An odd thing happened a little while ago, our 3 most used classified ad sites went from page 1 rankings to being entirely de-indexed by Google; some of our celebrity sites I could well understand being de-indexed, but these 3 sites were as pure as newly fallen snow…
I’m still trying to figure out the exact cause of what happened, but so far I’ve come up with the following theories:
Duplicate content: All 3 sites served cities that were within 15 minutes of each other, and when we launched them no single site had enough users to generate a lot of ads - but the 3 combined generated a fair bit of ads, so we essentially ran all 3 sites off the same database… Later on, we had each site sort the ads based on the city they came from, in hopes of avoiding duplicate content filters - but they’re still the same ads, just sorted in a different order.
Poor link quality: 2 of the 3 sites participated in what at the time seemed like a good idea, Link Metro. While I now look to Link Metro as the root of all evil, a year ago it seemed like a good way to build up some links. One of the downsides to local classified sites is we had a real bi*tch of a time getting links; in 2 years with good search engine rankings and having a large user base, we only gathered maybe 4 or 5 one way links of pure love… whereas it took hours and hundreds of emails to generate roughly 10 link exchanges. However, since there were only 2 of the 3 involved with link metro… I’m somewhat skeptical since in the past our link metro’d sites usually stayed indexed and just lost rankings.
Besides the above 2 reasons, I am drawing a total blank as to what could have caused this total de-indexing at the same time. So far it hasn’t had a major impact on our earnings, but if we don’t figure out something soon I think the traffic will start to drop off, even from our regular users.
April 7th, 2007 at 6:57 am
[…] However, enough sidetracking and onto observations on the earnings, and the numbers. We actually earned slightly less per day this month (about $5), which was due to both our e-commerce sites earning less. It was a lower-than-average month partly because of the de-indexing Jason spoke about, and not because Adsense has dipped further (thankfully). […]
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:26 am
[…] Lasnik: “search evangelist”, at SES Toronto, and were able to talk to him about our Classified Ad site problem. He had promised to get back to us re: trying to diagnose the problem and help us fix what Google […]