July and August were terrific months traffic wise, the best we have ever had over here at ArticleSnatch.com. It was a nice test of scale for the platform that we are running on. At the end of August we noticed something that other sites have seen – the dread Google Slap!
Google Slap
Toward the end of august we noticed a drastic reduction in the amount of traffic coming to the site from Google. Doing some research led us to see that we also were no longer ranking for several key factors. We sent out feelers to several people to see if anyone had any answers to this, of course no one had a concrete go fix A and you will result B. We heard everything from its due to interlinking to spam to buying links to just “regular algorithm changes” to read the webmaster forum, to linking to affiliate programs. We put into place a few of those things, but I still had the feeling that it wasn’t any of those, especially not the algorithm change – articlesnatch.com should rank for the term articlesnatch (rather than a million crappy your site is worth $5500352345235 sites).
After a month of trying to figure out exactly what happened and 2 reinclusion requests being submitted and processed (with very vague answers), making various changes including removing some hacked hidden links into another blog, I remembered Andy Beard and started chatting with him. Together we drummed up a plan that hopefully will remove the Google Slap and restore the ArticleSnatch back into the site. Below I will layout the plan and follow up later with what the results have been.
The Plan
- Expand the number of posts on a topic page to allow for easier finding of the articles
- Add rel=nofollow to all outbound links from articles (I know I can hear you groaning, but wait)
- Fix other redirect, canonical and indexing issues
- Improve the usability of the rss feeds
- Remove some obviously spam articles – like the bunch from a company that included numbers in each of their pen names – nice waste of 7,000 articles from 5,000 “authors” guys – Zapped. (Working on better system to catch it sooner)
- Put on a happy face! Just kidding
Changes unrelated but made at this time
- Moved js-kit.com comment script to the last line of the code, so if their servers are running slow or lagging, it shouldn’t block the page load.
- Removed another Google FriendConnect module that wasn’t doing much but taking up space
- Added related youtube videos to the bottom of each article, stick around and watch some – its pretty fun
- Improved tracking and monitoring for article spam
Of course there is a lot more to it than just that, but thats the meat and potatoes of it.
Rel=nofollow – probably one of the most debated subjects out there. Google says to build as if search engines weren’t in existance, if we did that, then everyone could freely link to other sites that they had monetary interests in and sell ad space, link space, keyword space and whatever else they wanted to. However Google also says to add nofollow to other sites you own, affiliate programs, paid links (which you shouldn’t have anyway), sites you don’t trust and a few other things as well. In June Google changed how they treat the “page rank” from passing to nofollow links, and how it affects PageRank Sculpting, so there is less of a reason to use it on internal links. Noindex might be what you want if you want something to not show up. David Leonhardt even ran a test to see which search engines did what with a nofollow.
Mixx recently got filtered (penalty) and decided to add rel=nofollow. Digg took some protective measures before being penalized and Digg has been commended by Matt Cutts for their action, so thats a good sign.
Twitter has it on almost every link across the board, these sites all being affected shows that its a pretty serious penalty to be linking to sites you know nothing about. Twitter also removed our account in July as well and has yet to respond to any email requests, not bad for a $1 billion company.
From a SEO perspective some say that you should only build followed links, others say that you should not worry about it and build all kinds of links, and others say forget about the links, write good content and others will pick it up and reference it and the links will come naturally. The good content theory is probably the most sound, it worked for some major sites, however it really only worked after they had a following and people were happy to link to them. If you had a group of people as happy to link to your company as they are to link to wikipedia, then I’m sure you wouldn’t worry about links either.
So where do we stand, as of now we have added rel=nofollow on all links in author resource box. We have also stopped filtering out the links that are in the article body, so those links are now present, but nofollowed. Since you weren’t supposed to have submitted articles with links in the body as per our Terms, that’s just a bonus. Remember if an article gets no traffic, whats the difference how the link is? Also many articles end up getting “buried” in a sites architecture and rarely see the light of day, we are working on improving this as well. We think the increased visability some of our changes make will help get more viewers to read your articles.
