Hi Folk

I administer www.friars.co.nz. For the search "luxury accommodation in new zealand" we were #1. Next thing you know, we are nowhere to be found for this phrase .... I am sure this has been asked before, but does anyone have any clues on what went wrong? (it happened in the last few days).

Since then, I have added the word luxury to our title, hoping this may make a difference...

Would it be
a. that we serve pages without session IDs to google?
b. that we have not updated our page for a while?
c. that we change the titles of our other pages (not homepage) randomly?
d. something else?

Thank you

- Nicolaas

It’s hard to say without more info if this is related but somehow Google has indexed some your pages in spite of the crazy URLs. But it looks like they have indexed many of them more than once. Google says you have over 15,000 pages on your site – does this sound right? Maybe not related to your current issue but you have some serious problems that need to be corrected or you will eventually have a much worse problem. See the following are all the same page.

http://friars.co.nz/
http://www.friars.co.nz/
http://friars.co.nz/index.php?PHPSESSID=5d3d9e31965f37987d0c3763d1ce08 3c
http://www.friars.co.nz/index.php?PHPSESSID=5d3d9e31965f37987d0c3763d1ce08 3c
http://www.friars.co.nz/index.php?PHPSESSID=540eab9197dce97eec1af7ac9031fc 82
http://friars.co.nz/index.php?PHPSESSID=540eab9197dce97eec1af7ac9031fc 82

I suggest you also try to get some inbound links with your keyword phrase in the anchor.

Hi ther

Thank you for your interesting reply.....

Apparently we are back up!

Because we have these wild urls with the phpsession ID in it, I served different pages for bots where they get a site without the session IDs. A few hours ago, I took this out, because I thought we may have been blacklisted for serving different pages to bots... hmmm, who knows.

If you would spider our site then you could perhaps get to 15000 pages if you tried all the different links (links create trips and you can have all sort of combos).

We really only have about 40 individual pages, but some of them have about 400 different views (e.g. mypage.php?i=1 is completely different from mypage.php?i=2) and so on.

Thank you again for your reply, perhaps some body can make sense of it all. I certainly can not.

We have inward links btw, about 500 of them according to google, but this also needs more work.

showing Google so many identical pages with different names is sure to be a problem.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.friars.co.nz%2F&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official


If you don’t at least show up for a keyphrase with the search below, you will have a very hard time ranking for it.

http://www.google.com/search?q=allinanchor%3Aluxury+accommodation+in+new +zealand&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

JohnW is right, I put "The four-hectare Margrain Vineyard" in quotes and G returned nine results, eight from your site, you're going to get a duplicate content penalty if you don't do something about that.

Hi

First of all, thank you for your replies. Really great and much appreciated.

Ok, so it is a bit of a mess and I am going to see to it.

The problem I have, I think is that I have "a million" links on the site, all using different PHP variables. Many of which go to similar pages (but not not always identical).

For example, there are about five hundred host pages (completely different and these should all be indexed), and at each of these pages, there is a link "add to trip", now when you follow this link you get the same page, but the link has changed to "add again to trip?". Google seems to think these are two pages. And so on....

Is there a way to stopping Google from indexing certain pages linked on a "root" page (apart from the nofollow tag, which means that google does not follow any links)?

I had a look at http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.tourism.net.nz and noticed that these folks have 260,000 pages. I think this is double-up also and they do not seem to be penalised for it (they are #1!).

Anyway, thank you again for your useful answers thus far. I am new to this game, but I see that there is some logic to the madness.

Have a nice weekend

Nicolaas

After a quick look at their URLs I would say that they are NOT getting duplicate pages, if they are, it’s not because of session variables. They have dealt with this issue quite nicely.

For your site you might try creating one version of each page that has a friendly url, using mod_rewrite, then if there are still ways to have a duplicate, use robots.txt to disallow the folder with all of the duplicates.

OK guys if you are going to do site reviews :) Do not usually do this but this particular site is baffling us!

www.guideglobal.com

All hotel descriptions rewritten for original content (over 4000), shed loads of backlinks, has reasonable page rank, pretty good basic seo IMO. Hosted on a dedicated IP and is 18 months old.

Cost lots of money to produce for content etc :( Came out for 3 days about burbon time then got wacked.

Bad things that we changed: overdid the internals, had too many links pages with empty cats and had adsense on them.

Does not rank for company name, allinurl, basically nothing. More than the sandbox me thinks although it is not dispaying the usual grey bar penalty, all the green in tact. In a way I wish it would so we can move on.

A number of possibilities, one is the domain has a shady past, Internet Archive shows it to be a link directory up to Nov 2004, G also shows a number of non-cached pages such as
http://www.guideglobal.com/?city=Syros

it's an empty category page, but setup for AdSense, not a good sign, IMO.

I put "an erstwhile home to celebrated intellectuals" in quotes in G and got back seven results, six from your site and one that looks like a 302 hijack from a dodgy Czech site, I'm no expert on this, so someone else might comment...