.com/ with exact matches and no hyphens

You need to have 100+ keyword matches in your HTML source or more depending on competition.

You need to link build to at least PR3

dmoz link if you can...

Thats 99% of Google's algorithm anymore.

Click to expand...

That is probably the purest and simplest way to look at Google's algorithm.

zeefire00 said:

That is probably the purest and simplest way to look at Google's algorithm.

Click to expand...

I kind of figured he was mocking me with my just another "Google fucked me" post.

chockomonkey said:

would you mind elaborating on what it was that you did so that others here can learn from your mistake and not repeat it?

Click to expand...

Well, I had done a 302 redirect on my domain to one of the sub domains for a couple of weeks while I developed the content on it. I figured no big deal as the that page had nothing on it to begin with, I might as well have the inbound links going to a sub domain with content.

Big mistake. Bing & Yahoo had no issues but Google started to return my domain.com for every search that should have brought up sub.domain.com

Then, started to un-rank the site altogether. Even after I removed the redirect and added content to domain.com is was still screwed up until Google re-crawled the whole thing and updated the indexes.

Lesson learned on how each SE handles 302 and 301.

Spider Man said:

reject for 302 ? new TOS ?

Click to expand...

Uh No, if you read the original post...

The page returned from the site was no longer the relevant page for the keywords. It was returning the page that had been 302 redirected. Kind of like hi-jacking your own site

It's all good in the hood now.