Nov
My Strange Google Rankings
I’m trying to explore why my Google rankings were all removed for Pimp Myspace and I may have stumbled across something. I am no SEO expert, so I wanted to pose the question here to my readers. Hopefully someone out there has seen this before and knows what’s going on.
If you search in Google, site:layoutpimps.net/layouts you will see something like 500+ results all of which are my individual myspace layout index.php pages. Here is the results page link: Google Results for site:layoutpimps.net/layouts
Now this all looks OK. You will notice the 5th link down is layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php - Fashion Myspace Layouts.
By looking at that, you would assume that the layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php page is indexed in Google. Now check this out. If you search Google for, site:layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php you will get a “No results displayed” page.
Well, what’s going on? By looking at the first page you can see the fashion/index.php, but if you search that specific page in Google, it won’t show up. This same thing happens for nearly all of my layout pages.
UFC Layouts is another funny one. If you search in Google, layoutpimps.net/layouts/sports/ufc/index.php you will not see the index.php page, but you will see 5 preview.php pages.
However if you go back to that original search, layoutpimps.net/layouts/ you will see the layoutpimps.net/layouts/sports/ufc/index.php is listed at the bottom of page 4.
This whole thing just boggles my mind. I have no idea what’s going on. Is it an htaccess issue? robots.txt issue? The only thing in my robots.txt file is:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
If you think you know what’s going on, PLEASE leave a comment and help me out. I would greatly appreciate it.
I noticed that if you put the word “site:” in front of the search…. so like site:layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php it will show that it does exist.
Don’t know if this matters, or if I was simply doing the searches wrong before?
David,
As best as I can tell there is nothing out of the ordinary going on here. Google is simply giving priority of one URL of dupe content over the URL of another. I say dupe only with respect to 2 URLs for the same page.
You will note that this page is included in results
layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/
while this page has been omitted
layoutpimps.net/layouts/fashion/index.php
They are in fact the same page and Google is choosing one over the other. That’s the way I see it unless I’m missing something.
I’ve seen this several times recently, and the examples I saw had no duplicate content issues. One guess is that maybe this is how pages in the supplemental index are now being treated.
I’ve also seen it with pages that appear in the backlinks report in webmaster central, but then don’t come up when you search for that particular url. The do come up when you do a search with the site: operator. Haven’t seen anyone else talking about this, so not really sure what’s up at this point, but it’s probably a safe bet that these pages aren’t as highly valued in the Big G’s eyes.
[...] Original post by David Lithman [...]