Remember our editors are only human, we unfortunately do not have millions of visitors every day clicking thumbs up and down and saying this is lame, remove it, etc, although we do have a rating system, so feel free to use it. This change is NOT permanent. We are going to be reviewing authors and looking at the sites they link to. Those are writing quality articles and linking to quality sites, we will be removing the rel=nofollow from their links.
We are also looking at implementing the Google Safe Browsing API to check for bad links when the article is submitted.
We have already started reviewing authors based on what they are writing about, quality and the sites they are linking to. We will continue to do this as well in the upcoming weeks. Authors who have been approved will have the rel=nofollow removed from their resource_box links. We have also upped the removal of undesirable content, so if you have been submitting that (doubtful your reading this), and you login to your account and can’t find things, thats probably way.
Some other changes have taken place that at first we thought caused it, these included a few bugs with the new platform causing too much non changing content between pages, titles on pages all being the same and blocking robots from the wrong things. In late July we implemented a number of changes that improved the load time of the site as well as improvements to the usability of the site. Several of these changes had been long in the making and others were after speaking to some other site owners.
These changes included
- Implemented Google Ad Manager for improved ad targeting as well as faster ad serving.
- Added a feature for authors to select a default language that you would like to view the site in, one of 47 languages
- Moved translated pages to subdomains based on language instead of folders, added more caching to reduce the number of queries for translation, to improve page load time.
- Added a feature so authors can now submit articles in any of 47 languages and they will be machine translated back to english thanks to Google Translate
- Improved page build times, reduced load on server and some other technical things you probably don’t care about
- Added memcached to reduce the number of queries that mysql has to answer, a 75% reduction.
- Several other minor changes that allow for greater customization down the road
- Improved article statistic and logging
After over a month of work and several late nights trying to get these changes, they are ready to be pushed out to the live server. We will continue to fix things as they arrise and hopefully we can get out the google penalty box – this isn’t hockey!
Any questions, comments, feedback, suggestions? Please reply below.
UPDATE:
I think based on reading some of the comments that authors maybe confused about the nofollow policy, this is temporary until we can figure out what caused the penalty as well as who is linking to bad neighborhoods. After we get all of the bad neighbors out of here – and we removed several thousand of them yesterday alone – we will be adding things back slowly to trusted authors.
Also for those who have submitted articles across various topics, including some less than scrupulous ones, may I suggest that you go into your account and delete them. We recently removed all the articles from someone based on a few bad ones, come to find out she had 4400 articles. Now hopefully she will reply our email – but hasn’t yet. Either she can login and remove the bad stuff, or wait in line while an editor works on it, and then have the non bad ones reactivated.
For those who may have noticed pen names with a number in them and them gibberish – we’ve removed 6,000 of those articles as well. anyone see anything you think should be removed – please email us a link.
Update (10/2/2009):
We have found the first hidden link – I’m ashamed to admit that it exists, but now that I have found one, the hunt can begin to look for more. This person used some elements to hide the link, we found some new things to search for thanks to a post from 2007 on mattcutts blog.
In case you are wondering who was the first one we found — anandaapothecary – no I won’t be adding their .com here nor their link.
Another one found – Spencer Hunt – linking to his profile on EzineArticles.com – some “expert” he is.
Update (10/3/2009):
The first signs of some increased traffic from google have showed (thank you)
Update (10/4/2009):
Removed a lot of articles that were linking to online pharmacies, then went a step further and removed all articles by all authors who linked to an online pharmacy — were you affected? Want the legitimate articles added back – email us so an editor can take a look.
Update (10/5/2009):
Removed more articles from people with bouncing email addresses and duplicate submissions. If you notice that you have submitted an article more than once, login and delete the duplicate. If we notice, you will have all articles disabled until you fix the problem.
