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No recovery yet. Quick update... I put in a reconsideration request and was denied, saying No Manual Spam Actions found.

From WMT: The Total Crawled count on the bad subdomains is steady, and there are still no Removed pages, but the Not Selected count is steadily increasing--in fact the total of Indexed and Not Selected is greater than the Total Crawled count -- how does this make sense?

Thanks.

We'll give the links a shot.

We did consider that the high number of similar static pages may be viewed negatively by Google, but we were ranking very well on many long tail searches before the drop. On WMT, the subdomains show no pages indexed until the exact date range that our rankings dropped, when they spike to the tens of thousands.

What do you think is the likelihood that the subdomains are the culprit in this case?

Thanks for all of your help.

Thanks Jared. The subdomains are www.ww and www.lnirfrx. We configured all subdomans to 301 to www. We did not receive any messages in WMT -- just the sudden drop ranking.

I'm thinking about putting some links on a forum that I know doesn't have nofollows and is crawled several times a day. But we have tens of thousands of these subdomain pages indexed, will posting a couple of the links help? I wouldn't want to post more than that because it would look spammy.

Two and half a weeks ago, my site was slapped with a penalty -- 60% of organic traffic disappeared over 2-3 days.

After investigating we discovered that our site was serving the same content for all subdomains, and Google somehow had two additional subdomains it was crawling and indexing. We solved the issue with 301 redirects to our main site (www) a couple of days after the drop -- about two weeks ago.

Our rankings have not recovered, and the subdomains are still indexed per Webmaster Tools. Yesterday we submitted a Reconsideration Request. Will that help? Is there any other way to speed up the process of lifting the penalty?

This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl

Thank you!

Thanks for this. When you had the linking issue, did you traffic drop suddenly or was it gradual? Were only the mislinked pages deranked or were all pages on the domain deranked?

It looks like we were hit by this algorithm update described by Matt Cutts:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-four-15705.html

He says it is designed to remove duplicate domains from search results, but we still show several times on the first page for some searches and have dropped completely off on many others.

I think this update must have included some Panda elements, or triggered a reevaluation that we fell into because our site is still being indexed.

I did take the quiz and got a big fat "maybe."

Our strategy with this site was to nail long tail terms and it worked very well for a while. This is an ecommerce site so I don't think it is out of place to have a lot of item and listing pages. However we do generate several variations of each item page because our products have size, color and shape permutations, and unlike other sites in the same space, we have unique pages for all of those combinations. The pages are different, but perhaps not very significantly. We have had success with this strategy on another site which has not been penalized, though we stepped up the number of item listing pages substantially on this one.

Traffic seems like it may be recovering slowly but you might be right that we are being overly aggressive on the number of generated pages.

Hi all,

We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower.

One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www).

Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August.

We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor:

• We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks.
• Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day.
• GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact.
• Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google?

This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl

Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day.

Thanks!