Google Ranking Drop - Strange Issue

[dingloo]

Hi all,

I manage a website which has been in page 1 in google search results for a popular two word phrase for more than a year now.

This week I noticed that the ranking was lost and the nearest result for this website for this two word phrase was on page 7 for a different page on the website.

During the investigation when I tried site:sitename in google, I noticed that the very first result shows some other website's home page result.

Eg.
<Some Other website name>
.....<Some text from their title, description, etc>
<Our Website link> <Cached> <Similar Pages>

Any idea if this could be the reason for the ranking getting dropped? I understand that there could be many reasons why a page gets dropped from ranking, but has any one seen the above mentioned scenario in the past?

Please share your thoughts here.

Thanks,
Dingloo

[edited by: tedster at 8:05 pm (utc) on Feb. 4, 2009]

[tedster]

when I tried site:sitename in google, I noticed that the very first result shows some other website's home page

This does sound bad - the site: operator should only return urls on your domain. Have you checked your Webmaster Tools account for more information?

[dingloo]

This site is not tracked using webmaster tools yet. Just adding it now.

[tedster]

You may be surprised at how much information is instantly available from Google through Webmaster Tools. It's not like Analytics, where you need to build up a history for any data to show up. This is one of the reasons I often encourage webmasters to use it. You are giving up very little information to Google and they are showing what they already know - or think they know ;)

[dingloo]

Hi

I could not find any major issue in the webmaster tools also.

I did notice that on site:sitename.com search in google search, the first result for the home page still shows up the same junk text that I had posted in my earlier post.

I have written to google to look into this.

Does any one have any other suggestions on how to solve this issue?

Please let me know.

Regards,
Dingloo