90 replies to this topic

[horsetags]

Hi
Just to continue, which may or may not help, our site was building up good links with about 40 pages non supplemental and the rest were and we were getting a bit of trade. 3 weeks before Christmas we had about 200 non supplemental and business boomed :-) (for a week).

Then all pages except 3 went back to supplemental and business nose dived :-(

Now here's the thing that i've noticed with the supplemental results. I don't think it's about linking as mine are going slowly, without me adding any links to any of these pages, 3-4 every 2-3 days are coming out of the supplemental results.

The other thing i have noticed is that, although my site is being spidered by the googlebot for many months, it has always been the same ip address.

Over the lsat few weeks i have been spidered by different googlebot ips, one does its rounds and then another takes over, so i am assuming that maybe the different data centres are updating, and as it has never done this before, i wonder if this is a sign that google has seen my site for a while, decided that it isn't a fly by night (sandbox?) and is now getting ready to show all my pages once all of the data centres have done their rounds.

This is what i think causes some of the problems, we see different data centre results, although the site: results are usually the same.

The other thing i have noticed is that, if i do a site: from within the webmasters tools link, i have 295 pages in the .com and 295 in the .co.uk serps

If i do a straight site: in firefox google search, the .com is 295, but the .co.uk is 60!

IE is different again!


Anyway, i hope some of my observations help in some way, but have probably been old knowledge to everyone else for a while :-)


Paul

[copywriter]

I'm back in position today for all my keyphrases. That was a short one!

[thx1138]

I'm back in position today for all my keyphrases. That was a short one!

That's good to hear Copywriter, no such luck here as yet.

Charlie

[copywriter]

Hopefully you will follow suit very soon! Hang in there!

[JamesDean]

Dont panic! This just happened to me about a month ago. I feel it was a bad data push by google or what they call a gfu. I lost my rankings overnight but I came back around 3 weeks later. Others have told me that this has happened to them for the last 3 years or so. So dont worry and dont do any changes to your site and you should come back

Glad your back!

[Force7]

Hi,

Thought I would post some of the things that was happening with one of our sites.

Jan 3rd I noticed that our hits were really low. I took a look at our rankings and found Google had wiped at least 90% of our rankings. The strange thing was the fact we still had a few #1 positions so I felt we were not being penalized. I waited a few days hoping it was a glitch and would came back. The days dragged on for 2 weeks . No major changes were done but we checked trying to see if there was a reason and cleaned up a few small items that really should not be a problem. Suddenly on Tuesday Jan 16th we started seeing our rankings again. Still not completely restored but only lack about 10% now. Just hope it stays. :praying hard:

I always come over here and see if anyone is experiencing the same but no one seemed to be having a drop that lasted more than a couple of days. I never really posted thinking it was just our site.

[thx1138]

That sounds familiar Force7, vast majority of listings gone, but still a couple of number 1's. We're rapidly heading towards a week so far, your post has given me hope that maybe we'll only have to endure another week. If nothing else it's given me time to do some housekeeping stuff, creating a sitemap, sorting out unintentional duplicate content etc.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Charlie

[lunatrix]

That sounds familiar Force7, vast majority of listings gone, but still a couple of number 1's. We're rapidly heading towards a week so far, your post has given me hope that maybe we'll only have to endure another week. If nothing else it's given me time to do some housekeeping stuff, creating a sitemap, sorting out unintentional duplicate content etc.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Charlie

Hi charlie, I'm still with you on this one. it was pointed out to me that on the last google cached index page all our img alt tags which for the majority say 'graphic' were showing up as what might be seen as hidden text or keyword stuffing. I've been scratching my head wondering if this might be whats tripped us up. needless to say i've stripped all the alt tags out of the pages and resubmitted to google using their form on the webmasters tools.

[copywriter]

Well, this one isn't over yet. Just out of curiosity, I checked my rankings again today and I've popped back out for 2 keyphrases. The others are holding. This is a little roller coaster ride. Ah! The wonderful world of Google!

[Jill]

it was pointed out to me that on the last google cached index page all our img alt tags which for the majority say 'graphic' were showing up as what might be seen as hidden text or keyword stuffing.

What makes you think they would be seen as hidden text or keyword stuffing?

[thx1138]

Lunatrix, you need to be careful with img ALT tags, they're a requirement for software that reads pages for the sight impaired, you may fall foul of the Disibility Discrimination Act if you don't take reasonable steps to ensure your site is as accessible as possible.

Still no improvement here by the way.

Charlie

[Keniki]

Lunatrix, you need to be careful with img ALT tags, they're a requirement for software that reads pages for the sight impaired, you may fall foul of the Disibility Discrimination Act

Nice to see someone comment on this for a non benefit reason.
Lotts of reasons a site can hit difficulty some beyond your control (at least temporarily).

[Jeri2012]

Thanks guys, I'm not panicking yet, well maybe slightly, two weeks or so of lost revenue makes me feel a bit queazy.

It's come as a bit of a shock as I don't seem to experience these fluctuations that everyone talks about, I guess I've been very lucky.

Charlie

Well, I and many others are probably in the same boat, as I just had a site deindexed. It's pretty scary, especially when it makes up about 50% of your livelihood - and no, I don't do anything "shady," except by accident, if at all. I was just thinking about how much Google has me by the "gonads," so to speak, as I am VERY dependent on them for either Adsense, Adwords or SERPs. And then disaster struck, as my site disappeared off the index. (Jill has answered that she doesn't think my supposed transgression was the reason, which is a relief.)

[Jill]

t's pretty scary, especially when it makes up about 50% of your livelihood

If you read the earlier parts of this thread, you'll see that we've already mentioned that depending on free rankings for any part of your livelihood is just not a smart thing to do. I don't mean to kick you while you're down, but this happening right now for you should be a real wake up call to start working on some other forms of marketing and advertising.

It can't be said enough that free search engine rankings are a BONUS. Not the source of the food on your table.

[Jeri2012]

If you read the earlier parts of this thread, you'll see that we've already mentioned that depending on free rankings for any part of your livelihood is just not a smart thing to do. I don't mean to kick you while you're down, but this happening right now for you should be a real wake up call to start working on some other forms of marketing and advertising.

It can't be said enough that free search engine rankings are a BONUS. Not the source of the food on your table.

Yes, thank you, Jill, for taking the time to direct much-needed attention my way. I agree, of course, as I almost had a heart attack, and I've had several of those panicky moments over the past couple of months, as several of my most important pages did exactly what Randy described in another excellent post: To wit, my relatively new site (less than a year) would have pages go straight to the top of the index for a couple of weeks, yielding some exciting results, and then they would disappear completely off the face of the earth, causing me to start sweating. I'd do another page, same thing. Now, the whole site. I haven't seen much here yet about deindexing, so I'm still sweating that one, although I still have other sites that I can work on in the meantime.

Of course, I have tried many other methods to get significant traffic, including owning FFA pages, using safelists, doing traffic exchanges and PPC. Other than PPC I've had no luck, and PPC has never yielded a significant profit. Someone mentioned "email ads," but I don't see how one can do that other than sending out SPAM (not something I will do, obviously), using (relatively useless) safelists or having one's own list already. If I had a substantial list, I wouldn't need the search engines in any event. I'm sure you've already addressed all these issues elsewhere, and I will continue to research through your site.

Thanks again. Even in this short time of being here, I've found answers to longstanding questions.