[ARVolund]

So with all the crazy assertions the last six months or so about why Google de-indexes network blogs I though I would do a little experiment.

Setup

Used the default template

Used the default sidebar setup

Set it to show 40 posts on the front page

Turned off all the comments

Added a privacy page

Other than increasing the posts on the front page, adding the privacy page and shutting off the comments I left everything else at the default settings including just the one category

Added

I did remove the sample page

I took a site (PR2) with one existing article and added it to a private blog network in October where I knew it would get a lot of daily articles and lots of low quality backlinks thrown at it.

There are about 50 people in the network with about 350 sites, the blog is getting hit with between 20-40 new posts a day. The posts are spun and are of low to medium quality, no porn, Viagra or gambling but pretty much anything else goes.

The site has been averaging 30 new mostly unrelated posts a day.

Most of the articles have 2-3 links in them, with the 40 posts showing up on the front means the site is avg about 100 links on the front page at any given time.


Results After Three Months (using awstats)

5200 results with the site: search. (Lots of tags indexed)

49+k hits by Googlebot so far this month and 65k hits last month

1958 unique visitors this month.

286 links from Google

Traffic from  59 different key phrases including  ugg fashion, jackson browne, hack facebook, louis vuitton bags, make your ex miss you like crazy, managing your employees,  gain youtube views, and skin treatments.


Conclusions (Things that will not get you deindexed in Google)

Too many posts per day
More than (pick any number less than 100)  links on the homepage
Doing blog comment blasts or hitting your site with other low quality links.
Having lots of  unrelated articles on the same site.

Added
Using the default them will not get  you deindexed.

While I did not expect the site to get deindexed I have to say I was a bit surprised that enough of the articles actually ranked well enough to get any meaningful traffic. While I doubt any of the rankings were great and I have no idea how competitive any of the terms are just the fact that the site is bringing in almost 100 visitors a day when I basically did everything wrong from a SEO standpoint strikes me as extremely interesting.  Now most of the terms only brought in a few hits, the ugg fashion was the biggest draw with 18 but the fact that Google liked the site well enough to rank any of the terms at all is interesting.

Edited by ARVolund, 24 January 2012 - 00:24.
Additoinal info

[gregmac037]

Agree...

On FBL, i have observed that blogs that are deindexed are using default themes..

[Goldnote]

He used a default theme in this experiment and it didn't get deindexed. He didn't add it to the "conclusions" list though.

[BuzzBox]

I'm betting though that while the default theme was used, the sample page was removed & a Privacy page was added (as noted).
Imagine how easy it is to link "has sample page" + any other kind of footprint they're checking for. I know I could find 1000's of blogs in a second using that criteria.

Edited by BuzzBox, 23 January 2012 - 19:18.

[ARVolund]

gregmac037, on 23 January 2012 - 10:43, said:

Agree...

On FBL, i have observed that blogs that are deindexed are using default themes..

Goldnote, on 23 January 2012 - 16:32, said:

He used a default theme in this experiment and it didn't get deindexed. He didn't add it to the "conclusions" list though.

Correct about the default theme, I edited the post and added that info.

I really never thought it would be a problem to be honest as so many people who just start their own blogs never change the theme from the default. if Google deleted all of them from the index we would know about it.

BuzzBox, on 23 January 2012 - 19:16, said:

I'm betting though that while the default theme was used, the sample page was removed & a Privacy page was added (as noted).
Imagine how easy it is to link "has sample page" + any other kind of footprint they're checking for. I know I could find 1000's of blogs in a second using that criteria.

Yes I did remove the sample page. Really does anyone with their own network or adding sites to a larger network leave the sample page intact?  I removed the default post as well but it never occurred to me that anyone would leave those up on a site when setting it up.

[BuzzBox]

ARVolund, on 24 January 2012 - 00:30, said:

....
Yes I did remove the sample page. Really does anyone with their own network or adding sites to a larger network leave the sample page intact?  I removed the default post as well but it never occurred to me that anyone would leave those up on a site when setting it up.

Lots of sites in ALN with sample page

[gregmac037]

50 out 69 were using default themes with sample page....
Probably it was just coincidence...

[ARVolund]

BuzzBox, on 24 January 2012 - 00:33, said:

Lots of sites in ALN with sample page

gregmac037, on 24 January 2012 - 01:07, said:

50 out 69 were using default themes with sample page....
Probably it was just coincidence...

WTF??? Seriously??  I never would have thought that to be the case. Removing the sample page seems to be on the same level as removing the default post. A couple of clicks and it is gone.

Why would anyone leave it up on the site?

[mofoe]

ARVolund, on 24 January 2012 - 01:27, said:

WTF??? Seriously??  I never would have thought that to be the case. Removing the sample page seems to be on the same level as removing the default post. A couple of clicks and it is gone.

Why would anyone leave it up on the site?

Humans take the path of least resistance. In other words people are lazy mofo's.

[ARVolund]

mofoe, on 24 January 2012 - 01:30, said:

Humans take the path of least resistance. In other words people are lazy mofo's.

I suppose so but considering the effort it takes to setup a blog removing the sample page is such a small additional effort. It just seems hard to imagine that the extra step to delete the sample page after doing everything else is just too much additional work for anyone.

[Goldnote]

If people are too lazy to remove those sample pages etc they should be deindexed. It's not like it's hard or takes a lot of time. You get back, what you put in.

[Terminator Tobe]

Interesting findings.

Had a PR4 blog & a PR5 blog de-indexed today.

Both are now N/A and no pages appearing in Google index.

