Home page disappears after optimizing for WMT suggestion

[scooterdude]

I lost the homepage of the site i've done the most work on, it happened after i optimised it for one of the keywords suggested by wmt

as soon as it was re indexed and re cached, the homepage disappeared

so now i am in some disarray,

This was up to 2 months ago now, and not a peep,

I built no links whatever, only thing i deed was optimise homepage for keywords google appeared to like the site for

would this be a penalty of a wait for settle down affair?

cheers

[edited by: tedster at 6:53 pm (utc) on Dec 22, 2010]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[tedster]

Let's get into some more detail first. What does "disappeared" mean? Not in the index at all?

Also, were you taking the keywords the WMT already reported as being prominent and then doing something further with them? If so, what kinds of steps did you take?

[scooterdude]

The homepage is in the google index

Yes, per wmt, the site was rankig for say green widgets, i checked manually, taking care to be logged out of google, plus using another pc an conection to verify the rankings, which where pretty accurate

so I increased the prominence of green widgets in frontpage text, and images, title, anchor text, plus I reduced other widgets types till there where a number of widgets, but only a few types, ergo "green widgets" quite prominent but not dominant

then I waited, and then the page dissappeared from serps, does not rank for a single term it had previously ranked for out of 30 terms, not anywhere in the first 1000 results

exact match search for full title does not bring up site in first 1000 and the title is actually a unique combination

this site is not new, more than 1 year old, but its never really done anything amazing, i am more into the tech development than SEO, and always seem to put my foot init with SEO, thus far

[tedster]

It's usually not a good idea to unbalance the content for ranking purposes - I've seen sites get a 6 month penalty by adding in all the "related searches" terms. So it's often best to serve your visitors first and search engines second.

That said, exact matches for title phrases have also taken a hit in recent weeks. Some members found that adding a word to break up the exact match helped them re-appear. That's not at all intuitive, I know, but I'm just the news boy;)

How long ago did this happen? If it's recent, a bit more waiting could make sense. After a major change it can take a while for things to settle down.

[scooterdude]

well its been 2 months plus now

and what i actually did was to reduce the number of terms i was attempting to rank for

[tedster]

Too long. If your traffic has suffered, then I'd say revert.

[scooterdude]

Thanks, I 'll revert to something as close to what was there before as I can.

[backdraft7]

scooter - consider yourself lucky...at least your site disappeared and you have something solid to work towards. Our rankings appear fine, yet traffic and sales totally disappeared. Traffic shaping I guess....they've shaped it into something that resembles what my dog leaves in the front yard.