I noticed something interesting in relation to that site that I referred to that got slapped in Niche Subdirectory SEO Restructuring & Search Engine Slappage

While I believe the first slapping may have occurred due to the restructuring and the need for the google cache to update and flush out the old structure, the site has since been reindexed into the latter half of page 1 three times for the main keyphrase.

After the restructure, the site was already doing well, returning from it’s latest down in the google yo-yo experience. It was on page one, hovering in the latter half of the top ten. Within days it ended up as high as position 5 once google acknowledged a dmoz backlink. Shortly after that it got slapped.

Then after two weeks it returned and was slapped within 24 hours. Then another 2 weeks later it returned for 3 days then got slapped. Then it was back again a week later and slapped within 24 hours.

So if it keeps comiong back and then getting slapped, what’s going on?

Someone at google is manually targetting it? I doubt it, the content is good. I’m quite proud of the site. It’s about the only site amongst all the clearly ecommerce sites that actually contains useful information about the niche subject.

The restructuring? Not anymore, the google cache has updated, the old structure is nowhere to be seen?

Some minor structure tweaking? I have played around with a few smaller silo’d sections of the site that sit outside of the original main structure. Personally I don’t feel this should have had such an effect that I could be returned to page 1 and then slapped.

Too SEO’d? Nah, the SEO techniques used have hardly changed since the site first started ranking and going through the google yo-yo effect.

So back to what I hinted back in the title, incompatible plugins. I had installed All in One SEO and SEO Ultimate. On occasion I can be a plugin junkie, and especially with the site concerned. It was one of my first Internet Marketing sites and I was fascinated with the ease of adding plugins that you could now do since WordPress 7 came out. This site was also the one I’ve expended the most effort on. Anyway, somewhere down the line I had both plugins live – pity that there’s no update trail (or if there is, I’m not yet aware of how to discover it) to allow me to find out when I installed and made SEO Ultimate live. Anyway, the problem with these plugins being used together is that they overlap in functionality, thus creating a functional contradiction that may have been screwing with things like the robots.txt file and other parts of the site when the search engine bots came crawling.

To further support this theory is the fact that I didn’t just get slapped by google, but yahoo and bing as well. Furthermore, I’ve since getting slapped, I’ve started to rank for the domain name without the “www.” prefix on yahoo and bing. The site’s domain uses the “www.” prefix which suggests a problem with the search engine bots interpretting certain information about the site. Why else would it go from indexing the domain correctly, then slapping it, then a few days later reindexing the domain using the incorrect format? Doesn’t sound like a problem with the content to me.

I have since disabled SEO Ultimate as I can’t be bothered to learn how to use it right now and All in One SEO is tried and trusted. If my theory proves correct, I would expect to see a return of my site within 3/4 weeks that will be permanent, rather than looking like some sort of blip. And I’ll be posting the result here.