Home Page was number 5 the other day, completely gone today

[StaceyJ]

Okay, I'm about to lose my mind. I've been following all the strange stuff with G the last many months, but this takes the cake.

Ecomm site is about 4 years old. Home page ranks well for a few choice keywords.

For Blue Widgets the home page has hovered around the #5 spot for a long time, and for Red Widgets it's been at #1 for awhile (maybe I shouldn't say anything). Yesterday I checked and for Blue Widgets it is gone altogether. Poof, Vanished, Gone. I went through the top 900+ results and it's not there, doesn't even look like a -950 penalty. I found 2 of my product pages in the top 100, but the Home page is no more...

AND, for Red Widgets, it's still at #1.

And on top of that, I have made NO changes to the Home page recently other than to change a couple small images with similar images of almost identical size and left the Alt texts the same as it is still appropriate to the images. I change 3-4 of these images on a fairly regular basis anyway, like a Featured Products listing.

Ideas? I'm totally confused.

[tedster]

Stacey, there seems to be an epidemic of this kind of thing lately. In the instances I've seen, the ranking re-appeared within a few days. I don't have a handle on the reasons for it, because it doesn't last long enough to study the phenomenon well.

If the change only happened yesterday, I'd just go with white knuckles for a few days before taking any steps at all.

[StaceyJ]

Thanks tedster. And I saw the other thread about this topic after I posted this. Don't know how I missed it before. Sorry. If you want to delete this or move it to that thread that's ok with me.

edit - typo

[edited by: StaceyJ at 8:31 pm (utc) on June 3, 2008]

[Robert Charlton]

I've been experiencing roughly the same thing for the home page of a site that has Sitelinks for two of its main phrases. It's intermittently disappearing on the more competitive of these.

Turning off Google's dupe filter (by appending &filter=0 to the Google search url) brings the page back to the #1 position. This is common behavior on sites that get scraped a lot. Generally, Google figures it out in a few days.

In this case, I'm a bit more concerned than usual, as a check on Copyscape and whois shows that there's apparently a whole dedicated server that's serving up sites scraped from this page (and the rest of our site).

[martinibuster]

Should Red Widgets and Blue Widgets have their own dedicated web page? Or is the home page appropriate for both red and blue widgets?

Are there sufficient differences between the widgets that for the sake of conversions, dedicated blue widget and red widget pages would work best for converting visitors specifically looking for red or blue widgets?

For instance, in my opinion it would be less than ideal for a hosting site to have their home page rank for both dedicated and shared hosting. I would prefer a page specific to dedicated to rank for dedicated server queries, and a page about shared hosting for shared hosting queries. Then I'd want the home page to rank for something general like Web Hosting.

What is your longtail traffic like?

[Whitey]

I'd just go with white knuckles for a few days before taking any steps at all

I don't know what's more nerve racking. Waiting or reversing back a few steps to the time when the site was stable. How long should you give it before reversing ?

[edited by: Whitey at 4:52 am (utc) on June 7, 2008]

[tedster]

Well, one challenge with reversing to a time when the site's ranking was stable can be that the algo does not stay the same.

In the case that StaceyJ brought up, it sounds like there's been precious little change to the Home Page anyway. And the few small changes that were made are the kind of thing the site does regularly as part of their normal business operations.

[martinibuster]

I'm curious if too many inbounds to the home page instead of inner pages had something to do with it, ratio of anchors, and whether or not Google may have pulled the legs off a dominant link building strategy (like for instance article marketing etc.).

That Red Widgets is still ranking #1 but Blue Widget is not is interesting. What is it about the topic of Blue that triggered the site getting left out of the shuffle?

[confuscius]

What appears to be somewhat unique in this round of ups and downs is that relatively stable sites that have NOT made recent changes have been adversely affected and not just small sites! So there is nothing to go back to to reverse the changes because none have been made!

[martinibuster]

Ok, just read the other thread. One of the things that stands out is the large amount of pages published per site...

[StaceyJ]

Should Red Widgets and Blue Widgets have their own dedicated web page? Or is the home page appropriate for both red and blue widgets?

Yes, they do have their own pages, but the index page is the one that ranks anymore. The Red Widgets and Blue Widgets pages used to do very well and rank for their keywords, but over the last 6 months we've gone from having 1/4 of our pages in the main index to 1/100 or less of our pages in the main index (per using the /* operator), and now the index page seems to be almost the only page that ranks for anything anymore.

I had posted in this other thread Index page does not rank today but is still listed [webmasterworld.com] that after 2 days the index page came back to position #5 for Blue Widgets, and it is still there. Red Widgets retained the #1 spot all along.

I have been adding a few (approx. 3-5 each) inbound links for both terms to their respective pages, as well as a couple to the index page over the last several months, so I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not. The link text is varied but all the links are coming from the same domain, although different pages on that domain, and that domain is not connected to me in any way. But those links don't appear to be helping the Red Widgets or Blue Widgets pages at all as the index page is what ranks for each term.

I guess I should add that neither of these two phrases are that competitive, Blue Widgets returns approx. 450,000 and Red Widgets returns approx. 260,000 results. However Widgets returns 157,000,000 results and we're not in the top 900+ results anymore for Widgets, but I've never actively gone after just Widgets as it is way to broad of a term.

Long tail does well for many phrases, and those mostly point to specific product pages, which is good.

edit - fixed link and added info

[edited by: StaceyJ at 1:34 pm (utc) on June 7, 2008]

[StaceyJ]

I thought I'd update this as it's still wonky.

Yesterday the Index page for Blue Widgets disappeared from the serps again, only to reappear at #5 again later in the day. This morning it's gone once again...

Has yet to move from #1 for Red Widgets... and hopefully won't.

[Pass the Dutchie]

Hi StaceyJ,

We are seeing the same thing here. Over the past 3-4 months our home page has jumped up and down the first page serps on a daily basis for the search term 'Widgets'. Now for this search term we are ranging between position 70 and 80. Some of the other search terms 'Red Widgets' remain unchanged but others have dropped a few positions or a few pages.

This has been the case now for 5 days.

[netmeg]

I dunno; I've got a one word keyword that by rights I shouldn't be ranking for (I rank #1 for StateName Keyword and have for years, but not for Keyword by itself, normally) and I've been bouncing around between #3, #52, #74, #102, #151, #273 and #351 for over two weeks now. It's completely wild how it's jumping around; I've never seen anything like it. I've been graphing it in Excel just because it's so bizarre.

[Brett_Tabke]

This thread is discussing same thing:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[tedster]

I've been thinking so, too. Let's take further discussion to that thead.

StaceyJ, it looks like you were the first report about whatever this is.