I always switch on domain privacy, use unique quality content and never use the default templates.

Max of 10 articles on the home page as well.

Can only think it may be 'Having lots of unrelated articles on the same site.' as ARVolund suggests but there are only 10 on there.

Any suggestions to get the PR back and reindexed?

EDIT:

Just noticed ARVolund says 'Having lots of unrelated articles on the same site.' doesnt get you de-indexed in his opinion so any suggestions to get the sites PR back and reindexed much appreciated!

Edited by Terminator Tobe, 24 January 2012 - 03:47.

[Juvv]

Every time i buy a new domain for SEO purposes, I always convert the whole thing to look as natural as possible.

Here is my list of things to do for the newbies out there:

install wordpress
delete all test posts and pages
change theme
make sure to add a blog name and the secondary comment bit
create an about page and fill it in
create a contact page and fill it in
create a provacy policy page and fill it in
remove all the default sidebar garbage and just put categories and search bar and maybe like a word cloud or something to change it up a bit.
use a unique name every time for the blog poster
change permalinks to day/month


if you dont do these, then maybe its a good time to start if you have had issues with de indexing.

also if you get de indexed, it could be because of the URL's history if you purchased it from someone else.

[Terminator Tobe]

Thanks Juvv - I do most of what you suggest with the exception of:


create an about page and fill it in
create a contact page and fill it in
use a unique name every time for the blog poster
change permalinks to day/month (I use category/post name)

Will amend the other blogs in the network with what you suggest.

I will see if this helps - not had any problems before apart from a few lower PR domains with low links getting hit with PR N/A but never PR4/5 domains getting hit.

[ARVolund]

Terminator Tobe, on 24 January 2012 - 03:44, said:

Interesting findings.

Had a PR4 blog & a PR5 blog de-indexed today.

Both are now N/A and no pages appearing in Google index.

I always switch on domain privacy, use unique quality content and never use the default templates.

Max of 10 articles on the home page as well.

Can only think it may be 'Having lots of unrelated articles on the same site.' as ARVolund suggests but there are only 10 on there.

Any suggestions to get the PR back and reindexed?

EDIT:

Just noticed ARVolund says 'Having lots of unrelated articles on the same site.' doesnt get you de-indexed in his opinion so any suggestions to get the sites PR back and reindexed much appreciated!

You really need to look at what they have in common. If they both were killed at the same time you can bet it was for the same reason.

Where are they hosted?  I had a bunch go down once (15) and they were all hosted in the same place. I moved them that day and all of them came back but two.

Do they have the exact same links?  etc etc.   Find the common point and that is probably the issue.

[Terminator Tobe]

They are all on different c-class ip's but with the same hosting company - this could be it.

They do have similar links - could be that too!

Can you recommend any good diverse c class ip address hosting companies?

[BuzzBox]

ARVolund, on 24 January 2012 - 04:13, said:

. I moved them that day and all of them came back but two.

When you say "they came come back", do you mean they were de-indexed, then got re-indexed without intervention from you other then move domains? Or are you just referring to PR?

[ARVolund]

Terminator Tobe, on 24 January 2012 - 04:17, said:

They are all on different c-class ip's but with the same hosting company - this could be it.

They do have similar links - could be that too!

Can you recommend any good diverse c class ip address hosting companies?

Leapswitch is pretty good and you order by the site so you can move just the two without having to do a whole package and put them in different countries if you want. There are also some other good ones you can look through the thread below for some ideas.

http://trafficplanet.com/topic/150-best-current-seo-hosting/

[Terminator Tobe]

Thanks, going to give Leapswitch a go.

Will let you know how everything goes.

[ARVolund]

GODOVERYOU, on 24 January 2012 - 07:35, said:

WHITE HAT DISCUSSION:

On the 100 links or less - that was just a coincidence I'm sure. If you did it out of the 'Google says to use 100 links or less per page' there's a discussion to be had on why that's no longer a valid issue. But I'll assume it was coincidental and not by design.

FWIW - I wouldn't have expected deindexing on the criteria you are testing. A large part of it (being deindexing) is the metadata information the BigTable uses. The timestamp gives Google's algo a chance to run a site's previous Out Bound Linking history against the results of other sites linking out to the same places. When the outbound linking history becomes a multiple domain pattern, the algo then has a positive match.

..............................................

Now for the real discussion....

BLACK HAT DISCUSSION:

2 Money Mkaing Opportunities Missed

If you are averaging about 50k bot hits a month from Google - I do have a way to monetize that if you are interested (not public discussion). It's BH, but if that's just a test blog - might wanna think about it. PM me if you get curious. (sorry guys)
...........................................................

I think you are leaving a lot of money on the table that you might want to think about. To be honest, I'm now considering throwing some domains on these networks to do this exact thing with. What can I say, I was just looking for another reason to buy another 256 IP's, lol. But seriously, you could pretty easily build a network out of this concept that would automate itself into at least a couple grand a month if not more. Just depends on how much traffic you can suck out of the SERP's and if you can keep bot hit's high.

The 100 was pretty arbitrary the way it worked out, I wanted to get at least that many so I kept 40 posts on the front page thinking most people would use three links per article.

My whole thought with this was to test some of these crazy low numbers and ideas I see floating around. You have people saying any more than 40 links on the front page can get you dropped by Google and I knew it was bogus so I tried to do just about everything wrong I have been hearing from the "quality crowd"

I have been thinking about a few ideas to get some cash out of the actual visitors, that there are any is something I still find a bit surprising.

Monetizing the bot traffic is a new one on me though. I dropped you a PM as I find that interesting. .