What To Do If Your Ranking Drops Down Suddenly? Options

[aaron653]

Hello

Since the last 3-4 weeks, my site have been No.1 in Google for two important keywords.

But today, with one of them, I see it nowhere in Google.

With the other keyword, its at No.2.

When I observed the sites at the first page, I found that the whole keyword is in the title and the description. On the other hand I have only a part of the keyword in the description. So I am going to change the description so that it includes the whole keyword.

Now what else should I do?

[Hyperformance]

Hi Aaron -

Before you do anything, I would just wait a few days... it may be nothing at all. Your changes may be detrimental at this point - you know where you were and the datacenters may be updating or it could be something else. I would wait a bit before making the changes "you see" on someone elses pages and using you that as your reasoning - I am assuming that you were ahead of them before and didn't notice "them" until now.

My 2 cent

- Scott

[RiYo]

Aaron, a question that normally is asked first ... how old is your site? If it is brand new (few weeks/months) you might be seen at first and then all of a sudden drop off the planet (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) .

richard

[aaron653]

Its not brand new...its around 2 years old.

[Randy]

I'm with Scott. The first thing I'd do is nothing. For at least several days, perhaps a few of weeks.

Only then will you have a better idea whether you actually need to make changes or it was a momentary glitch.

[BBCoach]

Hello Aaron,

I'm with Randy and Scott. One of my web sites is an 11+ year domain and two specific pages were continually ranked in the top 5 for multiple searches. Then on September 21, 2007, they disappeared out of Google. I mean gone totally with no visible results even when doing a site: search! Yahoo and MSN still had them ranked.

I looked thru the code with a fine tooth comb and couldn't find anything out of place or suspicious and did NOT change a thing. Those two pages are now crawling back into the top 10 since the last week of October. Why did that happen? I dunno, but the only logical explanation would be that one of my competitors reported those pages as spam. I know that's a long shot theory because there are suppose to be some checks and balances at Google before pages are removed from the index, but that's the only thing I believe could have possibly occurred unless Google picked my site to run some tests on. If that's the case, y'all need to stop that now! LOL!

Aaron, wait for a month or so to see what happens before changing anything.

[Jill]

Similar to what the others said...STOP LOOKING!

Instead, review your analytics and see if traffic is down. And also optimize for hundreds of phrases so it's not a problem if/when a few of them go AWOL for awhile.