Dramatic SERP changes?

[Conkster]

Hello,

Is it common for a site to "disappear" for it's best keyword phrase on Google? Are these dramatic changes often temporary (especially when you know you're innocent of any shady tactics)?

Thanks for your responses!

[mpea]

How lon has your site been up for? It may be going throught a temporary pahse. The phases that i have been through:

Some sort of sand box for about 5 months (for competitive words)
then it was highly rank, possibly for a testing phase to see how often it was clicked(for a couple of weeks)
then dropped to a low rank (for a couple of months)..
then fairly high ranked... permanent


I haven’t noticed any major SERP changes with my keywords, so its possible a testing phase, where some keyword may be dropped for a while

[hhheng]

My site always jump from 11th page to 7th page, and then drop from 7th to 10th, etc, everyday the SERP is changing, but never disappear from google. You'd use some tools to check it, since maybe your site is far away from page 100.

[mpea]

yes a had a diffence like that with day and night.

Which makes sense

if you search for club bacon at luch time you might be looking for a bacon club sandwich

but at night time the chances of looking for a night club called bacon have increased.

[jakomo]

Hi hhheng,

Check your pages in different datacenters..... My keywords rank #2 in some datacenters and #6 in another datacenters....

Yes, sometime disappear some pages (sand box), but with time, this pages coming again

Best luck!
Jakomo

[Conkster]

The site's been established since 2005. After picking it up on here, I did make some changes to the title tags and text hoping to improve my SERP rankings. I was able to bump it from the second page on Google to the first for my premium search phrase, but now it's gone entirely. Maybe I messed it up!

[CymaxStores]

Google's going through a little uncertainty right now (e.g. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/re-opening-bugs-thread/) so it could just be a temporary thing. On Jan 2 we disappeared from the results entirely for our best keyword (as did our biggest competitor), on Jan 4 we ended up being #2 for that keyword. It sounds like certain queries/keywords are just broken after something that happened in december/because of something happening this January. Wait a couple of days and see what happens essentially.

[Conkster]

yeah, I must have gone through that too. My site is back now, same spot - #6.

[Megadeals]

did u check all the data centers?

[Matt D]

WEll sometimes I notice site is gone from google and then few hrs or minutes later when i refresh its there...i guess thats how google works

[MikeSwede]

Something is definitely going on right now. I thought it was because I changed my preferred domain to www in the web master tools but I guess that's not it (maybe).
A couple of days after I changed my URL to use www I see non-www in the serp's and the hits got really low. I also see a lot of search phrases I haven't seen before AND, of course I see a lot of new spam pages.
Geeessshhh..... 2006 was bad and we are only at the beginning of the year

[wrkalot]

I agree that something "may" be in the works. I have one site losing and another winning. It's the exact opposite of what I "think" should be happening... very strange indeed.