Omitted results

[Poptafic]

Hello

We are facing a loss in ranking and organic traffic from 3 months on our ecommerce website.

Mostly we have lost our ranking on our product pages. These pages are gone in the "omitted results" of google.

It all started 3 months ago, when we had to face a duplicate content issue due to a technical priblems with our servers: 2 other domains that we own have been pushed online on google, while they shouldn't have. They have created millions of links to our main domain in a few days, and duplicate version / redirection to our main website.

We have fixed this a long time ago now.

But in GWT we still see that these domains are bringing links to our main ecommerce. It has dowgraded from 36 millions links to 3 millions.... Even if today there is no link !

We have done a lot of optimizations on site like adding specific content to our most important page, rebuilding the navigation, adding microdatas, adding canonical urls on products pages that we found were very similar (we sell very technical products, and we have products that are very similar. Now we have choosen 1 product to put in canonical each time it was necessary)

Bt still our products pages don't rank in google. They stay in the "omitted results". Before they were ranking very well on 1st page of google's results.

And we have noticed that some adswe put on ads listing websites are now well ranked in the google's results!... Like if the ads were having more authority on the subject than our own webpages...

We started to delete some of these ads. But it's not always possible. And 2-3 of them are still online.

Any advice to get our most important webpages at the top on the google's results back?

Regards

[tomwhite]

Have you redirected the two sites that were causing duplicate links using a 301 redirect (& told Google about the change of address through GWT?

Links can take quite a while to be removed from GWT, but it does happen..eventually!

The fact that the ads are showing and not your pages on your domain sounds like you either have very low domain authority, and the domain authority of the ad websites is higher and therefore ranking above you, or you still have an issue/algo penalty from your duplicate content (or something else).

How long ago did you remove the duplicate content?

[BlueprintMarketing]

_"Mostly we have lost our ranking on our product pages. These pages are gone in the "omitted results" of google. _

It all started 3 months ago, when we had to face a duplicate content issue due to a technical problems with our servers: 2 other domains that we own have been pushed online on google, while they shouldn't have. They have created millions of links to our main domain in a few days, and duplicate version / redirection to our main website."

so I am on the same page when your servers published the two additional domains that created this issue  I am assuming that you have removed those domains are no longer being served right?

when they were live they were on the same C block or IP? as you said they were served from the same server so going to say yes.

then request removal of the offending domains.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/requesting-removal-of-content-from-our.html

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/15389/removing-domain-from-google-search-results

http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-remove-wrong-crawled-domain-from-google-index

http://www.1stonthelist.ca/articles/omitted-results/

I would go as far as clearing the DNS records of those domains after you export the zone files in order to keep this from happening in the future.

I would then file

After I would check my site for duplicate content especially content that is already possibly on Manufacturers websites things like that because That will cause this type of issue on your product pages.

I would then use

http://www.copyscape.com/

&

http://www.siteliner.com/products

_http://www.techentice.com/best-free-copyscape-alternatives/ _

first check that everything is rendering correctly using

http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/

you most likely were omitted by Google for having little to no unique content. Eight Digital millennium takedown Act or DMTA

do you know anyone that would want to harm you?

http://moz.com/community/q/google-said-repeat-the-search-with-the-omitted-results-included

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/Ie9aJfZVpkw

Jane has some wise things to say in here and remember

_http://moz.com/community/q/does-omitted-results-shown-by-google-always-mean-that-website-has-duplicate-content_

"any URLs that are different are different in Google's eyes, unless the modifier is a # symbol."

_ This sounds like removal due to duplication rather than DMCA - the omission is usually noted as being because of DMCA notices if they are the reason, e.g. http://img.labnol.org/images/2008/07/googlesearchdmcacomplaint.png_

I think if you start with the beginning of the issues and start clearing  them up instead of spending time trying to optimize you will make much more progress.

I hope this was of help,

Thomas

[Poptafic]

Hello

Thank you for the answer.

1/ Redirect 301: yes we had a redirect 301 from the 2 domains to the main domain. But this has been removed since April ( more than 2 months)

Now each url that had existed on these 2 domains redirect only to an index.html webpage.

On this index.html page we only have a sentence clickable to go and visit our main domain (<a href="">visit our shop online</a>)

About the 2 domains

We also added a "disallow" code in the robots.txt after we deleted the 301 redirection to our main domain

2/ Ads on other websites vs our website

We have more authority than these websites (despite the fact that we lose several points of authority these last months). So you think our website has still a penalty from google for duplicate content? How can we recover from it faster?

Regards

[Poptafic]

Hello Thomas

Thank you for your answer.

1/ About clearing the DNS records of those 2 domains

What does it mean?

2/ DMTA

I have no message in my GWT. So I understand that it is content duplication the problem?

But I have to add that we have around 500 000 products. These are technical products and our competitors  use the same database of information about the products. So we have pretty much the same content on our product pages between us... Since 15 days we started to put online specific content that we wrote ourself about our best products. I think we can upgrade up to 1000 or 2000 product pages in the next 3 month. But we won't be able to do it for the 500 000 products...

And for the moment the pages upgraded with specific content are not ranked better (too early I think)

3/ Clearing the issues

You say: "I think if you start with the beginning of the issues and start clearing  them up instead of spending time trying to optimize you will make much more progress. "

You mean we have to focus only on eradicating the ads where we have our products on other domains? But what if we can't on a few domains? And what about our competitors that have the same content? We can't tell them to delete their product pages... And until 3 months ago we were ranking very well with these pages.

Or do you mean something else by "clearing them up" ?

Regards

[Poptafic]

Hello again

I've just seen in our GWT that we have a message "Googlebot encountered an extremely high number of URLs on your site"

It is from 4 days ago only.

I don't understand why we have this message. As we haven't change the number of pages. And in fact, as we have put gathered some pages very similar with a canonical url for the most important of them each time, Google should "see" less pages than before...

Any idea about what happen? And what to do to fix it quickly?

Regards