Something very strange I don't understand - Google SEO guys
 

In February this year I registered mysite.com and started building, I did a lot of research on both on- and offline SEO techniques. I have a google sitemap, googlebot is camping on mysite.com, whenever I check my stats the bot is there or has just left, I get some traffic every day through google so all goes well.

Mysite.com is going fine so a few months back I also registered mysite.org because I needed another url to test some stuff before I apply it to mysite.com so I opened a subdomain on mysite.org named xxx.mysite.org I have a robots.txt there telling all the bots not to index anything on xxx.mysite.org.Not a single link is going to mysite.org and the PR is 0. On the index page of mysite.org there is only a message of the hosting company so nothing at all.

All my SEO efforts paid off and for my main keyword mysite.com gets first position on yahoo. Untill recent I got spot 3 to 7 on google for mysite.com the spots above me are from sites with high pagerank that I have placed a link on or that mention my site, so it's logical that those heavy weight sites with PR7 or 8 outrank my new site for my main keyword, this is something that will change overtime.

Now it's get weird, last week mysite.com suddenly dropped from position 4 to position 97, so mysite.com landed on page 9 of the serp results. I didn't do anything but a day later it was back there at spot 4 but now for the last 5 days it keeps at spot 97 in google's serp results.

Now get this, yesterday I checked again and what do I see? Mysite.org with PR0 and no content has spot 1 for the mysite keyword in google. Nothing links to it, no seo no nothing :error and I checked a few times today and there it is still on spot 1.

I do know google found out about mysite.org pretty soon after I registered it but I haven't got a clue what is going on. I tried so hard to understand google but I don't get the hang of it, I don't do blackhat stuff or anything I understand yahoo, google must like mysite.com because it has indexed around 1400 pages so far but those serp positions are rediculous.

So what do you think?

you need to redo your research and read googles blog

They have it for .org now these days?

mysite.com was registered in 95 :)

I think I have an idea, might have to do with shadow domains, don't know for sure. I have one type in domain that I redirected to mysite.com but I don't see any harm in that(did this through directadmin). The cache on mysite.org dates from 3 September and only since a few days it got spot 1 while the cache for mysite.com dates from 12 November.

I think if you have 14 hundred pages then you do do black hat seo.

Focus on the link quality not the websites massive content.

The redirect can, worst case, produce duplicate content and lead to penalties...google sometimes gets a 301 wrong. Another possibility you should check is hijacking. Worst case would be some wannabe searchengine suddenly firing up thousands in inbound links to your site.

Possible, but 1400 isn't that much, one of my domains with 118k pages is ranked pretty well...if you do it right and avoid duplicate content, it doesn't necessarily harm your site.

Yes I don't see a problem with those 1400 indexed pages as my site currently has around 12000 pages. The type in domain that I use the redirect on has no content so nothing duplicate overthere.

The .org has duplicate content on the xxx.mysite.org sub domain but I don't allow crawlers by using a robots.txt on it. xxx.mysite.org was previously indexed by google but not anymore today since I added the robots.txt file since I noticed that subdomain got spidered.

When I check google sitemaps info for mysite.com I see nothing but green lights, there seems so much volatility to be going on it's weird, the site grows each day with around 100 pages it's all very organic. I'm just going to sit back and observe what's going to happen in the next weeks, it's not the first time the site went from a top 10 spot to page 9 to come back with a higher top 10 ranking but the .org domain getting spot 1 out of nowhere while the .com has never managed this so far despite all SEO work PR and backlinks is a mystery.

These are this months bots:

Googlebot
Yahoo Slurp
Unknown robot (identified by 'crawl')
EchO!
MSNBot
BBot
Unknown robot (identified by hit on 'robots.txt')
Alexa (IA Archiver)
MSIECrawler
Unknown robot (identified by 'bot/' or 'bot-')
larbin
Nutch
Unknown robot (identified by 'spider')
SurveyBot
BaiDuSpider
Girafabot
The web archive (IA Archiver)
Google AdSense
OutfoxBot
ZyBorg
Ingrid
SBIder
Voyager
Unknown robot (identified by 'robot')
GigaBot
AskJeeves
Y!J Yahoo Japan
bender focused_crawler

How much google traffic are you getting from mysite.org?

Did you check the server headers?

What are the HTTP status codes?

I checked the server headers for both domains, both are fine, there is only one difference in the report for the .org it mentions "content-length 486" and an Etag but doesn't do this for the .com both domains are on the same server. Http status is 200 ok

Status codes:

200 OK
301 Moved Permanently
302 Found
304 Not Modified
307 Temporary Redirect
400 Bad Request
401 Unauthorized
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
410 Gone
500 Internal Server Error
501 Not Implemented


This is for the .org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>
Date => Tue, 21 Nov 2006 01:00:14 GMT
Server => Apache/1.3.36 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.27 OpenSSL/0.9.8a PHP/4.4.2 mod_perl/1.29 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510
Last-Modified => Sun, 19 Nov 2006 23:42:01 GMT
ETag => "5a700be-1e6-45789bc9"
Accept-Ranges => bytes
Content-Length => 486
Connection => close
Content-Type => text/html


This is for the .com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>
Date => Tue, 21 Nov 2006 01:01:05 GMT
Server => Apache/1.3.36 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.27 OpenSSL/0.9.8a PHP/4.4.2 mod_perl/1.29 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510
X-Powered-By => PHP/4.4.2
Connection => close
Content-Type => text/html



About traffic for mysite.org from google, this should be 0.