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How've I destroyed my rankings?

Discussion in 'SEO' started by aleco, Aug 27, 2006.

  1. #1
    Hi all,

    At the start of the year I was ranking very nicely in the search engines, however, in April/May the VPS my site is hosted on suffered a series of problems which took the hosts quite a while to sort. As a result the site was offline for a large number of hours at a time until this was sorted. I also noticed the IP address got messed up for a while.

    Now, I'm not sure if it just so happened to coincide with my drop in rankings, but around this time my site literally dropped off the face of Google! :eek:

    I thought it could be the normal flux of G and co., but months later it's still not showing up.

    The main site in question is www.mob453.com - it is in Google so I presume it's not banned, but performing a search for it's own name (mob453) doesn't even turn up the main homepage anymore :confused:

    I hadn't changed anything on that site as I was making a new design to launch soon, but don't want to go live with that version until this is sorted. But I therefore can't think why this has happened seeing as I hadn't even done anything to it during that time.

    The vps hosts two other sites I run if that makes any difference - mobmms and officialringtonechart (I don't use this one anymore though as have no time).

    Any help would be very gratefully received!! :(
     
    aleco, Aug 27, 2006 IP
  2. cormac

    cormac Peon

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    #2
    Pages on the site seem to be missing or have errors. Your sitemap is missing and there are php errors for the Top 10 Chart page.

    Go through your site page by page and fix anything thats broken then start looking at other causes.
     
    cormac, Aug 27, 2006 IP
  3. aleco

    aleco Active Member

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    #3
    Thanks for the reply - can you link me to these errors as I can't see any of them and sitemap seems to be working fine? :confused:

    edit: also on Google Sitemaps, it's not showing any 404 errors and everything looks normal. Only odd thing is "Googlebot has successfully accessed your home page. Last crawl date: Jul 8, 2006" which was a while ago...

    The not found pages are due to two insignificant pages being removed
     
    aleco, Aug 28, 2006 IP
  4. Cheap SEO Services

    Cheap SEO Services <------DoFollow Backlinks

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    #4
    How do you find out if Googlebot has crawled? At Google?
     
    Cheap SEO Services, Aug 28, 2006 IP
  5. aleco

    aleco Active Member

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    #5
    aleco, Aug 28, 2006 IP
  6. infonote

    infonote Well-Known Member

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    #6
    Best is to go over your site and try to submit a reinclusion request explaining why.

    Is there an effect also on other search engines like yahoo and msn?
     
    infonote, Aug 28, 2006 IP
  7. aleco

    aleco Active Member

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    #7
    I'll give the reinclusion request a go - fingers crossed they provide some more light on this!

    I've never monitored yahoo or msn as closely, I'll check my stats tomorrow, but the keyword checker on here basically showed a ranking of 0 for all keywords on yahoo, msn, and google :( however, at least a search on Y! and MSN actually showed my domain as first listing when searching for it's own name...
     
    aleco, Aug 28, 2006 IP
  8. cormac

    cormac Peon

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    #8
    I really wouldnt do that until you are 100% sure your site has no problems - you are just flagging yourself to Google.

    From what I see on your main page you have "links" on your footer that leads to 'mate' its on that page that has all the broken links.

    I wouldnt use Sitemaps to check for errors as that data seems to have a time delay and by the time you do get the reports their bots already knows there is problems in the site.

    Download and install Gsitecrawler and run the bot crawl. It will tell you what pages have problems etc and you can also build a sitemap.xml using this.
     
    cormac, Aug 29, 2006 IP
  9. aleco

    aleco Active Member

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    #9
    I've just run the Gsitecrawler on my site, and other than a few 404s from an old part of the site I thought I'd removed links to, it all seems to be fine!

    Should I give Google a mail then? I've not got anything to hide from Google, although I guess the co-op ads I've got on my forum could be considered a no-no?
     
    aleco, Sep 6, 2006 IP
  10. aleco

    aleco Active Member

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    #10
    Just thought I'd update this for anyone with a similar problem:

    Well I finally got round to writing a reinclusion request to Google - after removing all the co-op ad links at the bottom of the forum part of my site...lo and behold a week or two later I noticed it appearing again in the results and now shows up once more for it's own name and some other phrases I'm monitoring :)

    So keeping well clear of the co-op now. Rankings are good again for the moment, but I'm not holding my breath as it'll probably suffer a drop once all the old co-op links coming in are lost.

    Back to doing link building the hard way I guess :eek: I was quite pleased with the apparent response time from Google though as was expecting this to take months! :)
     
    aleco, Oct 24, 2006 IP