shanemcdonald.org

Just a demonstration of where the traffic on the site was, compared to where it is today.

The image below is from Statcounter, the green line is PageViews and the Blue is Visitors.

Traffic Details for the past 30 days - view the most recent days, and traffic is up over 340%

I’m just glad this is finished with and I can start adding a bit more content !

I had enough with waiting so I placed a nicely worded email on Google Webmaster tools explaining the issues with the domain/hosting in November (which caused shanemcdonald.com to banned or penalised on Google).
That was Thursday … this morning I saw that for searches like “Don’t Stop me Now Chords” I was back at #1.

Traffic is up about 300% today which is great.

Glad its sorted!

So if anyone else has had problems like being penalised on Google, fix the problem, check the Google Webmaster Guidelines, ensure all items are being followed on your site, and then request Re-inclusion via the Google Webmaster Tools.

Nest thing for the site is to start adding some new content and new pictures.

Found out that the site had duplicate content titles and descriptions, as well as about 200 files not found, from the links directory.

This may be why the site had a huge drop in Google Rankings – so I have done the following (if anyone else has had these problems)

1. Added the links directory to robots.txt so that the outbound links php file is not indexed
   Some of the pages in the links directory are dead links and are therefore not found.
2. Removed WordPress plugins which created dynamic urls which caused indexing problems
   Also added these directories (the dynamic ones) to robots.txt as they served no real purpose.
3. Created a New XML Sitemap and submitted that to Google Webmaster Tools
4. Cleaned up the PHP scripts in the pictures gallery so that there was less chance of having large numbers of duplicated title, description and keywords content
5. Analysed the error.log file for any pages which may have being causing problems.

Hopefully these steps should help in getting the site traffic back up…. Heres Hoping!