Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We deal with a site in a competitive field which has previously ranked in the top 3 positions on Google for a particular phrase 'blue widgets' for well over 2 years, but about 5 weeks ago it disappeared entirely. Thinking it might be a temporary glitch or data centre update we didn't make any real changes for a couple of weeks, but it dind't come back.
The domain is www.bluewidgets.co.uk and the company name is 'Blue Widgets Ltd.' Many external links use the company name as anchor text. The site had previously not been updated for at least 6-12 months, but had still ranked well due to being very focused and (I think) pretty well optimised.
It comes up no. 1 for 'bluewidgets.co.uk' and is still fully indexed on a site: search.
It no longer ranks in the top 1000 (checked manually) for 'blue widgets' or 'bluewidgets' or "bluewidgets", although sites which link to it do. This seems to indicate some sort of penalty to me.
In the last few days I've corrected a few issues which Webmaster Tools had identified (a few duplicated titles and descriptions, but only a small proportion of the site) and am now waiting for these changes to be picked up. I've also done some directory submissions in the last week.
I'm now worried that if this is some over-optimisation penalty somehow related to the '950 penalty' I've been reading about it might be counterproductive to do these things. It seems to share some of the same symptoms, but instead of dropping 950 places its dropped out of the first 1000 entirely. Also, as no site changes had been done for several months, I cannot imagine what may have triggered such a penalty.
Anyone got any ideas?
Pete
Disappearing completely from a previous high ranking is a scary thing, and 5 weeks is a long time. The phrase based spam detection patent does mention the possibility, but I've rarely heard of it in regards to over-optimization.
Are you watching your server logs for Google search traffic? Are other keywords still performing?