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I applaud some of these changes, but the site is still to busy for me & has too many ads
Hi just checked out one of my articles. all i can see are ads, Chitika | Premium at the top, a large box in the top of the article and two large boxes in the middle of the article.
Lets hope these changes get you back into google.
You still dont rank for your name, but google shows Results 1 – 10 of about 406,000 from http://www.articlesnatch.com from a site: search
Since Ezinearticles has Do Follow in the links in the author box and is the internets top article directory, why would you think that this issue is hurting Article Snatch?? The only reason I have ever used your article directory is for the Do follow backlinks I get. I will no longer be using your directory.
Some good details that I may have to investigate for my site as well. Hope it works out!
Chris,
As we said – this is just temporary and we will be turning nofollow off for authors who are writing quality articles as well as linking to reputable sites.
The email address you used for the comment doesn’t have an account here, so I can’t look up your account now and say that you fall into that category.
hopefully you will reconsider this, but if not, best of luck to you, remember an article with visitors and a link to your site is better than an article that is never read.
Jason,
Send me an email — I’d love to get more of your feedback on it. We have been trying different approaches with the ads. But it would be good to get another pair of eyes on it. The only thing we see over here is what works with numbers vs actual visitor perception. We have a few other layouts to test as well.
There are still pages in the index – and the pages on www will be less than it was before as all the translated pages are now on sub domains vs folder on the www.
Hopefully it will all get worked out for you guys. The nofollow thing is going to make a lot of people mad – but I think you have the right to make people “earn it” also. I volunteered to edit some articles at another directory because there was something like a 6 month waiting list and I’ll tell you I spent about an hour just deleting and reading total crap. So now I have a whole new respect for you guys and all directory owners on a whole
I also have decided that I too am going to have to go the nofollow route for awhile also. Kills me to do it, because I think the whole thing is stupid, but Google is feeding my family, so making them mad at my sites would be a bad idea.
Chelle´s last blog ..Win Free Child Care for Date Night
Chelle,
It can be tough sometimes doing the moderating, but the nofollow thing is pretty much there for the scammers and the spammers. So anyone who is writing good articles and linking to good sites, it will be removed anyway. Then again, my theory is the spammers likely aren’t going to bother to read this, much less notice…
Once we get the junk gone I think we will be in a much better position.
An article titled ‘Rampless Egyptian Pyramid construction’ which I wrote to inform people of the ancient method of rampless Pyramid construction using a pulley hitherto unknown in the modern world is available on ArticleSnatch. I would like to see all articles presented so that advertising does not intrude on the format and so articles can be easily copied and pasted. The international languages translations are a very good idea and hope these are fairly accurate because I use these to inform non-English speaking people of my work.
In due course more people will become interested to the point of reading ‘Raising Stone 1′ and then fully comprehend the ancient foundations on which the theory is based.
Well I’m relatively new to the game, I see a lot of sense in what your writing re: the changes you’ll be making, however I do wonder if the little man like me can do more. to be honest I just keep writing about what I love and jam going to keep doing my thing!
Kyle´s last blog ..Setting Up And Working For An Online Business
Thanks very much for the “heads-up” about the changes.
As an author how can we find out if the “nofollow” will be removed, and when, from the Author Resource Box?
Best Wishes and lots of luck with the changes.
Jim
How do we request a review to get the No Follow removed? Many of us put our links into articles to boost our Google rankings, not because we expect much traffic from article readers. I completely understand your rationale, but it’s hard to imagine sending many more articles to ArticleSnatch while the NoFollow policy is in place.
One other note: how about reviewing new articles’ links when you review the article, and removing the NoFollow status for articles and authors who pass your criteria? This would allow you to screen out the bad links for new articles coming in and encourage writers to continue submitting. What are your thoughts on this?
I feel for ya on this one. So many of our lives are dependant on the Big G giving us traffic. I’m actually enjoying the steady increase in BING love lately. Some of these unilateral moves will slow way down as the level of competition rises.
Mike´s last blog ..Weight Loss Postcard
Thanks for detailing the changes you made to your site. Google also took out my ranking and i haven’t back yet. I’ll test some of your changes on my site as well.
Wow! This is totally crazy. That just goes to show that you cannot soley rely on Search Engine traffic all the time… It can die, even for some of the biggest sites on the internet, ouch!
Anwway, the NOFOLLOW aspect of your directory will suck, although I’ll keep posting articles. Any article is a good article in my opinion. It can help get at least a few visitors, so I think it’s still worth posting!
Keep up the good work,
- Chris
Christopher Stigson´s last blog ..5 Free Website Traffic Generation Strategies To Increase Website Traffic Now!
@ken – Good luck it can be tough to figure out some times.
@Mike – its what there is. We could go into a whole love / hate thing, but its more of a partner type relationship.
@Scott – I understand that you are expecting the links to help you in SERPS, however, if the bots don’t spider the articles, then it doesn’t really matter what they are linking to. Take a leap of faith with me that I’ve learned a few things about search engines and delivering traffic in the running of this site for almost 4 years. If this doesn’t work, we have other ideas as well. The nofollow will be removed at the author level, then anyone who abuses that, will have it put back on and we won’t review them again.
Remember while you clearly seem to be doing this just for links, a lot of authors write for exposure, they know that if someone reads their work and they like what the person has to say that they can click the link and go visit the site and purchase a product, subscribe, etc. Additionally articles from this site are syndicated quite widely and that too helps to increase your exposure.
We are reviewing authors based on how long authors have been posting here as well as how many articles they have published. I just glanced at your account quickly, The articles look great, but the resource box, I noticed that you using titles in the links and have random div tags. I’d remove both of those and use the extra space allowed to include a link to your home page with just the domain name as the anchor text. We have been suggesting this to authors for a long time, then if someone steals it and doesn’t include the link (which they are required to do) your domain name is still out there for someone reading it to see.
@Jim – We haven’t yet decided on a clear notification method, but we do know that we are going to make the changes as live as we go. What do you would be best? An email? a blog post that we have updated some? a message added to your account notifying you of the status? Reply here or shoot me an email.
@Kyle – keep up the writing, the hard work pays off in the long haul.
@Paul – I’m a little confused by your question, but it topic sounds interesting, keep up the great writing. There is a view ezine ready link on every article so that people can view the page without ads to get something to syndicate.
@Chris – I hear you. But hey if the traffic recovers and more people see it, then it all works out. Remember it isn’t permanent – except for spammers.
I recommend that you check, double-check, and then triple-check the hack that injected hidden links. A hack job will cause this to happen a lot quicker than anything else, and even though you think you fixed it, there’s a huge possibility that you missed some things.
Be very very very very sure that you aren’t still hacked before asking for reconsideration. Then and only then, after you’re absolutely positive that you aren’t still hacked, would I look elsewhere for the problem.
I have arrived here via a tweet from Andy Beard, can i firstly say that i am not a member here, but openly applaud the efforts that you are going to to provide a great resource. As soon as you get shot of those links to the bad IP`s G will smile at you again. 17k is still not a bad readership and i will happily throw some link love back your way, once i get an article together on my own site
btw you still have dofollow in your comments here, that is if you were looking at locking those links down as well.
Dean
Donna – thanks for the heads up – i’ll check what i can find via querying the database – The thing is that we filter out many html tags before the content is displayed, while sure that doesn’t mean we are hack proof, but it does mean that a lot of the hidden stuff doesn’t get displayed. We don’t allow div tags in the body, or embeds. any other ideas to search for?
That being said – we found out that another blog we linked to had been hacked (and had been so for 2 months) before we got hit, and then it took us another month to find it and remove those links. That was about a week ago.
@dean – glad to have you here. any suggestions feel free to reply or email me.
