Continually being penalized

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Hi there,

I don't remember what those URLs used to point to, but in any case they're not appearing in Google's index anyway so I don't see how they could be the cause of the problem. Actually one of Google's top contributors has been telling me to remove no-indexable URLs which can't be redirected via google webmasters tools.

Incidentally I've only started going this over the past week or so due to the problems which I've been facing.

Thanks again.

I think they're all fair points which you've made. Yes, I don't have a lot of links, but that's a seperate issue to the current problem which I'm facing (although if I had lots of links I'm guessing that Google's algorithm may not be so quick to punish me).

At least I'm still number 1 in Yahoo....hopefully Google will once again process my next reconsideration request favourably but this ongoing cycle is getty very tedious.

Thanks, Richard

There's a big difference between a reinclusion request and a reconsideration request. I've never had a problem with indexing (hence I don't require a reinclusion request). The problem is sudden, massive shifts in ranking in a niche field.

The page which is currently returned at 281 has no backlinks whatsoever whereas my homepage is normally indexed at number 2. This is entirely consistent with the behaviour exhibited by penalized sites.

Plus, google is currently presenting other sites ahead of mine for exact phrase searches from my website.

You're right though - I do require more backlinkes, but this is an entirely seperate issue.

Oh, and my site isn't just borderline relevant...it's currently the only real source of information on the island.

But still...why was Google trying to index the /frontpage url of my site. How did the robot discover that path in the first place?

Thanks for your feedback though, I do appreciate it.

Thanks very much. I think that we're now thinking along the same lines. People who have agreed that I've been penalized have also pointed out that having more links will increase trust and hence reduce the chance of it happening.

What's been happening over the past few months has been incredibly frustrating at times. I've gone from being number 1 one day to being at about 700 the next and then back again after a reconsideration request.

Some people have even suggested moving away from Drupal, or at least not using the views-generated preview pages such as /beaches etc.

My page titles all had something similar to Ishigaki, Japan on the end of them but I removed that following the second penalisation. My concern was that some titles were ending up with multiple occurances of the word 'Ishigaki' in them and that this could be perceived as being spammy. However, givent that I still have the problem this probably wasn't the case.

Those nodes which you spoke of were removed over a year ago. Most were never indexed as I changed my mind about the structure of the site shortly after going online. A few others were links to image gallery image nodes. I now work with a views-based gallery so I ended up removing them by hand, however, this is something which I've done over the past few days and hence can't be related to the current problem.

Thanks again.

Richard

I wonder if it could be related to my theme. I'm currently using an extension of the Zen theme which makes use of negative margins to drag the navigation bar right from the bottom of the HTML to the top. Is there a possibility that Google could be interpreting these links as a bunch of spammy links at the bottom of the page? Just a theory, but it's all I've got at the moment.

Oh, I also had XML files for pages which make use of the Google Maps API in a folder which was restricted by robots.txt. This in turn meant that Google's cached pages contained nothing more than an empty map and an H1 title. I've since permitted robot access.