SE's and i-frames

[Lemmy]

So I had this static page that I put up and "optimized" some years ago. It sat there quietly and did nothing, then about 6 months ago it started climbing on Google until I had 3 listings on the first page for some very nice keywords/-terms, traffic was flowing in quite nicely and I was making sales too.

Then I thought I'd exploit this some more and I put up an i-frame ad. Literally overnight my traffic drops to a trickle and my listings are nowhere to be found. Coincidence or do the SEs hate i-frames?

[virgohippy]

Google views "fresh" different from "historic." Google also intentionally mixes different "types" of pages in their SERPs.

My guess is that Google decided a static page that had not changed in 6 months was viewed different as soon as something did change, and so now the page is competing with other "fresh" pages rather then competing with other "historic" pages.

Yahoo and MSN... I've no idea.

[Lemmy]

Well that sucks! Google is a hard master to please. Maybe if I leave it alone it'll climb back up in another 6 months time. It sure was nice getting all those sales without having to work for it.

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Lemmy

Well that sucks! Google is a hard master to please. Maybe if I leave it alone it'll climb back up in another 6 months time. It sure was nice getting all those sales without having to work for it.

Uh oh... someone heard me think out loud and paid attention. |badidea|

/* Hippy on Damage Control */

Don't take my words as absolute fact. Try removing the i-frame to find out. If you were right about your initial suspicion, problem solved. If my pathetic attempt to understand the great empire of G was right... well, what's another day to add to that 6 month waiting period?

Where's halfdeck anyway? Shouldn't he be here by now?

[LowryBigwood]

Originally Posted by Lemmy

Then I thought I'd exploit this some more and I put up an i-frame ad. Literally overnight my traffic drops to a trickle and my listings are nowhere to be found. Coincidence or do the SEs hate i-frames?

It's just like adding another outgoing link as far as I know. Meaning... you give it some PR and change your page enough to where it's not the same which could possibly shift your ranking for those terms almost overnight. That's just a guess, no way for me to know. But, then again, the listings are constantly changing it seems. So, maybe it's a coincidence.

[Lemmy]

Originally Posted by virgohippy

Uh oh... someone heard me think out loud and paid attention. |badidea|

/* Hippy on Damage Control */

Don't take my words as absolute fact. Try removing the i-frame to find out. If you were right about your initial suspicion, problem solved. If my pathetic attempt to understand the great empire of G was right... well, what's another day to add to that 6 month waiting period?

Where's halfdeck anyway? Shouldn't he be here by now?

I removed the i-frame right away, but of course the damage was already done. Being a total ignoramus when it comes to SEOing I think what you said about G detecting a change makes sense, but fuck, did they have to be so brutal about it?!? What do they have against me making a little easy money?

[Halfdeck]

It's hard to say without looking at your page and the search term. Off the cuff my guess is its coincidence.

Google also sometimes "pulls" a URL temporarily from search results I'm guessing for re-evaluation if you make major changes to the URL (e.g. completely rewrite the TITLE tag, etc).

If your ranking drop isn't -300~900 range you can regain it; just do some smart, "natural-looking" link building (getting direct backlinks to the ranking page with varied anchor text leveraging links on your other domains instead of adding outbounds on this site of yours), and internal anchor text tweaks.

[Lemmy]

Halfdeck, the page in question is http://roundbrownhoes.com/ and the keywords in question are "round and brown", "black hoes" and "ebony hoes".

I hadn't touched the page for about 2 years. On July 26th I put up a webcam-style i-frame ad on the bottom of the page right over the flashing banner. On the 27th traffic dropped more then 90% and hasn't improved since.

I'd appreciate your educated guess as to what might have caused this. I'm not expecting a quick fix (I consider the traffic lost), but it sure would be nice to have some idea what happened so I don't repeat the mistake.

[Halfdeck]

Next time you can shoot me a PM; that way, you can keep your keywords private.

Your site still ranks for all those keywords but at 100+ positions and your home page doesn't rank at all for them.

Google is basically returning the second best result from your site for all three searches instead of the best result (the home page, in all three cases).

For example, hoe_profiles/sarah/black_hoe_sarah.htm ranks for "black hoes." If you do a site:domain keyword search, you'll see that url is the second best result.

Is Google suppressing your home page from ranking? Who knows.

