Website Traffic Marketing

First of all, this isn’t some psychotic rant about “Google done me wrong” or anything like that. I know how to get top Google rankings using only white hat SEO techniques by providing unique and high-quality original content, but for four months now something has gone horribly wrong with Google’s indexing of my blog - an effect I’ll refer to as the Twilight Zone filter.

Second, I’m not spamming, Google bombing, or doing anything else besides writing good content that’s well laid out for the reader, plus doing an occasional social bookmark at Digg.

Third, my blog has a sitemap and both the website and the sitemap are verified with Google Webmaster Tools. The robots.txt has the proper file exclusions and the feed has been registered with Feedburner since Day One.

All my blog posts are being done as social proof that white hat SEO is all you need to get good results at Google. As you can see I have lots of proof, but I need some help getting all the indexing errors from the last three months straightened out.

Once I get the Twilight Zone filter situation resolved, I’ll be opening up a membership area at hitsusa.com to share these techniques with other webmasters and bloggers.

Effects of the Google Twilight Zone filter

1. New posts don’t get indexed for days
2. Copies of my posts get indexed right away for DMCA violators
3. Half of my older posts disappeared completely from SERPs except when you search at Google.com in Norwegian, Finnish, or Romanian language.

1 - New posts don’t get indexed for days

Here are five examples of recent original blog posts that were not indexed by Google for at least four days, but in many cases copycat versions were indexed. Searching for posts by searching for unique snippet of first sentence…

Eve Carson - Post made 3-06-08

Eve Carson - Phrase search 3-17-08

NCAA Tournament TV Schedule - Post made 3/20/08

NCAA Tournament TV Schedule - Phrase search 3/24/08
 

ACC Tournament Schedule 2008 - Post made 3-10-08

ACC Tournament Schedule 2008 - Phrase search 3-17-08

2008 NCAA Tournament Bracket - Post made 3-13-08 

2008 NCAA Tournament Bracket - Phrase search 3-17-08

Britney Spears New Look - Post made 3-20-08

Britney Spears New Look - Phrase search 3-24-08 

Google indexing of my blog has been really screwy since early December and it’s getting worse, not better. These two posts have lots of examples of previous travails…

http://hitsusa.com/blog/507/top-10-ways-google-is-like-pamela-anderson/
http://hitsusa.com/blog/509/google-search-is-like-pamela-anderson-part-2/

2 - Copies of my posts get indexed right away for DMCA violators

Here’s a particularly egregrious example from 3-27-08. I made a blog post about Kristin Billie Davis, a madam arrested for running an escort service that news reports claimed was used by Elliot Spitzer.

http://hitsusa.com/blog/545/kristin-billie-davis/

First, my post is #1 at Google Trends and #1 at Blogsearch:
 

Two hours later, it gets copied by a spam site:

http://www.sarget.org/2008/03/27/kristin-billie-davis/

Presto, I’m in the omitted results and they’re in the top 10 SERPs:

This “copycat gets indexed with my content” nonsense has been happening regularly. I even had some guy at Blogspot copy fifteen of my posts in March, run them through a Markov generator script to insert gibberish changes, and then get indexed instead of me.

After two DMCA complaints to Google most of my fifteen posts made it into the SERPs, but strangely enough, Google didn’t delete the Blogspot spam copies and left them all in the index.

Copy of second DMCA complaint:
dmca-copyright-violation-blogspot-6.txt

Links to a couple of SERPS where the spam copy is indexed just below me.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=GreatPicParty.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=vegasfunpics.com

In this SERP, the spam copy ranks #3 and my original #5

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=16-year+old+has+7+kids

Note the Markov phrase substitution:

Mine: “A 16-year old Argentine girl has 7 kids after giving birth to her second set of female triplets in a year and having her first”

Spam Copy: “A 16-year old Argentine babe has 7 kids afterwards giving bearing to her additional set of changeable triplets in a year and”

Of course, for two weeks the spam copies were listed at or near the top of the SERPS and my posts weren’t anywhere to be found…

3 - Half of my older posts disappeared completely from SERPs except when you search at Google.com in Norwegian, Finnish, or Romanian language.

