Websites Returning From The Dead In Google

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I’ve had a few websites that have re-animated in the last few weeks in Google. It’s one of the most amazing things you’ll ever see. When you watch a website that “is dead in Google” come alive again, you’ll truly understand why Google traffic is so important. I had three blogs which were affected by lowered Google rankings, and 2 out of the 3 came back, and I can’t say for sure why it happened.

I went through and took a number of steps to save the websites. All three sites are Wordpress blogs, so I spent a bunch of time removing the supplemental pages and duplicate content. Whether this directly resulted in the improvements, I can’t say for sure, but it almost couldn’t hurt. Duplicate content has a way of knocking a website down for almost all results, so this could be the case.

I’ve always been amazed at how a website can either 1) rank for a bunch of long tail searchers or 2) rank for nothing at all.

This seems overly dramatic, and always makes you wonder if you’re penalized. It’s possible that what happened could be described as penalization that occured because of duplicate content. After the website is spidered several times (without all the dupe content), whatever penalty is associated with the content drops, restoring the website to former glory. This is certainly a sound theory, but I have no way of knowing if that’s exactly what happened. In any event, Wordpress blogs do generate a great deal of dupe content, so cleaning up your blog templates is always key.

Have you noticed any recovery of lost rankings lately?

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