LiewCF.com is Dying?!
Filed in: SEO Beginner, Site News — June 26th, 2006
It happened since last Thursday(June 22, 2006). Website traffic dropped dramatically. The amount of visitors drop from over 8,000 to under 2,000! Daily website revenue was cut off over 75% due to the traffic lost!
SiteMeter graph shows the sudden website traffic drop.
After some researching, I discovered that my website’s rank is dropped in Google search results. LiewCF.com was ranked top for many keywords but now it dropped out of the top 100 results. It didn’t even rank top for the domain keyword, “liewcf”.
This is terrible. 
Am I alone?
After digging some famous webmaster forums, I discovered that I am not alone.
- Dropped from Google?
- Indexed pages way down?
- Google Problem
- My site has completely fell off Google..
- Recent changes in google criteria?
- Has the removal of the 5 billion page site hurt you?
- Disappearing and Reappearing rankings - Everflux or something else?
- Sites being heavily penalized by Google
Conclusion?
- Google is doing something.
- DigitalPoint’s Coop network(or other link exchange?) may be the cause of search rank droppings.
I have temporary removed the coop links, but nothing I can do about Google.
My two cents
This is a disaster for LiewCF.com and my full-time blogging career. However, I believe LiewCF.com has good contents and this is a temporary change, everything will back to normal soon.
LiewCF.com will keep going to serve you good contents. Thank you for your regular visits.
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June 26th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
My traffic wasn’t affected
June 26th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Your page rank still great in ‘6′. But revenue being cut by 75% is hell!
June 26th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Sorry to hear that..Google is definitely doing something
June 26th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
maybe the major “google dance” back to action. A lot of things happen to blog worlds, especially the splog issues. If that is the case, somebody need to re-test back the new blog positioning strategy.
June 26th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
John Wong, page rank is not related to revenue.
Liewcf, all the best to you. If it seems like a penalty, don’t expect it to be lifted so soon. Try reinclusion request. And beware too of your text link ads, add rel=”nofollow” to the link or else you might take the consequences of link buying, or at least don’t let your readers go down the drain with u.
June 26th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Maybe you were earning too much money from them.
I have no problem - typing ah ok lah in Google and ressing the “I’m feeling lucky button leads to my site. But nobody is searching for those keywords. Boo hoo
June 26th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
I’ pretty sure that this is only temporary. By the way, for the search term liewcf blog, I’m ranked first? WTF? Haha
June 26th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Temporary glitch, happened to me few times before. I’m affected too but not as much as lcf, visitors down from 7000 to 4500 and revenue down by 30%. Lucky that adsense is not my major income anymore
June 26th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
i am so sorry to hear that.
June 26th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
what is Co-op advertising Network?
Any Examples?
June 26th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
Yeah, Do you remember ?? I asked the same question to you that day !!. Google Removes some pages for some or the other reason. I contacted Google About this, so they say
“Its normal, Your site will be re-indexed within few day”
June 26th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
I too got phased out by google on several keywords.
So how are you gonna live it up again?
June 26th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
Got to be careful to include text link ads and recipocal links these day..
Anyway good luck to you Liew.
June 26th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
All the best, hope your site recover soon and doing even better than before! I notice these days my search traffic are coming more from yahoo than google too.
June 26th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Yes Bob, your right!! Reciprocal links and Text Link Ads can be really dangerous. I removed some links from my blogroll and got immediate results !!
June 26th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Still that’s quite a huge drop of traffic even if google will reindex the pages again. I did a site:www.liewcf.com and it only shows 800+ pages. I remember liewcf used to have around 20k.
June 26th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
@Katana: yeah… you make me panic again.
June 27th, 2006 at 12:09 am
Same goes to my site. Traffic drop about 50% and revenue drop as well. SERP for my target keyword and index pages were up and down these few days
June 27th, 2006 at 2:31 am
Kahsoon.com was having the problem too.
Google does not penalizes the page search engine ranking or PageRank where TLA appears but link selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).
For normal text links, I would be careful not to include links to pages unrelated to my niche. To be safe, the “no follow” tag should be included if you can especially links to sites not related to your niche.
Google is definitely reshuffling their index as some of my sites get a ranking boost in some of the popular keywords. But knowing Google, everything can change in a blink of an eye.