Older posts with top rankings simply disappeared from the SERPS completely. Root cause seems to be, once again, other people copying my posts and Google deciding for some reason that they were the original and mine was the copy. 

This has been going on for months now and I can’t get it corrected even with submitting massive amounts of DMCA complaints to Google’s legal department.

When I do succeed in getting every copy removed, the post will come back to somewhere in the top 20 or 30 in the SERPs, but it’s almost as if Google still sees it as being new. It’s like they’ve lost all historical track of how many people bookmarked it as a favorite, commented it, where it ramked in the past, etc.

Sample Google.com SERPS that disappeared except in Northern European languages:

Tucker Chapman - Old US SERP (#9 when posted, but it moved up to #1)
This post was number one for several weeks, got 500+ comments, and then vanished. Two DMCA complaints have not freed it up from spam filters.

Current Google.com Northern European Language SERPs
  

See for yourself with these links:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=tucker+chapman
http://www.google.com/search?hl=no&safe=off&q=tucker+chapman
http://www.google.com/search?hl=fi&safe=off&q=tucker+chapman
http://www.google.com/search?hl=ro&safe=off&q=tucker+chapman

Alexandra Paressant Pics/Pictures/Photos - Old SERPs
This post was number one for several weeks and then it just disappeared. Multiple DMCA complaints have not shaken it loose for the Twilight Zone filter.
  

Current Google.com Northern European Language SERPs
 

See for yourself with these links:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=alexandra+paressant+pics
http://www.google.com/search?hl=no&safe=off&q=alexandra+paressant+pics
http://www.google.com/search?hl=fi&safe=off&q=alexandra+paressant+pics
http://www.google.com/search?hl=ro&safe=off&q=alexandra+paressant+pics

I have close to a hundred other examples of this, but the whole thing smacks of some type of spam/duplicate content filter that’s not applied correctly (or thankfully, in all language variations because then it would be hard to document it’s effect).

Search results at Google.com in other languages do not show my old posts either, just a few of the northern European languages. For a while, I could find them in the Russian, Spanish, Italian and Greek results, but those also vanished a few months back.

Other weird Google SERP indexing changes
Example 1 - I had a post that was #1 for the phrase “Triplets Widowed Dad” (Christmastime news story) that disappeared and then was replaced by a #11 SERP showing the story link from my blog’s sitemap.

Example 2 - For a couple of weeks in February, every single new post I made was indexed as being part of the blog’s index page, not as a separate post. That mis-indexing would last 4 to 7 days before being indexed correctly. If the post was copied by spammers, they would get indexed instead and mine would disappear.

You can see those examples and more in this post:

http://hitsusa.com/blog/507/top-10-ways-google-is-like-pamela-anderson/

Plus, my traffic has taken a huge hit. Here are screenshots of the time line between each million unique visitors.

54 days to 1 million visitors

26 days more to 2 million visitors

15 days more to 3 million visitors

12 days more to 4 million visitors on 12-17-07

Indexing problems started with new posts in early December and expanded to include older posts by late December. Now, my traffic is barely 400k visitors in a month because I can’t get anything indexed correctly. 

I don’t know how to directly contact the right people at Google about all these goofy indexing mistakes and really don’t want to get much more public with it than I already have with the earlier blog posts. (This post is a Wordpress “page” that doesn’t show anywhere except the sitemap).

Something like this in a high-traffic forum like SearchEngineWatch.com would probably create an uproar, so I’m hoping to somehow get word of what’s wrong to Google quietly and see if they can’t correct the spam/duplicate content problem that’s acting as some sort of Twilight Zone filter on my content.

There’s also some serious indexing problems going on where original authors of  content posted as regular web pages are ending up in the omitted results, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion…