Hello! I am having a curious issue with my website. More properly one of my pages used to have about 10th position in Google SERP for some significant query. In July and August we kept on dropping and now are completely off the first 100 sites for the query. Is it possible Google to manipulate the SERP for this term, as some solid top 10 sites are also off the 100 now? I would really appreciate if anyone experienced the same issue could help me. Thanks for your support!
Leis, this is pretty normal issue with everyone. If i m right then we are continuously watching fluctuation in the rankings from the mid last year. Last year we had "Google Dance" update and in this year near around march we had "Vince Update". So it's not wrong to say that google regularly experimenting with search results to give better user experience for a given search query. And nobody has control over google rankings for their or clients sites. Now you can do only one thing just stitch with basics what google says and try to get links in natural ways instead of submission work. That's all i can say to you bcoz more natural your links appear then more google trusts on you and you have better rankings. Also try to have relations with sites in same niche as your have yours and if possible then give regular content to your site by running a blog. I hope that these things wud give you much info & if you need more then we all here to discuss and learn more.
If you are out of 100, then you must have got a Google penalty. Google Penalises websites which it seems to be overtaking the SEO and climbing too fast. Check your efforts, you must have put banned content, or got links too fast, or done something which is a penalty according to Google.
First i want to know have u had such penalty for your or any of your client's site? Or you have just read somewhere that such penalties exist and you are giving your views here. Let me tell you, this is not a kind of penalty. This a normal behavior of google that we are experiencing from last year. I had such issues with my sites but with some regular decent work you wud get out of this situation withing a week or two. Cud please explain what does it mean "banned content", i have listen about "duplicate content" but "banned content" content is new for me. I wanan say to Leis, don't scratch your mind too much and just read this thread, it will give you much more info that wht u need to do or not. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1442007
Yes - it's a fact that beyond the algorithm, Google has employees who manually manipulate site rankings, especially if there was a complaint about a blackhat practice or something to that effect. I still have a site, let's say "StuffForSale.com" and it has many natural backlinks with the term "stuff for sale" within the link, yet Google doesn't even rank me on page 100 for "stuff for sale", even though I'm within the top 3 on Yahoo and MSN. I've been anguishing over it for 2 years, and I'm convinced someone at Google denied me to rank for that term, I've done nothing wrong - no illegal or blackhat stuff, no link farming, traffic buying or anything else.
Why does everyone automatically play the "penalty card" when they cannot explain something? Unless you've done something REALLY bad like cloaking, hidden text, sneaky redirects, selling links, etc. it is NOT very likely you have been penalized or banned. It's also VERY rare that you can get links too fast resulting in a penalty. If so then every page that is popular on Digg would likely be in the penalty box which is NOT the case. And for the millionth time, there is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty". Penalties prevent you from showing on Page 1 of the SERPs no matter WHAT you do. Pages w/ duplicate content FREQUENTLY rank on page 1, even position 1, even outranking the original version of the content. It's just a little harder than if the content were original. No one here has even bothered to ask for the URL you are refering to and what keyword phrase it used to rank for in position 10... how long the site's been up? What changes you've made lately to the page or site? What link building you've been doing? etc. Instead, they go spouting off at the mouth saying it's likely the worse possible scenario, pulling wild guesses out of their b#tts, instead of getting a little information and making some type of informed, educated guess based on FACTS. IMO People should spend more time asking questions, getting a little history, doing a little investigating before they go running off at the mouth about penalties and bans which is probably the LEAST likely cause of this happening.
ever heard of google changing algorithm often ? ok, this is what happend to your site: google changed the way they rank sites, so you dropped in SERP (google doesn't manipulate SERP, SERP is made by google ) keep optimizing your site and i am sure you will be back in business. good luck !
Thanks Canonical for your help! The page ranked for the query for almost a year. The domain age: 1997. No illegal or blackhat stuff has been done to the site of course. All links are natural. Perhaps Google assumes my page isn't relevant to this query. So there are two ways for me: to change the keywords I struggle for or go on with link building for the query I'm not even in 100! What tactics is better how do you think?
Thanks maineexista for your wishes! I agree that google doesn't manipulate SERP, SERP is made by google. You can fight for the query for months and then have to begin again from the ground up! It looks like somebody just removes the competitors.
this is normal just keep building links you will be back, where you was it happns to me alot but everytime i come back.
was just in google that your position changed? didn't change in yahoo or bing? If it didn't change in yahoo and bing so in google is just a matter of time... and more backlinks
Yes, but our position stayed stable for almost a year. Only usual +5/-5 changes. Now we are not even in 200 results for the query. And the same thing happened with a couple of other domains that were in the top 10.
In Yahoo we've also dropped out of 100, and in Bing we're taking 17th position. So the link building is the solution (in almost every situation ) Thanks guys for your help!