Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I was shocked to find out that my site has literally dissapeared from Google. I just can't believe that google would "penalise" my site. I am only trying to create awareness about the tsunami disaster by showing the tsunami videos to encourage people to donate which many indeed have.
I really don't understand what is going on with google recently. First it took my site weeks to start ranking in google while it was in the top 5 results for tsunami related keywords on the other search engines only days after launching it and when it finally started ranking well it gets wiped out off the internet for no apparent reason even though it has thousands of links many of them from .edu sites and enciclopedias and was even featured on the news.
I am very angry about this and if my site does not rank farely again soon I will remove the link from my site to google and discourage my visitors from using that search engine. Google has let me down bigtime.
To all the honest webmasters who have been unfairly penalised by google: I FEEL YOUR PAIN :-(
I can dream, can't I?
I don't monitor keyphrases like some of you do, but for some phrases that I occasionally check that the site does well on, the site is now a no-show. Even for the last name of the person (a syndicated journalist) associated with the site, it's now way down in the rankings - normally it is #1 for her last name. It doesn't make any sense. It'd be like if you searched on Letterman, and his show was #80 on the list.
The site's a great resource for consumers on personal finance, real estate, and consumer news. Newsweek even featured the site this week as a great site for consumers. We've never done any optimization stuff that is bad - we just post good content every couple of days and put appropriate title and description tags on the page.
What could have caused this dramatic fall from grace? I don't see any sites that have outright hijacked the entire site. The only thing I can think of is that because the site is associated with a syndicated column and a metro news anchor maybe Google saw that column on other newspaper sites and the television transcripts on the station site and thought the site I work on stole it from those sites (when in fact our site is the original source).
The only other thing I can think of is that yesterday we changed the right nav on the page (it's a #include on rightnav.asp), which of course affected every page on the site , so maybe that threw Google off? It was a pretty minor change, so I don't see how that could have a bad effect.
Any ideas? I'm at a loss.
I'm at a loss
It would seem that Google is too - they lost our pages!
I bet MSN still ranks you well?
I got curious and searched Google and MSN for "Google update".
Interestingly, I found WebmasterWorld number one in Google. Congratulations Brett.
Via MSN, I found the Google Blog page. It gave me an insight on what Google is doing against blog spammers. Also, interesting to know about Google Local.
Definitely, looks like Google and MSN are trying to offer the best results and trying to keep spammers off their tails.
Time will tell who wins.
P.s. No more specifics!
1) The SERPS (in my area at least) are just so radically different. The old guard are largely gone to be replaced by sistes I've never seen before. Surely this isn't credible? It's like Google is saying "You know all the stuff we told you yesterday when you were doing your searches....utter rubbish.... but hopefully these are better!".
2) Roll on the day that we have three search engines with a third each and their own results. Then, instead of sobbing into our pints, we might be singing "Two out of three ain't bad".
Having said that, if you can figure out from my post what my client's site is, I would appreciate the traffic since I'm no longer getting it from Google. :) And, the sad thing is that even if you knew the name of the journalist, you could enter their name in Google and never find the site.
OK, time to sleep.
I'm becoming less and less dependant on Google. MSN and Yahoo are providing great traffic.
Same here. I've been diversified and was never really that dependent on Google. I learned my lesson on Google a long time ago.
