I know this is a common issue - but what causes your website/web page to completely drop from google search results when you have done absolutely nothing to the page and are playing by the rules? I have noticed that this happens all of the time to people and then just as quickly they will be relisted. I usually rank in the Top 10 for a large keyword phrase - and all of a sudden this morning *POOF* ...gone. Another crazy thing is that you can be #1 on Yahoo! for a keyword and not even in the top 1000 for Google - how is this possible? Any insight would be greatly appreciated Thanks guys
Well its not you, its them. Google is constantly making 'adjustments'. Also, it is not uncommon to rank well on one search engine and not on another. After all, they are different companies with different methods of ranking sites.
You wont find the answer your looking for because nobody knows. But I did do a blog post about "Why do sites disappear from SERPs?" last week that may help you.
search engines have different algorithms so probably they have different ways to pick which is on top...
I have had trouble with hosting providers and sometimes in G's Webmaster tools you can see that the SE couldn't spider a page because of some temporary error. Another cause of google-dancing etc is as said before the constant re-indexing carried out by SEs. If the SEs notice that sites they expect to be in a particular place are not there, they will go back to their algorithm and sometimes find that it has a bug in it. They will adjust the algorithm and before you know it, sites are back near enough where they were. Or you could take the chaos theory view. That just one site or page change can affect the ranking of those related or linked to or from it. Which for smaller sites means you are just gonna have to take it on the chin.
Check multiple data centers before you think your site has disappeared. http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php