A search for most of the words from the title tag of your home page: "round brown hoes ebony babes with big black booty" should return your home page relatively high in the result, but it doesn't.

Your home page still ranks first for the keywords in the domain name, "round brown hoes."

I see a few minor problems (e.g. no www/non-www redirect installed) but nothing major that would warrant a penalty.

I think just wait a week or two to see if the home page at least pops up in search results for those keywords; if not, like I said, you might want to run a few link trades targeting those specific keywords and see what happens.

Of course, link trades can both help and harm a site. I'd ask a link trade partner to do more than just add a link to your site in his/her page footer (e.g. write a short paragraph and embed your link inside it). I'd also avoid offering links on roundbrownhoes.com (like I said, offer links from pages on your other domains; for example, a link from within a blog post would look the most natural to Google. If a post is more than 3 months old and has decent TBPR, I'm sure someone will accept links from that page; besides, the anchor text from pages like that, even with TBPR 0 can be more powerful than links in the footer on a TBPR 7 page, as long as the page isn't supplemental).

An off-topic thought: one reason why I think third-party blogs like blogspot and thumblogger blogs can rank well is because Google has a hard time figuring out the blog's owner. Both thumblogger's IP and whois has no ties with your other domains, so even if you crosslink them to death, Google doesn't have enough info to say you're crosslinking. If you use thumblogger as either a destination or the origin of a ABC reciprocal link exchange, Google can't complete the triangle because the linking isn't reciprocal; it's technically one way (you don't own your thumblogger blog, as far as Google is concerned). Of course Google might be able to take a guess based on circumstantial evidence, but with a big enough/varied link profile, I think its impossible for Google to draw a solid conclusion.

If the home page is penalized, I'm not sure there's anything you can do about it, since you need to submit a reinclusion request, which means you'd have to do some major overhauls to the page, including removing footer links, reducing crosslinks to and from your other domains, making the page look more "mainstream" to Google reviewers (e.g. adding links to 2257, Privacy Policy, etc), reducing aff links to make the site look less like a thin affiliate site, etc, which is alot of leg work and may leave you with negative side-effects without guaranteed payoff.

[Lemmy]

Wow, thanks man! You really know your stuff. The only bit I didn't understand was this:

no www/non-www redirect installed

I don't even know what that means.

I'll probably implement some of the stuff you suggest; try to get some natural looking backlinks, maybe try to make the page look more mainstream etc. I'll probably also remove the links to my own domains (I wasn't aware that G went as far as checking whois info).

And yeah, I thought about PMing you, but what the heck, there has to be hundreds of people targetting those keywords already. Let's just put it all out there and maybe someone else can draw some useful information from this. I think I'll just call it an experiment from now on and see how it goes.

That said, if anyone is interested in a "natural" link trade hit me up. I have plenty of domains so I'm sure we can work something out.

[Halfdeck]

no www/non-www redirect installed

If you have people linking to both "http://www.example.com" and "http://example.com", you're splitting your backlinks, because to Google, those are two unique URLs.

For example, if site A links to "example.com" and site B links to "www.example.com", you really only have one back link to example.com and one back link to "www.example.com". On the other hand, if both site A and B link to "www.example.com", then you have two backlinks pointing at "www.example.com".

So if you have links pointing only to one version, you'd end up with a much stronger page.

Same deal with example.com/ and example.com/index.html - if you refer to both URLs you're again splitting link juice and making both of those URLs weaker. My preference is to link internally to example.com/ and not example.com/index.html.

So first, you want to be careful how you link to your own pages.

Second, install a 301 redirect from www to non-www (or vice versa, depending on which version you prefer) so that all links pointing to the www version will be credited to the non-www version.

To do that, you can add a mod_rewrite in your .htaccess (non-www to www):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(replace example.com with your own URL)

Or (www to non-www)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(I prefer the www version, so I haven't tested this)

Use a HTTP header checker to make sure your code is working. You can also use Xenu Linksleuth to make sure your site is crawlable after the 301 install.

Or you can go into Google's Webmaster Tools and set your Preferred domain. That will take care of Google, but you'll still need to install a 301 redirect for MSN/Yahoo.

[Lemmy]

I always ask people to link to me with the www. but you never know so I'll try that code in my .htaccess asap. Thanks gain.