Anyones Rankings Just Sunk?

Who is ready to pull all their hair out and go get a job flipping burgers? I guess patience is the name of the game as well as just keep on keeping on! Boy, talk about patience building and frustration etc...

 

Maybe Google is on overhaul updates.... Major SERPs changing I also notice that...

 

Very true, i'm seeing more and more 100% solid White Hat websites that should rank and are the most relevant for a particular query not even showing up. Since Google's "war" on paid links it seems they are hurting themselves more than a bunch of Dofollow links ever could.

My site's still completely vanished, the funny thing is another site i've used an identical approach on that's in a slightly different vertical isn't effected which indicates it isn't a site problem but rather an algorithm problem.

I done a test the other day, i copied a PR4 page from my effected site and put the content on a domain that wasn't indexed complete with a backlink to my original "source". I then gave the new domain 1 single backlink from a completely unrelated site.

Yes 4 days later the second domain is outranking the first despite a backlink to the source telling Google that it's the originator and should be credited.

Now that's what i call an algo with more holes than a block of swiss cheese.

 

Bad news.....

Does this mean that your site that lost serps is showing up in serps, but much lower? I thought you lost all serps from this on that site.

Any word back from google after your contact with them?

 

Hey SweetFunny,
you mentioned this earlier:

"I have been informed Google is working on further merging the supplemental index (which still exists just not labeled) in to the main index, which is why there's some massive SERP swings. Some sites would obviously be effected more depending on things like Age, Supp to Main Index ratio, Backlinks and Deep Links etc."

Can you expand a little? Did you phone Google? Email them? Any idea when "some" of this mess "May" be fixed? Obviously understanding no particular site maybe fixed.

 

I can still pull every page up on the SERP's if i try hard enough, i need to construct the query to narrow it down to 5,000 results or less to find it such as... "Page Title - Sitename" or "Sitename plus a large string of onpage text"

Even then i only come up first if there's no other domain that's mentioned my site. So you may as well say SERP's are vanished, an average of 15,000 uniques per day and growing to 150 uniques per day and this drop happened in 5 minutes.

I don't know much more unfortunately, however in my experience it seems if Google implements a change and it positively effects 98% of the index and knocks 2% of it on the head they will roll with the changes.. Unless it effects high profile domains, then they will spend time creating some sort of fix.

So considering it's been 2 weeks now (plenty of time for a rollback or a fix) i'm getting closer each day to scrapping the site and doing a 301 on the domain to a new project to see if i can at least leverage the backlinks from it.

Sure it could come good, but i just don't see the point spending thousands more hours building a quality website that Google may never rank again.

 

Man, that is a drastic response. You won't consider leaving it as is for 3-4 months and seeing what happens?

This really sucks man.

 

Im letting mine site for several months to see what happens. Shesh, sure sucks though, my site is the definition of White Hat. We need to create a Webmaster Union
I will keep everyone updated here if anything changes.

 

Sure does suck, the thing that gets me is i've optimized 100's of sites over the years using the same methods and nothing remotely close to this has occurred. I guess one good thing is it's my site and not a clients, however it was my best site earning the most revenue.

Also indexed pages are dropping each day, so i don't hold much hope for it. The site also has a ton of backlinks which would cost thousands if purchased, for instance 2 weeks before it vanished it got a natural PR8 backlink on a PR9 domain and it also has about 30 x PR7's so it was a pretty solid site.

I might put the site on another domain, re-brand it and 301 the old domain to the new and see what happens... Nothing to loose.

 

Kind of strange that this happened to yours and not the 100's of other ones you have worked on. Very weird huh?

Indexed pages are dropping? Man... it seems like there would be some way to find out exacly what happened, so it wouldn't be repeated in the future.

PR9 natural link? Wow man. That is very sick.

if you 301 it, would you be able to keep all the link juice? If so, I don't blame you for doing that asap.

What a bummer man. Wish there was some lesson to learn from this, other than the fact that google controls everything.

 

The link is only on a PR8 page, but the site is a PR9 domain.

I've just set-up a test, i just put 3 outbound links on the effected site to 3 established websites. If these three sites jump a few spots in the SERP's for the anchors i will basically know if the penalized domain is passing any authority or not.

If it is, then a 301 "should" pass authority to my new domain but if it doesn't a 301 will most likely be pointless and i may as well leave the site as is and hope it comes good.

 

I'd love to hear the results of this, if you don't mind sharing.

I was wondering if any juice would pass, if the effected site truly is penalized.

Good luck sweet. It would be great to salvage something out of this.

 

I wouldn't trash that site just yet because of dropped pages. I had sort of a similar experience with one of my established sites that had 3000 pages indexed at the end of December 2007. One day out of the blue the site lost some rankings and traffic for keywords (but not the main keyword) and lost pages each day since that incident until the site only had 50 pages indexed. Now this is a totally white hat site. I've done nothing wrong and I don't know what happened. I also rant about it here when google dropped a entire subdirectory (well, I was scared..)http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=5798970#post5798970

I thought the site was penalized, but I was busy with working on other sites, so I sort of forgot about the site, but I remembered to check the site toward the end of January. The site and all the pages was indexed in google again and ranking for their terms, and traffic was back to normal.

I don't know if you're going through the same thing, but it sounds similar and maybe you should wait a couple of weeks to see what happens before destroying your site?

 

Congratulations! This is very encouraging news. Do you have any idea on what happened to your site?

 

I really don't know what could have happened, since the problem now obviously was not at my end. (and I did not make any changes on the site) I just know when I rechecked the site at the end of January the pages were indexed again and ranking. I was busying working on other sites, so I have not done too much researching, and I figure it must have been some sort of glitch at google.

 

sweetfunny, hold on to it, i have had the odd site "vanish" for a month or two then reappear ... google's equivalent of a magic show vanishing act trick!

 

run an email spider over the net and collect any email address that ends with @google.com and email them all, tell them you have read their search engione guidleines and have not broken them and are desperate etc...thats what I did a few years ago, and within a week my site was resurrected, don't know if thats the reason why but it's worth a shot

 

Look at the results here:
http://www.google.com/hws/search?hl=en&client=dell-usuk-rel&channel=us-psp&ibd=6061228&q=

Verses:

http://www.google.com/

I see my site on the first page at the top url there, but 10th page on the bottom url...
Anyone else see a similar thing with their wayward site?

 

Same here. As I stated that Google.com US results is only one fluctuate while other isn't.

 

Yes, but the strange thing is that both are USA.
I talked to a guy from Florida and he said my site is showing up on the first page where he is. But in all other parts of the USA it is Many Pages Down. Anyways, I guess I am just repeating what has already been said, but I suppose there is the desire to keep analysing it to determine exactly what is going on... Its hard to leave alone.