Google base penality?

[kynop]

our google base klicks went down from 100 to 2.3 clicks per day.

there has nothig changes. we did tests over tests, there is really nothing wrong.

is there a way to find out if there is apenality?

[scanlin]

I assume you're talking about referred traffic from Google. Have your rankings changed for your most valuable keywords? How long were you at 100/day? Was it a couple months, and then suddenly dropped to 2/day? Either your rankings dropped, or your competitors increased. Look at individual keywords and see if your position has changed in the SERPs.

[Francisco_Meza]

I used to be the google base king, but I never had that much drop in traffic. Did you check your Google Base feed? Maybe the autocrawl or something was turned off. I have never heard of a penalty.

[kynop]

we got about 100 clickes refered traffic from google base since about 1-2 years. during this time there where ups and downs and even small breaks which i can refere to updates google did (new attributes etc.)

but on the 29th of january we changed the shopsystem to magento. after we uploaded a new froogle.txt (still have the old wording) we went down to zero clicks for a while and then got back to up to 40 hit / day.

sine about 2 month now we have allmost no clicks anymore.

it has absolutly nothing to do with competitors. for example we exclusivly sell brand xyz for our country, we only have one person they grey imports this. and its only one product.

so, we only make it one page 4! the guy is on place one in google base and after that there are about 4 pages with books which have one word of the same brand but now all.

so, we definetly got on some ignore list or so???

[kynop]

yes the feed is just perfect, i could even manage to download feeds from other stores that compete with us. we have even slightly better attributes and all works. there are no problems in the google base account.

[Francisco_Meza]

I use Magento. Are you using the Google Base feature in your admin panel? What version are you running?

[kynop]

No, we use a plug-in called psmext v2. Its specialised fo creating files for all kind of product price search machines. we have about 20 diferent here.

[Francisco_Meza]

Try this Admin > System > Config > Google API > Google Base. Enter username and password. When i used Google Base (about 3 years ago), it used to take about 2 days until I started getting traffic. Maybe the psmext v2is what Google Base is not liking. Sometimes they feeds have a URL secretly inserted. This is what happens to me when I use one of those free XML site map generators.

[kynop]

we analysed our feeds a coupld days, the feeds are perfect. as i sayed we even have more attributes compared to a few competitors. using the magento built in funcionallity would just reduce the attributes. again: we dont have any problems in google base we can find all of our products in the shopping results, but just not on top positions but actually only on last positions.

[Francisco_Meza]

For magento, you can always enable the attributes: size, color, brand, model, l x w x h, weight, everything. I know you've only been on magento for about 3 months, but I think it's something you should consider. I have never heard about google base giving penalties. Did your rankings go down as well? I am wondering if one of the Google Website Reviewers (they have about 10,000 contractors who manually review websites) thought your site wasn't as valuable as the competitors. This sounds like your site was affected by either someone reviewing your site OR the Google Base algorithm changed against your favor.

[kynop]

we know magento in and out. but what does this have to do with the quality of the feed. we did analyse it many times and even compared it with the feeds of our competitors.

our rankings went all up after the switch. we spend 6 month in developing just the onsite site aspects with 2 seo related developer teams.

[Francisco_Meza]

You have me stumped! There is a person in the Official Google Base Blog. Her name is celebird or something like that. I think you should ask her OR post you question there at the blog. Sorry I couldn't help, but I tried.