trillianjedi - 10:30 am on Jul 20, 2008 (gmt 0)

This was not a deliberate test, but I thought I would share the results of one of my sites where something bad has failed to budge it's main keyword ranking from the SERPS.

Authority site, 6 years old. Toolbar PR, for what it's worth, has been steady at 5 for the last 4 years. Lots of inbound links with keyword anchor text pointing at the homepage. 10,000 pages.

Completely broken. For the last 4 months every single of the 10,000 pages (previously all indexed) has displayed a "failed to connect to database" type error. No page titles. As I mentioned, this was not deliberate - I've simply been too busy to fix it and it's low priority (generates little revenue).

Homepage still ranking #1 for it's main keyword (which does not feature in it's domain name - it's a branded site). Google returns about 1m results all in for that keyword. Lot's of paid Adwords ads, but it's not a big-money keyword.

The Wikipedia page, which is actually very good content-wise and a perfect landing page for anyone searching this keyword, is at #2.

Anyone landing on my site in the last 4 months would be greatly dissappointed. In google as much as me.

Observations:-

4 months and nothing has changed as far as google is concerned. Crawler always used to come along once a day although I haven't checked to see if that's changed.

The majority of pages are still in the index as far as an allinurl search tells me. I haven't yet examined the ones that are not in there, or been able to determine which ones are removed.

The site has lost it's sitelinks listing.

Interesting isn't it. Any questions? Anything you'd like me to take a look at specifically and report back on?