Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I searched that once a day for about a week and then suddenly my rankings tanked and traffic from google has gone down slowly every day sinse then?
Is there some kind of ban for using the site: search function? The only other thing I did was delete about 15 old pages from the site and unlink them because they were pages with worthless junk from a long time ago.
Anyone else had this problem?
I searched that once a day for about a week and then suddenly my rankings tanked and traffic from google has gone down slowly every day sinse then?
Zero cause-and-effect connection. If you auto-queried Google many times a day for a week, they might deny access to future queries from your IP... but that wouldn't have anything to do with your rankings.
Chances are the tanking of rankings was coincidental, but, if anything, it's much more likely that deleting 15 old pages from the site might have had some effect.
I'm not saying that's the cause... I'm only saying it's a more likely cause than using the site: operator might be. Did you by any chance check to see whether there were any external inbound links going to these old pages before you deleted them?
The effects of delinking probably wouldn't be slow and gradual, though.
What is wierd is my indexed page count went up by over 1000 pages while my traffic from google dropped by about 1,000 visits a day? I still get traffic from google and the traffic seems to have leveled off, but it's just less now. So, I'm not too worried yet.
Could it be a drop in page rank and I can't see it because it happened after the PR update about a month ago?
The only other thing I did was delete about 15 old pages from the site and unlink them because they were pages with worthless junk from a long time ago.
What Marcia is getting at is that even though you believe those pages were 'junk'. Google may have viewed them as supporting pages in your website. Once the pages were removed, it is akin to removing supporting beams in a house, the house can become weak and in worse cases, fall apart.
It is possible for you to keep those pages but possibly bolster them with better content? That way you offer your visitors better quality information while retaining the historical value of those 'pillars' if they indeed have age and rank.
The pages were all grey bared "no page rank could be found"
The pages were old link pages with alot of dead links and linked to some scraper pages which is why I deleted the pages because google did not give those pages any PR whatsoever so I assumed it was because those pages were linking to "bad neighborhoods".
I read somewhere that google was simply blocking PR transference from pages that linked to bad neighborhoods so I deleted them. No point on having pages that are doing nothing for anyone I thought.
