Website keeps dropping in and out of SERPS for a while now

[DiscoStu]

I have a website that will completely vanish from the SERPS only to return after a few days on the first page for competitive terms. It's been doing this for a few months now,jumping in and out...anyone know why this could be happening and what could be done?

[Robert Charlton]

Is it disappearing completely from the index, or just falling to very low in the serps? If low, how low?

Have you tried a site: search for your domain?

Have you tried a search for an exact text string on your home page?

[DiscoStu]

They don't seem to drop completely, but very low. One page dropped to 147 something, another to 428 and one to 642 - but one only dropped to 3d page. In any case, the site is still in the index, and in a few days the rankings will be back again...

[Robert Charlton]

"Very low" is very different from completely "out". What you describe might fit one of the patterns being discussed in this thread....

The Yo Yo Effect - is it now getting worse?
[webmasterworld.com...]

And/or... it might also be the latest incarnation or a variant of what had been described for a while as the minus 950 penalty ("-950") or the "end of results penalty". See this discussion...

Google -30 & 950 Penalties - brief summaries
[webmasterworld.com...]

The thread is referenced in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page, and you should familiarize yourself with the discussions in those threads.

I've seen something like the effect you describe, affecting pages for their most competitive phrases only, generally in cases where the inbound linking to a page is marginal for the search phrase in question.

The minus 950 discussions are helpful for identifying onpage factors (including site navigation) which sometimes will also trigger such problems.

[brinked]

Disco, when you return to the first page..do you notice a missing "cached" link below your website?

[DiscoStu]

Disco, when you return to the first page..do you notice a missing "cached" link below your website?

Sorry missed this. It returned a few days after, dropped out again and is currently back. To answer your question, I do see a cached link - but it was cached on July 5th, and it's been jumping back and forth since (and before) then.

[Robert Charlton]

Google's recently been devoting a lot of its resources to the update, so an old cache date might not tell the full story, but it suggests that your inbound linking isn't strong.

Weak inbound linking is also generally a factor (among others) in the kind of volatility you're seeing.

[DiscoStu]

Weak inbound linking is also generally a factor (among others) in the kind of volatility you're seeing.

Yahoo shows the site as having 78 K inbound links, though another resource shows 8,770 from 416 domains. Still it does have a good portion of links, and many are deep links. The pages I've observed jumping up and down the results have around 500 links going to that specific page each.

However, I think someone said something about the problem occurring when the anchor text is over-optimized...the site I'm working on has a couple of sitewide links on some big sites. I just checked now, and one of the site it's advertising on accounts for 72K (!) of the inbound external links. However, on that same site there are an exqual number of site wide links to two of our other sites and they're doing fine, so the sitewide link alone can't be to blame...but the site that keeps jumping up and down in rankings only gets 1-2 pages spidered a day, while the other sites (the other two with sitewide links on that huge site) are getting over 100 pages spidered a day.

[edited by: tedster at 7:30 pm (utc) on July 28, 2009]

[CainIV]

Hi Disco. I did a semi-controlled test with a domain when the phenomenon you are experiencing first arrived on the scene. The Yo-Yo effect link Robert presented above is a good reference for the effect as well as what others have seen.

In my semi-controlled test I change various factors of the website including footer links and the left hand navigation.

To cut to the point, the items that caused that exact type of flux or Yo-Yo were always link related, and in general had to do with one of the following scenarios:

-Too many, or overuse of keywords in the navigation
-Too many, or overuse of keywords in footer links.
-Excessive total number of internal links on the homepage.
-Excessive total number of links linking home with keywords in the link.

Hope this helps.

[DiscoStu]

Cain, thanks for that. I think I have a few ideas that I'm going to try out, will report back and tell you how it goes...it drops out every other week or so, so I should know by the end of August

[Steelbank]

Cain - How did you check for each one?

I have the same problem, with google. My site yoyo's between page one and page five.

Any further explanation is much appreciated.

[CainIV]

Hi Steelbank. The navigation - aptly referred to here as the 'mega nav' by Tedster - is a pretty easy one to address. One way to look at it is to ask a few friends if they think that the navigation on the website is 'overdone' or 'overbaked'. If they tell you it is, it is likely because it either contains too many of the same keywords (widgets - red widgets, blue widgets, hairy widgets) or the navigation simply contains too many items.

Reducing the navigation to the main core subcategories can help and is a place I would start with if that appears to be a problem.

The footer is also an easy one to spot - if the footer area is loaded with a lot of links that appear to have no real appeal to the visitor at all and were put into place for SEO in mind, then that might present a problem.

Most times you will find that you can find creative ways to create a taxonomy for the website that gets the right links to the right pages for spidering, isn't overly heavy on keyword links, and most of all, suits the visitor perfectly (which is really the first item you should always consider anyway)

I always try to work with one grouping or change at a time so that you can analyze the results. Changing more than one item takes away from any control in the test and can mes up rankings further if too many large scale changes are made at one time.

Hope this helps.