The only way to stay safe is to diversify.
June 27th, 2006 at 2:43 am
1. check your sitemap for error or invalid url. Submit manually to Google Sitemaps so you can see whether there’s any problem or not.
2. Do NOT use WP’s Sitemaps plugin Auto Ping feature.
3. Reduce / eliminate non-relative outbound links.
4. Wait and pray.
I succesfully managed to get my indexed page back in just couple of days after I fixed my sitemap and turned off the auto ping on WP’s Sitemaps plugin. Some of my friends have to wait for 2-3 weeks before they got their indexed page again, all after fixing the sitemap and turning off the plugin’s feature.
Also, I just saw that Google has updated its Webmaster Guidelines. You might want to check it out as well.
June 27th, 2006 at 2:45 am
It happen to our website network too, google drop our indexed pages and makes some women got lost out there, lol
Hope that google could get this issue solved soon, or we’ll leave this web biz and makes more women lost
June 27th, 2006 at 7:21 am
Confirm reciprocal link is dangerous? If then, I shall remove it also.
June 27th, 2006 at 10:06 am
I don’t believe that reciprocal links will do any harm.. lots of the sites are using it and not all are penalized in these matter. The issue is not from reciprocal links, must be something else.
I would rather believe that LiewCF put too many things at the top fold, making it hard for the search-spider to reach and crawl the actual contents.. not sure but could be.
Good luck though Liew.. hope that it’s just a temporary glitch.
June 27th, 2006 at 11:32 am
[...] Unfortunately, he became the latest ‘Google Dance’ Victim (Google Dance: The process of updating/reindexing Google’s servers, which generally takes place once each month). According to his post and comments, his top keywords were dropped out from the top 100 results (including ‘liewcf‘ ), the indexed pages dropped from 20,000 to a mere 771 (at the time i’m writing this entry). [...]
June 27th, 2006 at 11:33 am
As many have said, it should be a temporary thing.
Give it a couple of days to see if things improve..
June 27th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
I feel that Google is very sensitive to the things you do to the website. For example I just changed the title of my blog (URL still same) and my Google rankings dropped like a rock. Don’t know why. They may think I’m a new blog site or they see same content previously indexed under different blog title so are penalising.
I see that you have dropped the top adverts after perhaps listening to one of the earlier comments?
Good to see Liew is actively doing something…
Keep us updated on the effects of your changes Liew.
June 27th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
At the end of the day, Google is all about content. Just give the google tweak a liitle time.
June 27th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Blogging is not a full time career. You are painfully naive and unrealistically optimistic to think of it when your grammar (while not as atrocious as one blogger’s in TheStar.com.my) is equally cringe-inducing.
Get a life and get a (proper) job. =_=
June 27th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
Great say, Suet!
June 27th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
A little off topic but nevermind..
@Suet: Blogging is not a full time career…etc
At some point, I agree with you but in many other points I don’t really think so. There are many successful bloggers (or any webmasters who are making money from the internet) and they are treating this as a business. And in any kind of business in the world you’ll see ups and downs. Same thing applies here. Even if you get a proper job, that wouldn’t mean that the company would never flop.
In my opinion, anything can become a full time career if you put your heart and soul to it and make it big. Internet business is all about mindset. Diversify and don’t rely too much on search engines, build your name, build email list. Market affiliate programs etc… and don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Be positive and good luck!
June 27th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Wow. Those were not very kind words Suet. Hurtful.
Liew please disregard her comment. So what if your English is not up the some people’s standard. It’s ok to me and to many people.
What’s more important is the value you bring in blogging about interesting stuff and exposing interesting information on the web to the rest of us thru your wonderful blog.
Continue blogging as a career and make people like Suet eat their words. LiewCF boleh!!
June 27th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Only 1% of those who blog make it to survive on the revenue that it brings. You are that 1%. The 99% of the people like Suet just can’t make it.
Read that somewhere in StevePavlina.com
June 27th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Anything that try to manipulate google ranking will get your site in trouble. Have you read my post on webmastermalaysia regarding Digital Point Ad Network (http://www.webmastermalaysia.com/how-increase-traffic/6321-instant-inbound-link.html) one year ago?
June 27th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
LOL I make money writing and I don’t worry about (lack of) traffic to my site be it caused by Google or not.
