Forum Moderators: open
I'm a newbie to the forum so firstly let me say that if I am doing something wrong please let me know.
Ok... on with my concerns.
A few weeks back I decided to optimize one of my sites that wasn't getting any rankings to get a higher SE ranking for a certain term. So I followed what I believed to be the rules and uploaded my new index page.
Anyway to cut a long story short my site started to move up the rankings and up until a few days ago actually got as high as #34 for the search term "[snip]".
However disaster seems to have struck. Yesterday morning I checked my rankings and low and behold my site wasn't ranked in the top 1000 sites for my search term.
I couldn't believe it could have changed so much overnight. So I cheched to see if it had been delisted, but it had't. But what has confused me is that my listing is now reverted back to my old listing before I updated my site.
It's as if it has gone back in time and is now using an old data base for my listing and completly ignoring my new page title, description and content etc.
My url is [snip] and if you would like to check out my site you will notice that the title and description is nothing like what is listed if you do a site search in Google.
It would be greatly appreciated if anyone please explain why this has happened as I am at a total loss as to why.
Cheers
Dave Isaacs
[edited by: pageoneresults at 6:54 am (utc) on May 19, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]
You may not need to be too concerned. As regards the listing changing in Google, that's because Google has many data centres, and they are not all perfectly in step. Their load balancers will route you to different centres at different times.
As regards vanishing, well I, in common with many others, have seen a site disappear. My homepage vanished completely a few days ago - not in the first 1000 results for my two-word search term (usually I'm number one). A search for the URL showed it was in the index, but it looked a dead duck. A few days later it came back again, right to the top.
So don't panic over periods of less than a week...
DerekH
Thanks for your words of wisdom. You have eased my concerns as I had worked bloomin hard to get a higher ranking and I was panicing that I had done something wrong.
Maybe now I can sleep a litte easier knowing that all is not lost... well not yet anyway :-)
Dave
A few weeks back I decided to optimize one of my sites ...
This could be your problem and I think it depends on exactly what you mean by "a few weeks". If you mean less than two months then I would say that there is a fair chance you did something wrong. If it was longer than that then it may just be a glitch. For example I dropped 75 places from position 2 for my main KW last week. This lasted for about four days before I returned to position three. My home page was not changed in anyway during this period.
BDW - Yes I did change the content of the site about two weeks ago, but this was the reason it increase in rankings in the first place. Ya see with the old page I wasn't even ranked in the top 1,000, but when I got of me butt and re-optimized the page for my search term (gotta be careful here :-)) I started to see a mega increase in my rankings.
Robotsdobetter - thanks mate for the tips about google2 and google3. Hey I didn't even know they bloody even existed. Would you mind explaining the purpose of the separate sites?
As luck would have it, it appears that I am back in the good books and have once again magically reappeared in Google with a ranking of #36 (yippeee).
If nothing else at least I've learnt alot about the way search engines operate and I suppose in one sense it was a blessing in disguise (I think).
Cheers
Dave :-)
The good news is that there is potential for you to climb even higher during future updates but I would not touch anything while you are on the way up.
Since you are new to the forum you may want to have a look at Brett's "26 steps to 15K a day" advice on Search Engine World [searchengineworld.com...]
Robotsdobetter - thanks mate for the tips about google2 and google3. Hey I didn't even know they bloody even existed. Would you mind explaining the purpose of the separate sites?
www2.google.com and www3.google.com give you look into what the search results will look like in a few days or two. I Hope that helps you out!
