There’s an interesting thing with a site: search that Google doesn’t show the meta description for the pages. Instead it shows: “You are viewing HysterSisters Hysterectomy site as a guest. JOIN for *free* access to receive hysterectomy support!”. The tag looks properly formatted, although it’s mostly the same as the title.

I would also suggest that you remove (or NOFOLLOW) the links to Moms Who Think - - Girls Get Going that are on the foot of every page. I know they are your sites, but that can be the problem, they are probably hosted in the same place with the same contact info in Whois. Sometimes side-wide neighbourhood linking is not a good idea.

Unfortunately, SEO is not an exact art, and the longer you keep looking the more things you find that could be causing it.

I’d like to address a few of your questions and also point you to a thread that might be able to help you out. It’s the one which eventually ended up clearing out a large part of our dropped pages, although quite some are still missing in action (but we’re hoping that time is the answer to that problem!).

1. Should I remove the sitemap in webmaster/tools?
- I wouldn’t remove it, but I don’t generally trust any tool that comes from a site including seo in the domain… also, I can’t even see it at it’s standard location: http://www.hystersisters.com/sitemap.xml ?

2. Did the Google spider crawl stop in mid october on HysterSisters.com? If so, why?
- You should definitely be able to see this in webmaster tools under I believe the tools section. You can see google activity there including how many pages/bandwidth etc they are fetching.

3. Where did my indexed pages go?
- I guess that’s the key question really!

4/5/6. Sorry, I’m no expert in this although I try and keep up. I’d say the answer to your adsense revenue tanking is clearly less search traffic. If your traffic has dropped, it’d make sense that your adsense income dropped by the same, probably more (since search traffic tends to bounce out by clicking on ads more than users visiting from bookmarks).

There’s a rather long thread over at google groups pertaining to our specific case and perhaps reading that will give you one of those ‘a ha, perhaps it’s that’ moments. The thread is at http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/f0ad62c3fe6e9d33/05208168c956ce3d (man, why do those urls s**k so much?!).

Do you run any affiliate programs? Have you changed anything within the shop area or is there a reason none of your meta titles there actually pertain to the content on the page (ie. on a page selling product x, it’s perfectly normal (and in fact desirable) to have your meta title saying product x once as well as have it as a h1)? The title just seems to be HysterSisters Hysterectomy… on all pages.

Anyway, not sure if I’ll be notified of follow up comments (hate blogging systems that don’t allow that!) but if not, feel free to send me an email. I’d be happy to try and help.

Good luck and keep up the great work!

Sam

I’m talking about this website: http://www.hystersisters.com

I have 17,524 inbound links according to my webmasters/tools.

I have never been dugg nor stumbled upon. I don’t understand those sites and just have too much to do managing my own site to worry about digging and stumbling.

You better hurry up, because Google Toolbar PR will be hidden soon!

Please refer to this post
http://sphinn.com/story/14506

Google SandBox happens when you SpeedLink to your Website above the average speed of natural linking.

This happens to new and old Websites.

This is a big problem and Google needs to address it.
A competetor by design or your users inadvertantly may cause your site to go into a SandBox, by over Digging and Stumbling it.

Think of it as Quick Sand, the more you link to your Website the lower in Google index your Webpages go.

I would advise not to actively recieve inlinks to your site, if it is at all possible and later continue a natural linking process.

Matt, Thank you for stopping by and commenting. I appreciate the time you have taken to read about my woes and reply to me. I was penalized almost 2 years ago for being in the dp link coop (when DP claimed it was not so) and immediately removed the links and requested reinclusion. Google claimed to forgive me. But, from that point, the pages were never indexed properly again it seems. We have many discussions (almost 300,000) for laparoscopic hysterectomy, vaginal hysterectomy, abdominal hysterectomy, fibroids, endometriosis, hormone therapy, (the list goes on). Hystersisters.com is the leading authority for patient support but the spiders are not getting to the content. I have no idea why.

I am not a link-exchange-monster. There are a few authority sites we link to naturally, providing resources to our members. (Is our link directory of carefully moderated content a problem? We created the hystersisters link directory as a place to recommend our visitors for additional resources for fibroids, endometriosis, hormone therapy, etc. We do not link directly, rather we use a link jump. Are we being penalized for that?

I had a sitemap from vbseo but have removed it now. I have set the spider crawl rate to FASTER but that doesn’t seem to help. No matter what I think to try (sitemap, adwords, etc) nothing seems to help with the spiders getting to the content to make it available in organic searches for our patients.

THanks again, Matt,
Kathy

That said, I don’t see any penalties on http://www.hystersisters.com/ at all right now. It’s possible that any link exchange links to your site aren’t counting as much as before, but they’re not counting against you. So in some sense you have an open path ahead of you. I’d recommend not to try to get links from tons of link exchanges if possible.

One thing I would recommend would be good keyword research. For example, you show up #3 for the search [hysterectomy] to me. You might think about some of the searches that you show up for almost by accident (e.g. you’re in the front page for the search [novasure]), and whether you want to show up for more searches like that. You might also want to research more specific versions of queries. You’re in the top 3 for [hysterectomy], but nowhere to be found for related searches such as [laproscopic hysterectomy]. If you can generate useful + relevant discussions on more specific topics, those discussions can serve as great resources that users would love and benefit from finding in Google.

Best wishes,
Matt Cutts