Forget about the Google Dance or the Sandbox, I'm experiencing Google HOUDINI!

Let me preface this by saying I have built a dozen or so sites and am extremely familiar with the Google Dance and Sandbox.

I've been pouring my life and soul into a coupon code site for the past 10 months and its doing something very strange. My site constantly ranks #1-#2 for my main keywords for about 3 days, and then completely disappears for about 3.5 weeks. Its done this about 6 times already since being launched and its extremely frustrating. Hence, the name Google Houdini, the site consistently performs a disappearing act.

Any ideas why this is happening? Any ideas on how to stabilize the rankings?

The site has been gaining popularity in the niche and has been featured on many design websites for its unique design. It has dofollow links from AboutUs.org, and I am considering paying for a site review for the Yahoo directory, Business.com directory, BOTW, and JoeAnt.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

Since you've been around I'm sure you know the basics of this idea. What most likely is happening is some slight algorithm changes; weighing of certain backlinks more heavily than others. Do you have a pretty diverse link building strategy? If not, that is most likely the reason. Those paid directories should help, but there are other ways to stabilize your rankings. You should have every single page of your site social bookmarked to at least 10 websites. So if you have a 1000 page website that's 10,000 links, (deeplinks), which will help tell the SE's what your pages are about.

BacklinkBigSERPSBig Go through the free directories as well. It's tedious but worth it. Same with article directories, and some blog commenting once you learn how to find them.

 

Very nice and truthful explanation, thx i got some idea too now..

 

This happens to one of my competitors sites for the past one year and I laugh my ass off at him.

 

You are in one of he most competative fields on the Internet. And everyday your competitors are building hundreds of pages and thousands of backlinks. Your SERPs will jump around...but shouldn't be that extreme.

But I suggest NOT buying into expensive directories for 3 reasons.

1) It only one link
2) the page that will contain your link will not have and page rank, and if it does this page rank will be split between a bunch of listings
3) you will not get any traffic from these directories

 

Good point. I will have all my page social bookmarked

Yea I don't expect alot of pagerank from the links or traffic really. I'm just assuming that getting links from here will be another indicator to Google that I am a legit site and potentially an authority on my subject matter.

 

I got the same problem yesterday, no idea yet how to solve this problem.
My new blog at page # 1 google with a specific keywords, and this time, i didn't find in page # 1-10.

 

Its the first time I hear that word "Google Houdini"...lol All I know ranking changes because of competition and changes in algorithm.

 

And we have a new Google term! I think a competition for new Google terms would really be interesting. Well I have noticed many websites disappearing as if killed and disposed of. How about Google Genocide?

 

I would recommend deep linking. I have witnessed a similar phenominon on a site I worked on where the SEO was all concerted at the homepage. I think it's maybe a case of Google spotting what it see's as non-organic development of links (i.e all pointing to one page) and it is therefore penalizing you for it.

 

I can backup what others have been saying, I was suffering from this but I seem to have stabilized it with deep links, It may be too early to say for sure but I have held position longer than I have before.

 

I actually had something like this happen lately as well. My topsite usually pulls pretty great rankings for a variety of terms, but then jumped off my screen completely, even though Webmaster Tools reported it was still ranking well. Upon investigation I discovered that when logged into my Google account my site didn't appear in the results. As soon as I switched browsers or logged out, it was back

Not sure if you track your rankings with Webmaster Tools, but it may provide an answer to why they jump around so much.

 

Google like to try and 'improve' your personal search results by collecting and analyzing data about what you are doing online, collated from many sources, including their toolbars.

 

This happend with one of my young sites, it was really odd, but after about 15 months it settled down. It may simply be down to the age of your domain and the amount of backlink building that you have been doing.

 

Google HOUDINI is comical lol!

Anyways Google update has been playing around ever since July 1st. So I'd assume its cos of that!

 

Change your server IP and do not link to any of your old site. I think your IP or one of your old site is poisoned.

 

Hi,

Any updates on this?
Does the backlinking resolved your problem? For me it sounded much likely a google ban and not simple sandboxing or google dance..