Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've been lurking here for a day or two following a minor catastophe with the ranking of my niche business, which is heavily reliant on SERPs.
In a nut shell, we were doing just fine, having climbed to the heady heights of top 10 on numerous appropriate key phrases in the U.K G index.
However, sometime around 25 November, all changed. We have dropped off the chart for certain key phrases.
Interestingly some slightly more defined phrases are still pretty okay.
For example; <a 3-word phrase> might not show anything now, where as it was all good pre-25th. However, <add another word> may have pretty much maintained it's position (I am sure this is not a result of key word structure on pages).
After some very interesting reading here and abouts, I've checked on a number of things. Our 200 page (PR5) site of course has the odd problem. Inadvertent duplicate content and some duplicate page titles and meta tags, plus some code errors, for example.
However, I couldn't see that this has got us black listed or a -30 penalty.
I have since discovered that quite a number of our pages have been indexed under our old and now alternate .com domain rather than our .co.uk domain. About 25% of the site is now .com and no longer showing as .co.uk.
My questions are thus;
(a) Could this have been caused by the site being down (which is was on regular intervals) and the Googlebot then coming in via .com, indexing the pages and removing the 'dupe content' .co.uk pages?
(b) Would this result in the major (off the chart) drop in certain keywords, bearing in mind slightly different words have maintained visibility and also taking into aco#*$! that some of those words are not on the affected (.com) pages.
In other words, could losing some of our site content to .com have an overall affect on our .co.uk standings in the SERPs?
(c) If this problem is recitified with the use of a 303 on the .com alternate domain (which it now is, via an .htaccess file, thanks for the tips) will things right themselves and will we regain a decent standing once the bots have been and seen? Or, is this damage likely to be more long term and do I have to completely re-think my marketing strategy for 2007?
0r
Could this be a result of the recent flucuations described in other threads, although they seem to have occuured more recently (e.g. 28 Nov)?
This is not a comprehensive overview of all the issues, but I expect you get the picture and must have had about enough five minutes ago.
Any thoughts on this matter much appreciated.
Jimjam
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[edited by: tedster at 7:05 pm (utc) on Nov. 30, 2006]
