Google Penalising Pages?

[SteveOllington]

Jeez Ryan, no wonder you got Oracle with posts like that lol... congratulations on that by the way!! I don't suppose you can give a clue on what the "Something Really Special!" is?? haha

[RyanKent]

Thanks Steve.

My reply bothers me because I can't get the spaces between the sentences to stick. I even tried on a different pc and the dang thing doesn't like spaces. Oh well.

I thought your reply was spot on and I thought to help out a bit with some specifics.

The "something special" was comprised of a few things, each of which I value highly:

• a personal congratulations from Rand

• a phone call with Rand where he certainly went out of his way to make me feel special

• an as of yet unknown surprise package which should arrive any day. I am hoping for a dart board with Roger's image so I can use it whenever the Q&A gets glitchy or a piece of software doesn't function correctly.

• and a complimentary pass to either MozCon2012 or one of the Distilled Conferences. Since I live in California and I love Seattle I chose the MozCon2012 option. I am very excited about taking this trip next year.

Cheers!

[SteveOllington]

Wow yeah that is something special!! Choose a Distilled conference in the UK, come visit us across the pond!!

Yeah I know what you mean with the spacings, etc... it can be annoying... even more annoying is when you spend a while typing up a response, click "post reply" and then it disappears lol. Doesn't happen often thankfully but each time it does I tell myself to remember to copy/paste into notepad next time but I always forget.

I wouldn't worry about the spacings, etc... too much though mate, with answers that to go above and beyond the call of duty like that I'm sure people aren't too worried about paragraphing.

[RyanKent]

even more annoying is when you spend a while typing up a response, click "post reply" and then it disappears lol

Please open a ticket with the help desk (help@seomoz.org) and let Nick know about the problem! Sha suckered me...err....convinced me to do such and I have been feeding them examples for some time. They are having difficulty reproducing the issue. The more details they gather, the sooner it can be fixed. Please include your browser version information too.

[SteveOllington]

Yeah I should do that really. It's strange when it happens, it's not timing out or anything it logs me out when it happens. So I'm logged in, I post a comment and then it returns me to the page but logged out with my comment disappeared into thin air.

It must be something to do with sessions and all that I guess.

[RyanKent]

I agree. I did pick up one advance warning indicator. If you highlight any text and try to use the insert/edit link button but the button wont show as active, your post will be lost when you press Post Reply. It is the only way I know to detect an issue before it actually occurs.

PS. Jamie, sorry for hijacking your Q&A here but I am hopeful we have addressed your question

[SteveOllington]

Ah, well spotted!!

Yeah sorry Jamie lol.

[SteveOllington]

Dupe content is pretty severe, enough to cause your problems easily... try that software, I found a tonne of dupes on a large site with it that we'd have never found without it as it looks for chunks of text and consecutive words and phrases with the body text as well as sidebars, etc...

[scottlucas]

Wow that's definitely a long post to chew on!

I appreciate the content issues and know that it is really in best interest to get them fixed ASAP, that's why we are already pushing customer reviews (sometimes with images) and on the popular products have quite a few. But obviously the descriptions have got to go.

I think the best thing to do, as Steve suggested at the bottom is to run various tests with changes and more content to see what works and then build more of the same content on the rest of our pages.

The main thing that gets me is the other pages that rank in the top 50, sometimes thin affiliate sites with even less content or value than our pages! Seems a bit fishy.

One thing I still don't get though is why this 'Write a Review' page shows up instead of the newly added (indexed) product page?

If you look at this particular example:

Search on Google UK:
W11171G2

This page shows up -removed which is probably the definition of duplicate content due to its form like nature (we don't normally let these get indexed at all but I let it slide so I could use this as an example).

Now repeating the search with -removed
W11171G2 -removed

I see first result as the proper product page as the second result behind write a review.

How does that make any sense when write a review contains no content whatsoever?

Scott

[RyanKent]

When I perform a search on Google.co.uk for "W11171G2" there are 36 results total returned. Understand first that because we are using such a specific and unique search query, few results are returned and we can see every one. If we change the query to "W11171G2" watch" then 1.2 billion results are returned.

Also, I don't see the page you shared in those 36 results. I see two pages from your site. #21 rank is http://www.firstclasswatches.co.uk/red-dial.html, #11 rank is http://www.firstclasswatches.co.uk/products_search.php?page=8\. There are additional results but I need to click "repeat the search with omitted results included" to see them, which most people are unlikely to click.

There are two types of issues when dealing with duplicate content. Google will very often index duplicate and thin content pages, but they are algorithmically penalized in the rankings. The "main" version of the duplicate content will rank fine, and the rest will rank significantly lower.

You are correct that many of your competitors have thin content as well. You should be loving that fact, not upset by it. You can step up your site and take top rankings.