single keyword ban

possibility of a single keyword ban

[Dice]

Hey Board,
First of all let me start with my complements for this board, and everyone posting on it. I've been reading and learning a lot since I started visiting.
Now I have a question myself that I hope one of you might be able to answer.
Is there a possibility that google stopped showing my site in the SERPS for keyword "widgets" but continues showing us for all other keywords?
We've always been around position 30-something for this keyword, but it looks like google decided overnight to stop showing our domain for that particular keyword. All other keywords seem to be doing just fine.
Is this behaviour normal? Does it have something to do with the coming update? Does google "ban" a site for a single keyword, but not for others?

TIA
Dice

[lammert]

Hello Dice,

First of all welcome to WebmasterWorld!

The behaviour you mention is common. It happened on one site for me some months ago. My personal blog didn't appear for my personal name in the SERPs, but the site was there for many less obscure phrases. The ranking algorithm probably thought that using my personal name in both the domain name and on several pages was some sort of spamming :)

Actually, my site was not banned, but filtered for this keyword. You can test this, by adding the &filter=0 parameter to the Google search URL in the address bar of your browser. When I used this addition my blog returned to the position where I thought it belonged for my personal name.

One good thing, this filtering is not permanent. Since about a week the site is back in the normal SERPs without the &filter=0 parameter when searching on my name.

[Dice]

Thanks,
I've checked with the &filter=0 addition in the location bar, however I still don't see my domain.
Anybody else ever had anything like this happen before?

TIA
Dice

[nsqlg]

This is common, will back again. IMHO G is testing your site, if SERP is better or worst without you.

[phantombookman]

This can, and does, happen. I had a site on a single author, needless to say it mentioned the authors name quite a bit (not spammed just used where it naturally would occur in unique written content) and it was also in the domain name .
Result; filtered out (for KWD I presume)
Great matches for everything else but the name.
I went through the site removing as many references as possible and it eventually came good
Hope this helps

[Dice]

Thanks for the replies, it makes me feel a bit more secure.
Funny detail, just before the complete anihilation of our site for this particular keyword I've seen this keyword bounce up and down, fluctuating from position 30 something to 10 something and back (we keep track of our position on a daily basis). Is this regular behaviour as well? Can I presume that when this keyword comes back we'll be near the fluctuation avarage?

Thanks
Dice

[Dice]

Hey Board,
wanted to let you know everything got fixed! :)
We're now back in the SERPS at the exact avarage of the fluctuations over the past 10 days or so.

Regards,
Dice

[swa66]

I've seen this behaviour happen when my site was hosted at a less than perfect server. Inavailablility or slow performance of the server on occasion seems to have a posibility for big impact in the SEPRs. Never seen it since I switched to my own server.

[Dice]

Swa66:
This must be it. We have our own servers in our own dedicated colocation, this started to happen ever since one of our nameservers got some problems. We've resolved the problems, and now the keyword is back. What keeps puzzling me is that it happened for one isolated keyword, and not the whole site.

Food for thought :)

Dice