Is Google "local" Competing with community sites by removing them?

[otherJohn]

Hi all,
An associate of mine owns a about 30 "local" community sites where volunteers tell what’s going on in the community and the site lists local businesses and such. He had about 5mil a month in hits over all those communities and each community’s section was listed in the top 5 of Google listing. So if you searched for "Roswell" and "Realtors" you would come across his page that listed some links to realtors whose have a page about 1 click deeper. On those pages, there was about 5000 characters + of content about that realtor. Some with house listings. The site had very relevant community information like school and church announcements (that’s how it got started).
Then about 1st quarter of last year, all his listing disappeared about 1 week before Google came out with its "Local Listings".
He uses no cloaking or illegal seo methods. Content is definably relative to search. And no reason that I can see to have him dropped. He says his site was not the only one like that. Other similar sites have been dropped also. I couldn’t even find him 35 pages deep with Google on a search phrase that had him listed #1.
Can someone else help me on this? I cant figure it out. here is a link http://www.ouralpharetta.net/Businesses/Services/Realtors/ that i was refering to above.
-john

[subnetrx]

I run a community site and haven't noticed anything like this.

[Mel]

Google have not "dropped" ouralpharetta.net which has 971 pages indexed in Google. Alpharetta.net have a PR2.

The pages do not rank well but that is not Googles fault, since there appears to be little attempt at optimization with Google only showing 4 links pointing to the home page though MSN shows 115.

The page linked to I presume is competing for the search term Alpharetta realtors (that is the page title) has a PR0 and does not have that exact search term on the page. In short there is no reason that this page should rank well among the 50,000+ pages competing for this term.

Just putting up a website is not enough to get it ranked on the first page.

[otherJohn]

First, the content is dynamic and has changed since last year. I'm just investigating why it went from 2 years of top 5 listing to almost none in the search terms.

mel: Just putting up a website is not enough to get it ranked on the first page.

that comment was kind of rude and implies that is the way i think. If you have read my post fully you would have noted that its had high ranking search terms and then it just stopped.I used that page as an example because the owner said that was one that had a #1 possition constantly for a long time. The traffic for all his sites was at 5mil a month. Something was done right to get that many visititors. And knowing the site and owner, I can verify that its not one of those spam directories that’s similar to a FFA.
Now if what happened to the site is true (it went from top ranks to bottem) in not time flat, dont you think there is another explaination besides what you have stated? While I do agree on you for its current state of that page (that was my assessment also), I am investigating what happened last year.I guess i could go to archive.org and see what it looked like then.

[otherJohn]

I did just noticed that the site went from using querystrings to folder urls at that time.
another thing that may affect it is that all 30 communites pull from the same ip and server but show different content. And all of them say OurLittleNet on the site seeing that ourlittle.net is the parent site.
john

[Mel]

Hi John sorry if you think that my remark was rude, it was not meant to be, but judging the site from what I see on it today there is no reason for it to be ranked well at all, especially for very competitive search terms like realty terms.

It may be that the site was different in the past, and it was high ranking at that time, and if the page went from query strings to directories then of course all URLs would change and all rankings for the old terms would be lost, and new ones based on the new URL and content gained.

It is very difficult if not impossible to know why the old site went from allegedly high rankings to no rankings today, so I'm afraid I can't help you much with that, but I can possibly help you with what has to be done to get it ranking again.

A couple of shots in the dark:

It may be that previously the way the sites were set up before there was some significant anchor text linking that might have resulted in some high rankings, and if that were the case the lack of such linkage today could be the cause of the drop in rankings.

Another possibility is that the 30 or so community sites may have been heavily interlinked before, which could account for both the high rankings and the drop if they were penalized for it. I seem to remember that many interlinked sites lost rankings about a year and a half ago.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

As far as I remember the time that Google went local was about the same time they almost doubled the index. That alone made a dramatic impact on many sites. Now, imaginge that 500 (or 5000) new sites was added that was well optimized for the space your friends sites used to dominate. If your friend does nothing he will drop very much - as he did.

SEO is a relative game. If everyone around you optimize and get better and you don't then you are very likely to drop over time. Not because you do worse but because everyone around you do better.

Another thing that could likely have happend is if he made any changes to the site. He may think the changes are small but there might be something with those changes that makes the site less relevant for Google now compared to what they used to be: The templates, the titles, the internal linking structures etc

[otherJohn]

is there a possibility of sandboxing going on here?

and secondly, reguardless of what happened. What can he do. If he has about 30000 pages to "Optimize " for google. Thats alot of work.

[Mel]

I really doubt that sandboxing is going to affect old established sites like this.

If there are 30,000 pages I assume that most of the content is dynamic, and thus the first place to go is to the program that is generating the pages and in particular the database that is being used. He needs to make sure that each page has a unique and relevant page title, meta description and meta keywords tag, in addition to relevant and well structured page content.

IMO this is a job for a professional who has the necessary programming skills to bring this all together.

[Symbios]

page name changes may have set off a dupe filter do a search using site:yoururl.com and look to see if there are a lot of supplemental results also try some searches adding &filter=0 to the reulting query string on Google

[otherJohn]

Does google pentalize if the ip is the same on all of these domains even if they have different content.
john

[Symbios]

I read a paper on blockrank once, part of that infered that incoming links from similar IP's could cause problems, so if these sites are crosslinked then maybe but I've no evidence that this is your problem.

[Mel]

Does google pentalize if the ip is the same on all of these domains even if they have different content.
john

No Google does not penalize sites just because they are on the same IP - probably 50% of the worlds websites share an IP address with a hundred or more other sites.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

In general you are right, Mel. The only exception is when an IP have been heavily abused and therefore banned by the engines (or just Google). However, it's nothing to be overly paranoid about :)

[Symbios]

This is worth reading;

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/27444/http:zSzzSzwww.stanford.eduzSz~sdkamvarzSzpaperszS zblockrank.pdf/kamvar03exploiting.pdf

[Mel]

In general you are right, Mel. The only exception is when an IP have been heavily abused and therefore banned by the engines (or just Google). However, it's nothing to be overly paranoid about :)

Might be Mikkel, but I have never personally seen a case where an entire IP was blocked so that all the sites on the IP were penalized for the transgressions on one. IMO Google handles shared IPs much better than that.

I have seen cases where all the sites in a network were blocked regardless of IP though.