Legitmate website vanished from Google

I own fansite www.murraysworld.com and it has always been a stable position of no2 in Google for 'andy murray' for over a year now... yet recently the website has completely vanished from Google and I don't understand why.

I should point out that my website is not in the aging delay, it has been around for a couple of years now.

My site is completely legitimate and my practices are absolutely ethical... nothing I have done warrants consideration for a ban.

Anyone know what is going on?

 

Try after a few hours, probably they are changing something...

 

I think I might know....

For some reason Google and my browser thinks my website doesn't have a meta description or keywords... if you look at the source of my website it has those tags containing nothing yet in the code I'm looking at here, it's there! wtf

 

Doesn't look like it's vanished.

Using the site: command, your site is well indexed in google.

Using a datacenter watch tool, it looks like you are showing up in the 30-40 position range in google:

http://www.seologs.com/data-center-...urray&domain=www.murraysworld.com&startnum=30

 

No reason to drop that low... I've been in the top3 for around a year in Google.

Is it possible that because Google isn't recognising that I have set my meta description and keywords, that it could drop that significantly?

 

does google even use meta tags? I thought only some search engines use it. I think yahoo uses it partially in their equation, but google seems to just use their own formulas. no?

 

Well it could be a coincidence but since just recently when my description and keyword tags have been let empty, suddenly I drop from a stable 2 to 30-40.

And Google does use my description tag so it does recognise it for sure.

 

Mark, not sure. Did you previously have meta description and keywords in your index? Have you made any recent changes?

In looking at your site source, each entry title is using a <h1>title here</h1> tag. I'd start by eliminating the multiple h1 tags and using a bold css style in place. Put one static h1 tag above your entries to describe the front page.

 

Perhaps the dreaded page 4 (aka minus 30) penalty?
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=157780

 

I think the use of h1 tags is fine the way it is.

Having strong elements around them is overdoing it - but isn't likely the problem here.

I would (like you suggest) make sure you have unique description tags for each page. Just because google is using an old tag - doesn't mean it's not a good idea to have one that's accurate on each page.

Changes like this have been reported about the google serps. Just keep up the good work and perhaps hunt a bit more actively for links is really all I can say - aside from the description-tag thing.

 

I've made no recent changes apart from suddenly for an unknown reason, the meta tag is not showing in the source code and not being seen by search engines... the lack of that is the only thing I can think of.

And yes I did have a meta description before, including keywords.

EDIT: I just got the meta not showing issue resolved now, so hopefully that was the problem. I'll report back here if suddenly I go back to my original ranking.

 

Hello,
Reason? there are not, just wait, for me, again, this is the new Google model to sell more adwords, today you are in, tomorrow you are out!

Jakomo

 

So does anyone think it's a plausible reason that my site dropped from 2nd to 30-40 due to the description and keyword meta tags being empty?

 

Sure. It could be. I know for a fact that google looks at the website description. Not sure about the keyword meta tags.