#2 ranking site disappeared...

Looking to see if anyone has experienced this, heard of this or understands this...

I have a site that is designed for 2 keywords. It ranked #2 for both keywords on Yahoo/Bing for the past 3 months. Before that, it was top 5 for the 6 months prior to that.

All of a sudden it is gone. It doesn't appear anywhere.

Even when I search the domain name it doesn't show.

One of the odd things is that when searching the domain name, some of the sub pages comes up. The about page, contact page, etc.

It has been 2 1/2 weeks now with no return.

I would understand a change in ranking but to totally disappear makes no sense to me.

I can not give the name of the url as it is a very narrow niche and brings a significant amount of income.

 

could be over optimized, all search engines are cracking down on that these days. I've had it happen to a couple of my keywords.

 

Have you made any changes to the web site lately? If so perhaps you have accidentally blocked the search engine robots. I noticed you didn't mention Google in your post, have there been any fluctuations or changes on that search engine or is it specific to Bing / Yahoo?

 

It looks like the scary penguin got you too! Make sure your content is unique...

 

Have you checked Bing's webmaster Toolbox for any errors and also the rank for your pages? If you disappear from Bing, you'll disappear from Yahoo, too. As Steph noted, you didn't mention Google. Are you indexed in there?

 

Check webmaster tools and double check your robots.txt file.

 

I use Traffic travis and am less than 4% on my keyword.

There have been no changes. I didn't mention Google because it has never been indexed on google.

Yes I use Bing's toolbox and there is no error.

I have no robots.txt file

 

You should probably make a robots.txt file then...

 

Yes robot.txt would definitely help you..

 

Not sure of how much robots.txt files help but they have never been on this site and it has been moving up from page 2 for over a year until in finally landed at #2 spot. I will add but don't think it has anything to do with it being there one day and completely being gone the next.

 

If you don't have one then don't worry about it. The real purpose of a robots.txt file is to block robots, set crawl rate by those who support it and refer to a XML Sitemap if you have one. All major search engines check for one, but if you don't have one it won't really harm you.

Does the web site appear when you run the "site:" command? e.g.

site:domain.com

 

Hello,

From my experience you must have some something wrong and Yahoo and Bing saw that and kicked you out of the rankings. Here are some of the things that you might have done:

*Spammy Links
*Broken Links
*Duplicate Content
*Ect...

This is probably the most practical reason, the other one might be because of some recent Yahoo and Bing changes(which I havent heard of yet) that might have influenced your rankings.

Good Luck

 

When I run the site command I do find my page. It shows all the sub-pages first but the main page is towards the bottom of the page. However, it has this string ?vm=r after the name.

so http://www.domainname.com/?vm=r

not sure what that is or what it means...

 

Many people who see their websites disappear from the rankings have been conducting black hat SEO techniques. As long as the website's activity is normal, Google will not punish your website although no one completely understands their algorithms. I think the best thing to do would be to continue to build high quality backlinks to your website and continue to add quality content.

 

Just use canonical URLs and that will resolve the problem.

 

If you dont keep it updated daily then this might happen.

 

I added a canonical tag to the home page. Will see if that helps.

 

You probably made crappy links to your site which were punished by Google. You can check the status of your website by registering at www.google.com/webmasters, verifying your site and see the status of your website.

 

You probably did a crappy job of reading the original post...

 

He sure did. Google and other search engines just got confused about which is the correct URL. Many sites had this problem during 2012 so far, with many webmasters panicking their homepage had been de-indexed (but they sort of hadn't). It's just a case that these URL parameters are for the same page and it then looks like duplicate content (but isn't). Especially affected sites that use URL parameters for their affiliate referrals.

A canonical will correct this.

All the best, mate.