Down when crawled

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by William Martin, Jan 3, 2007.

  1. #1
    As I've mentioned a couple of times, I've been suffering from some really erratic results in G recently.

    It started in December when I was pounded and lost all of my positions. After a week or so, they returned, even stronger. Over Christmas they were brilliant and then a week or so ago, bang - gone again. I'm hoping they come back soon and I'm reasonably confident they will.

    I'm wondering if downtime can cause you much damage. If my site was down when mr G came to call, would that result in this sort of "penalty" of movement in the results.

    I'm crawlled every day or so so I'd be suprised but thought I'd ask the question.

    Thanks.

    Couple of other things of note:

    - This morning, links: showing a roll back
    - This evening, links as they were
    - Not been banned. Pages indexed but very poor positions.
    - White Hat site with authority, or as near as damn it, status. (if there is such a thing!)
     
    William Martin, Jan 3, 2007 IP
  2. TheMadHat

    TheMadHat Peon

    Messages:
    88
    Likes Received:
    14
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #2
    Usually it wouldn't cause any problems as they usually make several attempts over time before dropping pages. If you were down for a day google would just try again. If you were down an extended period of time (several days) that might cause some problems.

    Sounds like you could be on the borderline of a sandbox filter or something.
     
    TheMadHat, Jan 3, 2007 IP
  3. William Martin

    William Martin Active Member

    Messages:
    533
    Likes Received:
    26
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    83
    #3
    Hmmm. The site is almost 7 years old though!
     
    William Martin, Jan 3, 2007 IP
  4. TheMadHat

    TheMadHat Peon

    Messages:
    88
    Likes Received:
    14
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #4
    Yea, probably not a sandbox effect from being a new site. I've had some erratic rankings like that where I'd rank 1st or 2nd and then drop to nowhere. It was due to some duplicate content problems I was having. Google determined my page was a duplicate of another page (that wasn't ranking for those terms) and dropped the one that was. I changed some content and it fixed the problem.

    This could probably be caused by quite a few things.
     
    TheMadHat, Jan 3, 2007 IP
  5. minnseoelite

    minnseoelite Peon

    Messages:
    845
    Likes Received:
    15
    Best Answers:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    0
    #5
    If google finds duplicate content your site may be bouncing from the regular search results to the supplemental results and back again. If you create all of your own content and it is original I would suggeste signing up at copyscape.com and use the paid plan which will monitor your site and if it finds some other website has copied your pages content you will be notified so that you can contact the webmaster and ask them to remove it. And you get a cool little "protected by copyscape" logo to place on your site which I have found deters alot of people from stealing.
     
    minnseoelite, Jan 3, 2007 IP