My page is gone from ranking after I updated it

[virtualreality]

I used to come up on the first page with the keyword "inside page keyword" for a long time and a few days ago i updated my page with new fresh content (i kept the old one but I added more, and i did not change the meta tags) and now my page is gone from the search. Has someone else experienced that and what can be the reason?

[tedster]

People have reported such things from time to time - it might be a bug but it's more likely that your changes were significant enough for Google to do some trust checking to make sure they've got it right.

At this moment, Google is shifting around radically and there's little prediction to be made - except to say I'd wait it out. Most likely you'll see the ranking return in a few more days. In the mean time, you can check it to see if you introduced any technical problems when you made the update.

[virtualreality]

Thank you for the reply tedster. Google really does not make any sense. I did add very relevant detailed info on the subject on this page. It just cant be wrong! Many other pages that have less and even not accurate info pop before me now.

[bwnbwn]

virtualreality Ted advice is sound but to take to deeper have you made sure there hasn't been a hack and there is some bad code on the site? So many sites today are getting hacked from being on a shared server this is something I would look into. Have you made sure there is only one domain url to eliminate canonical issues? If your sure your clean then do as Ted suggested and wait it out.

[virtualreality]

Hello bwnbwn, good point. I take a great care of my site and it is on dedicated IP. Also all my code is validated and clean - no black hat or anything like that.

[chrislloyd515]

@Tedster

People have reported such things from time to time - it might be a bug but it's more likely that your changes were significant enough for Google to do some trust checking to make sure they've got it right.

We see this very unusual behavior aswell, none of our sites will simply increase in rankings, for the vast majority of the sites I monitor we will always a significant drop approximately two/three days before the site returns in a higher position, it's like one step backwards then two steps forwar. I've been looking around for information regarding this, half so I can understand it, half so I can explain it to clients. You say that it could be due to a trust checking trigger? I've never heard this mentioned before.

[tedster]

It's the best I can come up with; certainly Google has never explained it. And it doesn't happen for all changes or on all websites. So I'm supposing there may be a kind of trust level (either for a domain or a degree of change or both) that creates a kind of threshold trigger. Just guessing here - but it would line up with people's experiences.

[Robert Charlton]

Some additional comments regarding the above good advice...

If you think about page content changes from Google's perspective, Google assumes that inbound links to a page are pointed to that page because of the page's content. This is more probably true for an inside page of a static site, than for the home page of a constantly updating blog or news page... but those types of sites probably are ranking for different reasons than you would be for an inside page.

So, in re-evaluating rankings for a page that changes content, Google also needs to re-evaluate the relationship between inbound links and the content, particularly in the case of significant change. This probably involves a series of spidering cycles and multiple computations.

I'm assuming that Google is on the verge of refreshing its index, probably in the process of fixing some problems, and it's recently not been good about indexing page changes... unless, as tedster suggests, a site is trusted (and most likely often-viewed and prominent) in the index. If your site isn't prominent, it's likely for the moment that you'll be waiting.

i did not change the meta tags

Meta tags haven't been a ranking factor in Google for a long time.