Hi All, I am having a very strange issue with my e-commerce site that I have only just noticed (although I think it may have been gradually spreading from one page to another for a while now) The problem is that some pages that previously ranked top 5 page 1 of google have suddenly vanished. These pages all have content that was written by me, and some even have page rank. An example of the issue can be seen in this page: http://goo.gl/H2Qx9 if you search google for: NTD2003 - you would have previously seen this product in position 4 on average. If you search the title of the product - you find all pages that mention the product and link to the product in my site but NOT the product. If you search the first paragraph of the description - you find "shopwiki" which has stolen some of my content (and has been told to remove it) but not my site. At this point I thought the product has been removed from the index, however if you search the URL of the product you then get a result?! I have searched high and low to try and work out why some products have this issue but others such as NPR1523 TTB3450-S TT3450-T do not have the issue, the only common factor I can find is that products that have not been banished seem to have fewer related products (these are currently used to show products compatible with the machine) Could google be seeing the mass of code for these related products as duplicate content? I have tried to test this across 6 products one includes NSR200A and this has gone from page four to page 1 after i removed 46 related products. Does the related products thing make sense? or does anyone else have any ideas what could be the issue here? It seems to be the case for 60% of the machines within the vacuum cleaner section. Thanks in advance, any and all opinions and thoughts are very appreciated. * I have used a link shortening service above to prevent this topic showing when people search for the mentioned site.
Ok, Thanks for the info... well, good thing is... 1. We dont sell links or buy links. 2. We dont link to any other sites bar 1 (and its my company site) 3. There are other sites on the same hosting account however none are spammy all have original content. 4. No duplicate content as all the content on all my sites is hand written by me. 5 Pages have all been very fast to respond. We had an hours down time about 1 week ago but other than this there was nothing. It seems to be very specific to certain categories, especialy those in the vacuum cleaner categories.
how old is your site? This sounds like perhaps it is a new site that is jumping around the serps a lot.
approx 2 years old now. I have done a little experiment on 6 products by removing the related product links / reduced them down to only 12 products (from 50+) this was done 18 hours ago and two of these pages have now re-appeared on the front page of google... so I am thinking this may be the issue. Before this the products had sat rock steady at the top of google for 1 year + for their model numbers. I will keep you guys posted as to how things develop. I am hoping I may see the other products out the 6 return to the top of google in the next 24 hours. Cheers James
This doesn't necessarily sound as if it has anything to do with anything external. is there something you might have changed internally during the time period of the past two weeks? It sounds as if your links or page or content that have ranked have been changes somehow within your blog or site for example: you have upgraded to a new version of wordpress (or any other cms software); or changed the layout/ theme of your blog etc. that may conflict with some things. The result may be that your on-page seo/ demand to the search engines have changed. Have you tried to check other search-engines as well? If your rankings dramatically changed or completely disappeared, then i am right.
The appearance of the site has been updated, but only CSS changes have been made. Four of the products I ran a test with (removed related products) have now re-ranked in google (top 5 page 1), so I think you are 100% correct in thinking it is on page that the problem is rooted around. I am going to let the test run and see if I can get all 6 products re listed where they belong. I will then go through and edit the 250 other products that are showing this issue.
Well, I am seeing a good success rate in reducing the amount of related products per page (and therefore decreasing links) out of the original 6 edited products 5 are now back in the top 4 / 5 in google. So I have increased this now to 12 more products with reduced links to get an even bigger test sample size.