No this did not happen to me....I hear this all of the time people losing rankings and they feel that they have been banned by Google.....These are some questions you might ask yourself to answer your question. Am I stilled indexed? If you are you are not banned. Do I have a well rounded inbound linking structure? Such as links from articles, press releases, forums, blogs, reciprocal links, DMOZ, Yahoo directory, Microsoft small business directory, BOTW....meaning do I have any links that will pass trust and authority to my site to help stable out my rankings.. Did I buy way to many links to fast? I suggest not buying to many sitewide links because most of them will only give you one anchor text which sometimes can look like spam and your gaining to many links to fast. If you are buying links for the sole purpose of gaining rankings try to get them in text so they don't look like they are paid. Is my site fairly new? If you are a young site usually younger than a couple of years old. If your site is fairly new in most cases it will take awhile for you to establish stable rankings because most likely you have not gained well rounded links and Google looks at the age of your site as a factor in the Algo. Do I have a good internal linking structure? Basically your site is your way of telling Google that this page is important to them, your visitors and you. So if you are not linking to pages in your site then why in the hell would Google think that page is important. Use your internal linking and link to pages of value to you, your visitors and Google. Do I update my site regularly with new, unique, on topic and worthy content at least a couple hundred words? If you don't update your site then Google is going to lose interest in it period! Are my site categories relevant to my topic? Basically look at your site and just take a gander and ask yourself if they are relevant to each other or synonymous to one another. Page relevancy! Please feel free to add your thoughts and suggestions.
Nice post! I think this is why my site has dropped right down the SERPS. So I know prevention is better than cure, but how should we go about rectifying it? We could t email where we have links, but to be honest I'm not sure we will get replies... Any ideas as I'm sure were not the only ones! Thanks
Google rankings are like the most stressfull thing you could do in life. When we lost all our sites in sep 2003 in what ever update it was, I started focusing on yahoo and msn. I stopped worring about google and what do you know. Because i did not care about google rankings, they just loved my new sites and decided to rank them high. Know it was almost a year later. To this day I never worry about google. I love reading and writing on the forums about google to let everone know that there is always another way to make it online outside of google.
yes indeed you can make it outside of Google...but you just cant overlook Google's market share and growth.....All of the other engines combined dont equal Google.
just practice to have natural links back to your site, taking it slowly but surely if you paid for those link, why not request for modifying it? Goodluck
Who? Hey, I uploaded sitemap for blog and it was in the index in a few days, then a few days later it was gone. What caused that? Is it normal for a new submission? I used the site:domain.com query in google's webmaster control panel for checking status. poof!
I used the same way. I was unlucky with Google and stopped pay attention about pr and updates. I had really good rank on Yahoo and then suddenly i found out that i on first page for 3 main keywords on Google. Looks like then less you worrying about Google then better.
my rankings dropped earlier this month and came back today. I stopped depending on google a while ago.. it is too ify.
Ok I don't know who it was but some jerk gave me negative rep on this....That's kinda messed up...ARE you mad because your serps dropped? Are you a hater or a wannabe SEO...All I have to say is YOU "Get a Life" you freaking hater!!! And with quite a few people saying thanks, and nice tips and I had positive rep on this article you still will always have some jerk that has to hate.
Good points....the buying links too fast is kinda tricky though....What is your site gets dugg or slashdotted...you can gain potentially tens of thousands of links in a short period of time....it can look like you bought those links
Well plain and simple you'll get penalized most likely....But then once Google sees that the links are credible the filter will come off. I myself have had a couple of sites get penalized for gaining to many links too fast and after a couple of days they went higher up than before in the serps. So I believe the filter is in place and will affect you until G realizes their credible.