As for the blog comments, we moderate them, so they aren’t as bad, we use a delink author plugin for when someone submits a good comment with an invalid name.
Thanks again for being on top of this and not just ignoring everyone’s questions. Very professional.
I think the best way of notification that Author Resource “nofollow” has been lifted is adding a message to your account. If email is easier I would go that way.
Thanks,
Jim
Oh no! its not fair.
=-.
@aarkei Do you really think its a good idea to leave a one line comment and a link to a page that is just stuffed with keywords? linking to that kind of stuff is exactly the problem.
I hope everything will work out for you guys. Although I’m not yet a member of your directory but planning to because a colleague recommended your article directory. Will sign up as soon as you put back dofollow.
@Turning – you might have missed it that the nofollow will be removed for authors who write quality content and link to quality sites. So your better off creating your account now, so you become part of the initial review process. Plus more people will then see your content.
Also the link to your site from this comment was removed – because you didn’t use your name – that’s what the comment policy says.
I’m thinking the hidden links are probably the cause of this. As regards all the changes, you got to do what you got to do to protect your business. No traffic = no business for you, so I’m behind you 100%. Fingers crossed you’ll be back in big-G’s good books soon!
Jennifer´s last blog ..Bikini Bands
@Jennifer – thanks for the support, but if you find any hidden links, please let us know, we are pretty stumped by it.
Shame it had to come to this, however I think we will all benefit in the long run. I am very happy to hear that you are now rewarding authors who submit quality articles! I believe this move will improve not only your reputation, but the reputation of those of us associated with you. Recently I have used a number of articles from a variety of sites and find it rather tedious to sort quality articles from ‘junk’ articles, you are going to make some of our lives even easier now.. thankyou! Also thank you for sharing this info with us, a lot of other article sites are not so personable and would have left us completely in the dark, I’m sure. I support you all the way, keep up the great work!
@Anne — thanks for the support and the vote of confidence.
We have removed so more “junk” today – and will continue to do so, I think once we get the policies in place it won’t be as hard to maintain.
I felt notifying authors was the fairest thing to do, as those who are legitimate will really benefit in the long run.
Woow.. very high graphic.. nice conlusions..
I fully support your “cleansing” of the site as I’m sure this will make for a more pleasurable visit for viewers who won’t be bogged down by trashy links and or posts. I also hope everything works out for you and the site and I wish you well!
-Matt
Matt Ruddo´s last blog ..JustHost
I wish you luck with recovering the directory but I agree with other people on “nofollow”. Even Matt Cuts himself stated that they still follow those links and they DO encourage to provide outgoing links to relevant sites.
Since most of the article authors create content relevant to their site in order to benefit from link bank – makes no sense to me.
But again, I don’t use your directory and just followed link from Andy’s blog.
Alex Sysoef´s last blog ..Is FREE Overdone?
Here are a few fundamentals that people might not understand
1. You have to be in the index for a link to count – every single article directory has great articles that are not indexed any more, because they are too deep in the linking structure.
2. Reduced trust in the site would eventually result in even lower indexing, at least for the primary index, so even less value for the links.
3. Placing a nofollow on outbound links wasn’t done for some kind of PageRank sculpting – people know me for that topic, but it didn’t even cross my mind. I was also one of the biggest advocates of “dofollow” on blogs.
I totally agree that links out to quality sites from articles will be a positive. The only reason was it was clear Google didn’t like a large number of the links to junk sites.
Some stuff sneaked in – plenty of article authors were effectively abusing the site
4. I am fully aware that article authors are hoping for links that make a difference. Once Matt has worked through the moderation process which will be extensive, and a level of trust is established about an author, I know the plan is (and was from the very beginning) to remove nofollow for trusted authors.
5. The site will hopefully grow in authority now, and that will hopefully improve indexing and make any links allowed more valuable.
