How My Silly Mistake Reveals Part Of Google's Spam Filter For Auto-Generated Sites - And How You CanCopyright © 2005 Richard AdamsIf you use content generation software like Traffic Equalizer, Traffic Ranking or Traffic Hurricane I've got some essential and urgent news for you. You see, with the latest Google shake-up it highly likely that either many of your auto-generated pages "vanished" from Google's index, or else you haven't been able to get your new sites listed at all (except perhaps for your homepage). My silly mistake will show you exactly *why* this seems to be, and what you can do to get all your pages listed successfully. -------- The Site -------- In January 2005 I launched a brand new site based on the winning formula of plenty of original content plus a solid linking structure - a formula I've been tweaking for years that has got some excellent results - and exactly the sort of site that Google loves. I built numerous incoming links from quality sites and waited for the spiders - with both MSN and Google showing up within 48 hours of launch and Yahoo arriving a few days later. ----------- The Problem ----------- Whilst Yahoo and MSN soon started sending my site solid traffic, Google simply didn't want to know. Ah, "the sandbox" I thought and simply continued to build quality incoming links. All this time Google had been spidering regularly, when finally in August they clocked up an impressive 199,026 hits to my site. Finally I'm going in! Or so I thought. When it got to October and there was still no sign of my new site in the listings I set out on a detective hunt to try and figure out why... ------------ The Solution ------------ With a 10 month-old site that was being regularly spidered and possessed a Page Rank of 5 it was suggested to me by a professional search engine optimization expert that it looked like I was tripping a "spam filter" that was preventing my pages getting listed but he couldn't figure out why. So if it *was* a spam filter, what was triggering it? An exhaustive search of both the visible pages plus the HTML code itself revealed one major error - which may or may not be the cause of the problem... Whilst each of my META descriptions was different, there were similarities between them. They were all based on a standard sentence with the keywords inserted. As an example a similar sentence could read "Contains free articles and resources on the topic of [keyword] together with a free newsletter". Then I would just modify it slightly for each page, but using this general format. Could this be triggering the filter? Only one way to find out. So I sat down and rewrote every META description on my site making them as variable - in both content and length - as possible whilst still ensuring my keywords were present in each. Then I sat back and waited... ---------- The Result ---------- Google visited again within a few days a within a week of the changes being made - my site started to show up all over Google with them sending 91 visitors in the first few days of diplaying my results. Please be aware that this was the *only* change I made to the site - and it resulted in rapid inclusion in the index. --------- The Moral --------- No matter how good your site is, and no matter how much original content your site contains, use the same - even moderately similar - META descriptions and whilst MSN and Yahoo won't complain (yet) Google will refuse to play with you. This would make sense as content generation software typically use these "template" descriptions to create the pages and so this is an easy thing for Google to catch, even if it excludes a few original, content-rich sites in the process. The solution therefore to getting your pages listed is to rewrite your descriptions as I did to create as much variety in their content as possible.
Richard Adams is the founder of Merchant Account Forum, one of the net's most popular merchant account advice sites. Click Here Now => http://www.merchantaccountforum.com |
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