So no thank you, not gonna eat my words.
June 27th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Liew, Thanks for being so frank in telling (more like warning) us noobs. I hope your site recovers soon.
June 27th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
liew… actually this happened suddenly…
we are competitor in business. I also ran a tech blog. But actually I would like to say we are brothers in the malaysian context of blogging.
therefore, I have always gauge my blog performance against yours..
you mentioned that google has played down your blog… and based on my observation.. you COULDN’T be too wrong because I noticed that searching for “tech blog” and “tech blog malaysia” doesn’t include you in the first 10 -20 results. That is strange because liewcf.com used to be No.1 for “tech blog malaysia” and top 10 for “tech blog”.
I don’t know why… did you check out with Google ?
June 27th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Sueth: Forget about the money, just think how much of effort this guys puts to run this site !!. If possible encourage others, but never discourage. No one is perfect. I hope you get what I say
it-sideways: Try make friendship with other bloggers rather than competing with them.
Liew: No loose hope. Keep blogging and wait for sometime. But I think that this problem is due to that big ad you put above the header.
BTW which plugin do you use to create that multipage comments ??
June 27th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
If i change my blog’s theme, will my Page rank or Pages dropped ?
June 27th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
Thilak… i think it doesn’t affect… according to what i read ler… they never mention about themes wor..
June 27th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Jee, reciprocal links do not hurt, but systematic link exchange and link buying/selling certainly is, and will. Read Matt Cutss post on this.
June 28th, 2006 at 6:11 am
Thanks for great updates and important articles in your blog and So sorry to hear that, hopefully it’ll get better. Good Luck!.
June 28th, 2006 at 8:40 am
just wait and see…Your traffic will pick up
June 28th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Google is not stable and their crawling bot is full of bugs. Remembered theres people out there got their website indexed with 5 billions pages? hehehe.. Anyway my old 1999 website is back on top #2 yesterday and I’m happy for it. Next target revenue is USD5000 per month!
June 28th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Sorry to hear about this.
Perhaps you should diversify your traffic source. Easier said than done of course but no better time to do it then now.
I notice you have a RSS subscriber base of 1000+ are you monitising that? This is a source that is not affected by search engine.
Your reputation is good. Branch out into other revenue streams.
All the best!
June 28th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
You shouldn’t depend on Google, but your core readers.
June 28th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
Hi CF,
Similar things happening on my sites, I first thaught it was due to the worldcup that people “forgot” to use the internet.
But I also got kicked of from some hard earned page 1 positions, but - must say I was neglecting them…
Since content didn’t change, I guess the linking strategies need to be boosted up!
Good luck with yours!
Stef
SEO for dummies at:
http://www.quickandeasywaystomakemoney.com
June 29th, 2006 at 10:44 am
First thing I would want to say. Optimism is not about “actions” but optimism is within one’s self being. By being optimistic, one will not sadistically go against his/her own will (but I hope one’s will is something that intends positive eh?).
Well no matter, we are in a world with many misguided people who end up being cruel as a way of being misguided. But hey, our wishes are to be happy and positive without anyone left behind right?
My bad, I needed to rant there, but anyhow, no matter Mr. Liew, you’ll be fine if you just go as you will as you believe as you will now eh? I’m certain you’re sincere, maybe a bit on the negative side at times like all of us during panic, but just like I mention. Go as you will as you believe as you will. Excuse me people if I’m off topic, just wanna consider ethics anyhow & inspire the guy. Each of us is misguided differently, but no worries, we just gotta change ourselves somewhat once we see such misguidance.
Yeah, Mr. Liew, I’m certain you’ll be back on track and get back what you need.
June 29th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
[...] I came across the pro-blogging folks here. Telling from pure html guts, these are good people, some are even making good bucks. But you can’t help but think about how to sustain the whole gig. [...]
June 29th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
“This is a disaster for LiewCF.com and my full-time blogging career.”
Liew, full-time blogger - is not a career. Think again.
My advice.. find a true career. Blogger as a extra income.
More secure..
July 1st, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Not a big deal.
You will get some glitches even in emplyment world.
Be more diversify and enjoy.
Good luck.
July 3rd, 2006 at 1:35 pm
good luck bro..
