Rewritten site - in and out of google for the last few weeks

[big_jimmi]

Hi guys

Im fairly new to SEO, but have been a user of adwords for the last 4 years. Over the last few months my site seems to be appearing and disapearing on the first page of google's organic listing on a more or less daily basis. Surely this isnt normal. 6 days ago it was consistantly at number 4 on page one - now its nowhere to be seen.

To give you a bit of background, in november 06 we took the development of our site inhouse rewrote the entire site using all the seo tricks we've seen, titles, content, validated code, keywords in urls etc. The domain name had been up and running with the old site on it for over 4 years. We kept the domain name just changed hosting companies.

When we re-released the site in Jan it went straight to the first page of google and stayed there for at least a month, then it disapeared completly for our main keywords (apart from one which showed up on page 10)

Currently we dont do any link building (other than a few commerical banners) but just concentrate on PPC.

Our site doesnt even rank on yahoo or msn....could this all be down to us changing hosting compaines (ip address)

Any help/advise would be greatfully received.

Kind Regards

[big_jimmi]

Any ideas guys?

[AlexK]

Since the beginning of this year [webmasterworld.com] many sites have been bouncing up and down the SERPs like a Yo-Yo, with a periodicity of 7-10 days, sometimes culminating in a month-long absence. Although not yet fully confirmed, it seems that this may be deliberate policy [webmasterworld.com] from Google, in which the overnight drop is intended to inform you that there is a problem on your site (!).

Check out all the usual suspects. Look particularly for duplicate content (same content on multiple URLs), as Google sees that as a particular crime.

[dollarshort]

join the club, my site has been on the top for over 5 years it has now slipped to the second page after (supposedly) correcting a lot of no no's, lesson learned if it an't broke don't fix it.

[ashii]

[quote]lesson learned if it an't broke don't fix it. [quote]

Right but I believe in a backup plan.

[Robert Charlton]

Did these new pages keep the same urls, or did you restructure the site as well?

If you did restructure the site, how did you handle the old urls?

[kidder]

Just for the record we were bouncing in and out of the serps for a while so we made some significant changes to the way our content is served. Things settled for a few weeks but now the bouncing has started again. Maybe this is the future - much of our content is user driven and we may be forced to use some "robots" control to lock googlebot out of certain areas because of possible duplicate issues. The problem is that this content is what drives our sites traffic so it then becomes a case of having one set of content for the people and one set of content for the bots. This is all to ensure we don't trip some hypersensitive dupe "filter"...

[tedster]

Maybe this is the future

Yes, maybe it is -- we'll all be studying how to get out of the "yo-yo rank" category and into Google's "stable rank" bucket.

[Lorel]

Currently we dont do any link building (other than a few commerical banners)

do you mean you have never done any link building? Being as it's not ranking in Yahoo or MSN either this would indicate to me your links may be slipping (old sites dying off) and thus your keyword ranking.

[big_jimmi]

Thanks for the reply guys. To answer your questions...

Did these new pages keep the same urls, or did you restructure the site as well?

If you did restructure the site, how did you handle the old urls?

- The domain name is the same but all URL's are now different.
- We redirected the old URL's to the new site within the .htaccess file
(Redirect /old_site_page.asp [newsite.com...]

Check out all the usual suspects. Look particularly for duplicate content (same content on multiple URLs), as Google sees that as a particular crime.

- Perhaps that the problem - I have www.widgitmakers.com and www.widgetbuilder.com both pointing at the same content. Also I have mulitple landing pages within the domain for PPC ad's that have same contect just reworded to include that particular keyword. COuld this harm my rankings?

All the content is static - not user generated. The only thing we block with robots.txt is access to the secure area and the image folder.

To answer Lorel - No we never have done nay link building - perhaps we should, but I've always been weary of buying links (dont have time to get the manually).

Ive been checking since i last posted and its consistant now - we are no where to be seen. Ive checked google webmaster tools - which says my site is indexed but there was 2 404 errors relating to the old site.

Any advise you can give me would be great.

Cheers

[big_jimmi]

I just found this p[ost on a different thread

[webmasterworld.com...]

This happened to a client of mine. The culprit had copied the home page word for word and posted it on several of their pages focusing on different keywords for each page.

by lorel.

This is similar to what i have done to a few of my keywords - for ppc purposes (which is working very well).

Could this have affected in it?

[big_jimmi]

Ok I may have found the problem - just checked google webmaster tools and there were 4 404's that I hadnt redirected.

Do you think this is the only thing thats caused it or could there be more to it?

[tedster]

You've already mentioned a potential duplicate content issue -- I'd say get that and any other issues around duplicate urls for the same content fixed. There are two solid threads about duplicate content in our Hot Topics section pinned to the toop of the Google Search Forum index page.

And yes, today it is relatively common to appear near the top of a search for a while and then vanish - at least this year it is.