Qype has a ranking problem. Yesterday, in the first part of this series, I wrote about how you are able to localize the part of a domain that causes problems. Today, I will try to figure out the origin of the problem. For this, it is helpful to have some previous experience with similar stories, enough time and a good apprehension of things.

I usually first look for classic technical mistakes: directories that are blocked in robots.txt, pages that were pushed out of the index by the noindex-attribute or when the canonical-tag is not fully understood – which is new but already a highlight – and where, for example, all pages get redirected to the landing page. All of this does not seem to apply in this case though, which means there must be another reason for the decrease in visibility. The second step would be to look at Google's Webmaster-Tools for the site, if you have access to that. Is Google reporting any conspicuous behavior or are there changes in the interesting areas of the Webmaster-Tools that can not be explained? You should especially take a closer look at the “Crawling-Statistics” option. Sadly I do not have access to Qype's Webmaster-Tools account, which means that I cannot make any assertions on them – though I believe from experience that this would probably not yield much new insight.

Slowly but surely, we are running out of the easy, self-made possibilities that could have caused this problem – time to consider a “Google Penalty”. Those of you who have been with us for a while, will have heard of ranking-penalties before. Google uses them to punish those who go against their Webmaster Guidelines or other behaviors that they do not deem acceptable. You can find a short introduction into the different types of penalties in this article. In this case, I went through the different penalties and looked at how applicable they were – which left me with a keyword-depreciation. While I am not a big fan of 3D-nick-nack in diagrams, in this case I found it fitting:


Here we can see on which Google-resultspage (1 to 10) the keywords of the subdirectory are found. I introduced this as a nice way of assessing ranking-problems a while ago and today it is being used by many others. The red bars show the keyword-distribution at the beginning of the year: a rather common sight for large content-websites. The blue bars up front show the current distribution. More than 60% of keywords only show up from page 7 on – which is the common picture for a keyword-depreciation. To make sure that I am not going off into the wrong direction, I also did a quick check of the “people”-directory, which shows changes that look perfectly normal. This means we can assume that Qype is suffering from a Google-Penalty in the form of a keyword-depreciation of the “/place” subdirectory.

This is where the real work starts: the next step is to find out and asses possible reasons that Google might have had for this penalty. And that is exactly what tomorrows article will be about.

There is something rotten in the state of Qype
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part II
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part III
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part IV