Absolute positioning using CSS Penalty

[SEO Guy]

Well at least that the only thing I can thing of. Here is what I did, I have a friend who owns www.jimmessenger.com that I help out with SEO advice and help find places for him to buy links. He was rocking up the rankings, had 500+ pages in Google, tons of back links etc, we were on the first page for all his main terms save 1 that was like #12. Because it was the hardest one to get I decided to try to place his main kw “phoenix real estate” right after the body tag in his site, so it was the first thing the SE saw. I really didn’t like how this looked however and so I decided to put it in a Div and Use CSS and absolute positioning to have the text appear on the page in the footer instead of at the top pushing down the graphic and wrecking the frame.

I uploaded this change and it looked Great, However in the next few days Google updated his cache and the new CSS was showing as his description, but what happened next has my friend wanted to never turn on his computer again.

Virtually all of his hand written, well organized pages were dropped from the index, those hundred or so pages that are left are almost 100% from his forum and have no snippet for description and no title. ALL of his rankings are gone, he dropped from #6 for allinanchor for his main keyword “phoenix real estate” to virtually off the planet. HE’S DEVASTATED and I don’t blame him, he has worked really hard on his site (Which I build for him btw) and now to get a penalty like this slapped on (If that’s what it is) is just brutal.

I really need your guy’s help to figure this out.

I removed the CSS that had the text in the div, which was completely visible (Not Hidden)

We have written like 5 letters back and forth to Google, with all template responses (Form letters) Not helpful or appreciated.

I removed his robots.txt (Why because I’m grasping at straws and even thought it’s the same one I use, I’m freaking lost)

Now here are some other notes, that may be helpful or of interest. I honestly don’t think he’s doing anything wrong but hey what do I know.

He has vBulletin forum on his site at http://www.jimmessenger.com/forum/ but I don’t think this is the problem, if it is then we should all take down ours heh, he has not modified the code in anyway so its straight up vB

He is part of what they refer to as a “relocation referral network” this is basically a group of real estate agents that all have websites and service different areas, they link to each other from their index page, or site wide. All of these sites are unique, on completely different IP’s, owned by different people, totally unique content and “ALL” are real estate sites. There is no non-relevant linking going on. However as I said many of them are site wide.

He buys some links, from like newspapers and an Arizona site. Not a lot just a few site wide, they are all non-reciprocal, he doesn’t link to these sites in any way, he’s just advertising on them. If we can get penalized for “inbound links” sorry seoinc Im going to go buy you some irrelevant links and then report you ;-) That’s a joke, but you guys see what I mean here, a site cant be help responsible for links “to” its site, only “from” or am I wrong?

Last thing. He has a links directory for normal reciprocal links, this directory consists of a page for each state, and he only accepts real estate websites absolutely “0” non relevant link partners. This is one I really think is one of the most legit links pages I’ve even seen here is an example http://www.jimmessenger.com/florida.php

I’m really stuck here guy’s Jim is a good friend and I can’t seem to figure out how to fix this for him, Googlebot has not returned to his site (Except the index page and then bounced off) since this happened.

I normally wouldn’t make a post like this because usually if something happens I have a pretty good idea why and how to fix it, but really compared to any other site in his market or any other this site is a clean site and I don’t know where on some fateful day we could have upset the Great Google Gods.

Thank you so much for any input and looking at the site, please email PM or call if you have any questions I’m happy to provide more info
Cheers
SEO Guy

[Mel]

You can rule out absolutely positioned divs as the cause of your problems. I have used them on all pages of many sites and they are all ranking highly mostly with all their pages indexed.

Something has happened to your friends site though, since at present only one of his pages are indexed, (but he has 257 not spidered pages shown with the site: search) and he has 1680 inbound links according to googles Link: search and a homepage PR6. The PR6 and the 1680 inbound links mean that the site should be reindexed soon IMO, but it would not hurt to add a sitemap and a response to the if-modifed-since GET to ensure better spidering.

I would lean more towards a server failure or Google for some reason reindexing his site. I have seen several instances like this recently and suspect that Google may be doing some database reshuffling.

[Anthony Parsons]

Yep, I would rule out absolute positioning through CSS as I use it on mine and all customers sites with out any problem what so ever.

I'd just be thinking more along the lines that Google has dropped the site for complete reindexing and will be back again in the the week or two. A penalty for absolute positioning? Not likely.

[Dodger]

I agree that the CSS reposition will not cause this.

I do not think it is just Google either. Yahoo is only showing one page in their index right now, and that is just the Home Page. They are also reporting over 20,000 backlinks as well.

Has there been any changes that the Hosting Company may have done to cause this? I noticed also that it is a shared server with 108 other websites. I can only see the first three, and two of those are porn sites. One of those sites is showing the blank results like the real estated site is in Google.

I am thinking that something is really amiss with this Host, and you may want to get into contact with them about it. They need to check their setup for your website and make sure that it is not getting crossed up somehow, or being made non-accessible for spider crawls.

[Nick W]

Consider it confirmed again. It aint your CSS.

THis is standard practice on 90% of sites I build, never a problem.

Nick

[seobook]

I know of at least one site which recently got dumped for having a large reciprocal link directory. It was slightly larger than the one on your friends site, but it could be the prob. if you can't figure out any others.

[SEO Guy]

Thanks for the responses guys, I thought it was more coincidence that I added the CSS then it actually causing the problem, I am just so lost with it.

As for the only one page in Yahoo, I am aware of this: The previous site that was on this domain (Which I had nothing to do with it was just some template real estate site) was not in Yahoo at all because it didnt pass their guidelines, this site that I built is 2 months old and we have been in contact with yahoo, they have re-evaluated the site and have assured us it passes now and we are just waiting for the remainder of the pages to get indexed by inktomi, so far Yahoo only has the index.

As for the hosting issue, he is on a virtual hosting with some very small outfit, I know that www.ozzu.com (another friends site) is hosted there and he has had problems with pages dropping out of the index as well, used to have over 100,000 pages indexed, now less then 40k.

I will give it a week and see if we start seeing bot action, if not I think I will start by advising him to switch hosts, I'll just put him on my rackspace account with a dedicated IP, that should do it. WHAT A PAIN!

I wish I knew more about servers and the potential SE pitfalls that can occur because association with hosts. I know there was also an issue with Go Daddy 4-6 months back and getting dropped just like this maybe its a similar situation.

Anymore input and of course the input so far is GREATLY appreciated
Thanks Guys

[Anthony Parsons]

Thanks for the responses guys, I thought it was more coincidence that I added the CSS then it actually causing the problem, I am just so lost with it.

I hate it when that happens. I hate it worse when your dumped with it without prior knowledge of the site.....yuk.....Good Luck.

[seobook]

I hate it when that happens. I hate it worse when your dumped with it without prior knowledge of the site.....yuk.....Good Luck.

That is kinda why I like only working on a few websites. there are a whole bunch less random bad deals.

[seomike]

What a wierd thing. I have 2 phoenix realtors 1 of which is having the same problem. We have had a hell of a time getting him to do anything in google. We are using absolute divs also to minipulate where linkstructure and content and h1 tags are. Everything is visible. Odd that 2 sites in the same area are having the same problem.