July 3rd, 2006 at 3:05 pm
[...] If a decrease in Adsense earnings bother you, at least it’s a little comforting to know that not only liewcf claimed his website revenue dropped by 75%, but some more others are talking about the same disaster lately. For me, knowing that this an up-and-down business matters; the decrease will later be compensated with another increase.. soon perhaps. Today it’s going high to unexpected amount of dollars, and suddenly the day after that you see a very small amount of earnings and start thinking what you have done wrong But when you see another extra dollars in few days later, you will start smiling and forget the sad story. If extra dollars are not enough, then take a read on my Adsense bell curve theory. Happy webbing! [...]
July 3rd, 2006 at 5:31 pm
[...] Unfortunately, he became the latest ‘Google Dance’ Victim (Google Dance: The process of updating/reindexing Google’s servers, which generally takes place once each month). According to his post and comments, his top keywords were dropped out from the top 100 results (including ‘liewcf‘ ), the indexed pages dropped from 20,000 to a mere 771 (at the time i’m writing this entry). [...]
July 4th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
My site is not affected.
word of caution:
always diversify your online income. Have few profitable sites, and few source of traffic.
I gave up SEO long long time ago and I am glad I did. Don’t wanna put all my eggs in one basket.
July 7th, 2006 at 10:08 am
[...] In a recent post the author mentioned that his traffic was badly affected when Google decided to reindex their search result. [...]
July 7th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
I suggest you put less ads and more contents..Honestly, I stop visiting your website for more than a month till today due to those annoying ads…
July 7th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
well, I believe many won’t agree with me, but its up to you, I am just trying to be honest, your blog though its still giving that much of information as last time but its giving more and more frustating too… to many ads, and I hate the fact that when I saw something interesting and I clicked it hoping that its a link to a useful post just to find out its actually an affiliate link. Remember most of the things yo u normally blog about can be obtained somewhere else too and if you ask me whether I prefer to read it on a website with no ads or a website with ads, I will go for the one with no ads.
I know you want to make money, thats good, but if you’re planning to sell something, make websites mainly for that purpose. to “sell” and to make money. If you plan to make this website with a purpose to provide information, put less ads then. You might be saying those people like Darren make money from their blogs, but think carefully, how many ads you can find on his “main” blog, problogger.net? I have seen his other websites aswell, its not really a blog, its a website with the aim to sell but using a blog system. you can see a different between a website made to sell and a website made to provide information, honestly, I don’t believe in sites with the purpose to make money and provide information at the same time. Its not going to work! When I say website made for contents, I never mean you don’t put ads, yes you can, but not too many ads..I don’t know how to explain, but there is an obvious difference between a site that is meant to provide information and website that provide information but with the intention to sell. Try to think, with the topics that you blog, what kind of people come and visit your website? Do these people know nothing about “ads” or these people are people like you, webmasters etc who come here to get some information. Once you know what kind of people visiting your website, you will understand this essay.
Thank you
July 7th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
*frustation
August 4th, 2006 at 12:00 am
So Liew,
How’s your traffic development so far? Any improvement?
August 4th, 2006 at 9:35 am
@Lee: thank you. The traffic is recovering…
August 10th, 2006 at 2:15 am
Good to hear
December 17th, 2006 at 6:35 am
weird. so having random text links can hurt you? this is messed up.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:06 am
[...] That’s hurt! I can feel the pain because I had similar experience. Google search is the main source of my site traffic, therefore I got hit very hard that time. [...]
September 2nd, 2007 at 2:44 am
I Found Google Drop by blog as well…. sob sob, what should we do to recover or just let it be??
September 2nd, 2007 at 3:53 am
@Jerry Ong: read google webmaster guidelines: http://urltea.com/1djy
If you were referring to your blog, remove the massive blogroll
September 2nd, 2007 at 3:58 am
I did check http://urltea.com/1djy but i think the info had been removed. massive blogroll? you mean the blogrolling i’m using? thanks for your prompt reply!
September 2nd, 2007 at 5:21 am
@Jerry Ong: Read: http://www.feedthebot.com/
Yes, your blog has a very long blogroll… Google dislike web pages with over 100 links.
September 2nd, 2007 at 7:18 am
Thanks for your attention! seems like i’m lazy to google the answer but choose to disturb u
Will remove it and see whether inprove or not! Thanks again~