OK I may have to eat some humble pie. Only a few days ago I was shouting from the roof tops about my steady rise to #2 in Google for the keyword 'Bamzooki' ( see thread : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=33075 ) Can some please explaing this: in a matter of two days I dropped to #5 and now I'm about #150 ??? (The worst position the site has ever been by some margin. Maybe it will come back onto page 1 naturally but why have they done this - I'm at a loss. Through all this time MSN have been a constant - I'm at #2 Any thoughts??
Google is currently breaking things and hurting people. Please refer to this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=32672&page=9
Welcome to the mysteries of Search Engine algos. One tiny little tweak and webmasters across the globe are in despair, wondering what on earth they have done wrong. Usually the answer is nothing. I would hazard a guess that since your site is only a couple of months old that you have been sandboxed by Google; i.e. a site-age related filter has been applied. It's not uncommon for a site to get a 'new site boost' where it ranks well for a week or two before the sandbox kicks in and the site drops like a hoors knickers. Nothing to be done, I'm afraid, but continue with the site and hope that in about 9 months you will emerge from the sandbox and begin a slow (it's usually very slow) recovery to the previously held position.
The site is about 5 months old now and I think I've already been through that process - It spent a few early days at the dizzy heights of #1 and then crashed out of the rankings altogether. Slowly it has raised through the pages until 'bang' this. From what I've read it could be one rogue bot/server and it might bounce back on the next crawl? (I hope!)
me 2 - sites three years old, suddenly dropped from top 5 ranking for many keywords to 35/40/100/200/none ranking. Feeling a little pee'd off to say the least.
OK here's what I've found out - if I check the cache for the website: http://216.239.53.99/search?hl=en&q=cache:www.bamzooki.org.uk I see that it was last cached on 6th August - so for some reason Google have switched to this datacenter with an old cache - previously the site was being cached on a bi-daily basis. Can't understand why Google would make this kind of mistake, surely there should be some sort of simple default to 'use latest cache'???
Ah. It looks like Google is beginning one of their famous (infamous) GoogleDances. That's when they do a major update. It used to be webmasters would look forward to the Googledance. That was until the Florida update. Since then, everyone bricks it when Google start updating in case their sites drop out of existence. DON'T make any major changes thinking you must do something. These updates can take several weeks to complete. If you make major alterations you could blast yourself out of the rankings. Best to wait for the dust to settle and see where you end up.
Patience is a virtue! 3 weeks after picking my jaw up from the floor after seeing my sire drop nearely 100 places it is back in its rightful place at #2 in Google. Doesn't it seem crazy that Google can't seem to get it right? Has anyone else recently seen their site(s) bounce back after being it hard?
It seems crazy to me that Google uses the entire Internet as their test network. I constantly preach the mantra of "Development Environment -> Test Environment -> Production Environment" to my clients. Google appears to be a bunch of college kids with limited IT experience.