6. If you are an author of quality articles linking to quality sites, all the changes will actually benefit you
Google do still follow nofollowed inks for discovery, and in rare occasions it is possible that they can even use some anchor text from them which conveniently messes up many methods of testing
I am also of the opinion (pure speculation) that Google cares about junk links even if nofollowed – if every link on your site is to some kind of malware, even if using nofollow, I know I would want that site to suffer.
Andy Beard´s last blog ..Stompernet + Infusionsoft Free – What Do You Get?
I commend your efforts to clean up your house. I also think you are doing the right thing by closing the link doors and then opening them after review. You have to protect your assets in whatever way you deem fit, and it seems like you are headed in the right direction.
Good luck getting rid of the spam!
@Andy i had a feeling you may have popped in to see some of the responses and although Matt went into a lot of detail to clear up his intentions, there still seems to be a few agrieved members mentioning the nofollow policy until it is cleared up.
As you mentioned there Andy, G will still follow links in some cases and i think it has been cleared up quite well by some of Fantomasters posts about Yahoo following nofollow links, but as this is a Google issue Matt is working through i am curious as to why some authors are still worried about getting any link juice when they quite clearly are as long as they provide valuable content.
I hope you get through all your modding with all your hair left in place Matt
Dean
Dean´s last blog ..Google knows what clothes i am wearing via SideWiki
I think i’ll still have it – but maybe a little grayer.
thanks for understanding – and we are working on getting rid of the spam.
Thanks for contributing andy – I think you are correct about the junk stuff. We’ve removed lots of articles now from people who were spamming the site, yet none have said anything to us..
Hello, I read your site article, very nice article in your site please you add more article related to SMO.
thanking you
Breeden
How are all the changes working?
As I was reading down the article, the only thing I thought could have caused the slap is linking out to less than reputable sites. I think the nofollowing was spot on and then you can eliminate the suspects one by one.
Traffic is back more than before. So either it was something else or the less than stellar links. still going to work on getting everything setup to allow for legitimate links.
Hi article snatch, im so glad to find a fellow article directory experiencing the google slap. Mine kicked in on the 13th sept and ive tried almost all of the same things you have to no avail.
Id love it if you could email me and let me know how things are going, you say you have recovered traffic to more than it was before.
Could you please email me and let me know if this is the case, id love to compare notes with you…. buckyuk @ gmail.com
Id really appreciate it. Thanks.
Alan
Everyone can get slapped by google.And it’s irritaing that’s for sure.
But the most important thing is that you’re still indexed on google.
If google hasn’t deindexed you. Then you can get to your old positions again with some work.
Cheers
Johnny
Johnny´s last blog ..Be Careful When Trying To Make Money Online With PPC Marketing!
Hi,
Just to add to my comment above, it looks to me like your site is still experiencing the same problem as my site, the actual article pages generally arent being returned in the searches, but home pages and category pages and tag pages etc are all ranking fine.
Id love to hear from you to see exactly how your site has progressed after the changes you’ve made.
thanks.
sure I’ll send you an email.
Johnny,
Thanks for the insight — we never were deindexed — but did start to see a reducing number of pages indexed.
Fortunately I think we acted fast enough to prevent total deindex. we have started to see a lot of traffic recovering though.
Regarding that slap: That’s a very recent Google Slap. It makes me very apprehensive about which materials out there still apply and which were made obsolete. All the more confusing for people like me who are just starting by doing massive research – only to find that some of it is obsolete… sigh.
Christopher Basilio´s last blog ..Day 7: Incubator – Affiliate Marketing Game Plan
Looks like you have articles for escort services, and even an author named “escort”, online pharmacies, handguns, butterfly knives, stun guns, various drugs by name – and for “sale” and much more directly in violation of Googles TOS for Adsense – maybe something to look at.
Maybe a big Database purge would help.
Carl — thanks for the comment — in the future if you notice something that shouldn’t be there — please feel free to send us an email with the url and we will look at taking care of it. We have purged a LOT of articles from the database and continue to do so.