netscape dropping positions

[mpthink]

Has anyone else experienced the loss of all their positions in Netscape? This has happened to my phrases over four diffeent web sites. I haven't been banned, and all my other positions are intact.

Does anyone know what's going on with Netscape?

Thanks!

[agerhart]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld mpthink!

Netscape's search results are currently powered by Google, so if you are losing your rankings in Netscape's search results, you need to research your Google standings.

[mpthink]

Agerhart thanks for the reply

My rankings for Google have not changed since last month; with the obvious exception of various rises and gains they are all still there. However, of the 50 or so Netscape listings I had for one of the web sites, none whatsoever remain from last month! The same is true for the other three sites I'm concerned with (all on different IP addresses).

The most immediately logical conclusion is that something is up with Netscape. Any ideas?

Thanks again

[gypsychild]

I have a similar thing mpthink - my site has completely gone from Netscape (first noticed this yesterday). Everything is fine with Google, so it does seem quite odd. Are your sites still listed, but with a lower placement or are they out altogether?

[mpthink]

As far as I can tell, gypsychild, the sites are not listed at all in Nestcape at the moment - even searching on the company name, which was number 1 last month, yields nothing whatsoever. This is the same with all my sites, and seeing as how I clearly haven't been banned, I can only surmise that Netscape is doing some really arbitrary filtering or something.

[gypsychild]

My site was down for about three days and if your sites were also down lately, then perhaps that could be the reason - although I don't really see why if they're all showing up on Google. In any event, luckily for me it wasn't a big source of traffic, but for you perhaps not such good news.

[mpthink]

Well, I'd be a lot more worried if I had lost the Google positions.

[heini]

Just an idea - Netscape seems to filter Google for location of hosting, so that when you have a site hosted in Canada it might not show in Netscape.co.uk for example..

[gypsychild]

Yes, I think that's it heini - my site is .com, but hosted in the UK - must be quite a new thing as it was showing up there not so long ago. Not the most logical way to filter results - surely many of the .com's hosted outside the US must be geared towards the US/international market.

[mpthink]

Not too sure - the primary URL for my biggest site is a .biz. And anyway, if they were filtering geographically, would it be this abrupt?

I do believe this problem will eventually emend itself, but I still find it inexplicable, as well as slightly annoying for those of us who have to report back to clients on how they're doing in the search engines.

It's lucky, really, that it's Netscape and not MSN or Google doing this, but I still find it a concern. When I get some answers I shall post them if I think they'll be of help to anyone.

[andy04031]

I think netscape is secondary but still it's kinda annoying, actually I have some similar experiences but I have to check 120 clients on a monthly basis so I see more than somebody with one or two domains, I'm not worry about it, maybe next month the situation is different - this is exactly why SEO Pro's shouldn't give any guarantee because it's not ethical and nobody know what is going on tomorrow morning....
Tony