Last week I received 60 emails from HelpMySEO visitors who were experiencing a problem. Used to new pages on their websites being indexed within 48 hours at the most they found the fact that they now had to wait up to seven days before they found that page on their website. They were asking if this is a new Google penalty which is coming into effect before the upcoming PageRank update. 

 

One webmaster in particular sent in this heartfelt message: “My Blog is three years old and has a PageRank of five. I am used to putting pages up and having them indexed by Google within 24 hours. It ranks high in its niche for specific keywords and has been, for me, an increasingly important course of income, particularly as things have got tougher in the offline economy. Now, however, I have to wait several weeks before I see new posts ranking high and it is about a week before they appear in the Google index. Google appears to have stopped indexing my new posts. Is this the introduction of a new penalty? Something like ‘posting day + 7 days’ wait’? Please any idea will help.” 

 

Google does introduce, each year, new filters and new penalties which is its natural response to the constant gaming which goes on as webmasters strive to optimize their websites so that they show up high on the organic search engine results pages and attract more viewers. That’s only natural. I took a look at most of the websites affected and it emerged that the majority are WordPress Blogs.  WordPress is a popular blogging platform and has, in the past, featured heavily in the choice of many a potential blogger because it is easy to update and can be indexed quickly. 

 

The affected websites I looked at were all using the SEO plugin for WordPress. The very words ‘SEO Plugin’ fire up most webmasters’ imagination who think that here is an automated way to SEO a website and get it ranking high. As I have mentioned here before however automated SEO tools are not really that good for many practical reasons which only make sense in hindsight. 

 

In this case also the SEO plugin for Wordpress that screws up the code and prevents Google from indexing the website pages correctly. Plugins like this don't do real SEO. They hide certain pages on your website from search engine spiders and they allow you to edit the header information of your web pages. This can also be done through the regular Wordpress interface. Although the new blog post wasn't listed for 7 days on Google, the index page of the blog was listed in Google's search results.

 

As the index page of a blog often shows the latest blog posts, it is likely that Google uses the 7 day delay for the blog page because the post can only be found on the blog index page during that time. Some of the affected blogs publish press releases on their websites. As the same press release can also be found on many other websites, Google might return the first publisher of the press release in the search results and discard all other pages with the same content.

 

Other affected websites seemed to be AdSense scraper websites. These websites have very little unique content and they have been built to attract visitors that then click on the AdSense ads on the website. 

 

Two of the affected websites I checked had user agent sniffers on their server working as a gateway. These programs return different pages to different user agents (human web surfers, Googlebot and other bots). If you used such a script on your server it will prevent Google's indexing robot from indexing your website and it can be misinterpreted as a spamming (cloaking) attempt. This is very similar to the SEO plugin problem above and although Google will probably address it at some point my guess is that they are not too fussed about differentiating right now between lazy webmasters trying to automate their SEO and save some time and Black Hat optimizers using Google forbidden techniques on their websites. 

 

At the moment, based on the results I saw it looks like the  7 day delay might be related to two different website types: websites that use server scripts that return different pages to different user agents and websites that contain little or no unique content. In this sense the 7 day delay for blogs that display the content both on the blog index page and the blog posting page is not a penalty but a Google feature that prevents duplicate results.

 

If your website is a Made-For-AdSense scraper website then it's probably time to think about a new business model. Google will give these websites lower rankings in the future and I am pretty certain it will degrade their PR in the coming update. 

 

If you use bot blocking scripts or other server scripts that change the content that is delivered to visitors of your website then you should make sure that you're not accidentally blocking Google. It's better not to use these scripts at all. At the end of the day the only SEO worth having is natural, organic SEO performed in a clearly-understood, step-by-step way. That way your results will be long-lasting and continue to deliver high on Google search.

 

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