One of my sites has inexplicably vanished from all search engine results : Causes?

Draeger

Draeger

Draeger

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One of my websites has simply dropped off the face of the earth as far as search results go on the major players - Google, Yahoo, Live Search etc.

I can't understand it - The website was optimised very well and it was always at the top of its tree for the subject matter on the search engines, appearing on page 1 and in the top 5.

Now typing in the same search phrases as before, it simply appears to have vanished from these results. :eek:

I recently overhauled the entire site, adding fresh content and basically did a complete redesign on the whole thing.

I thought this would have had exactly the opposite effect as as far as I'm aware, search engines thrive on fresh content when they are crawled.

Had a rather confuzzled client on the phone this morning asking why his site isn't showing up in the search results anymore.

I'm just baffled as to the possible causes of this.

Any ideas?.

Ta.
 
Does it completely not appear (i.e. if you search for a sentence of text that appears on the site, does it not come up)?

Something very basic, but when you overhauled it, might you/the software you were using have inserted code to prevent the site being crawled, or might you have left that code in if you had it there while you were testing prior to go-live?
 
Hatter The Mad said:
Blackhat SEO? Hidden text? Link spamming?
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None of the above m8, no.

Just the usual basic stuff. No underhand tactics were employed at all.

The worrying thing is that it's not just one of the engines its vanished from, like Google for example. It's gone from them all.

It shows up if I type in the domain, yeah, but the phrases and keywords that worked before don't throw it up.

I'm guessing that it's no coincidence that this has happened just after a redesign of the site but I can't put my finger on why.

Cobertizo said:
Does it completely not appear (i.e. if you search for a sentence of text that appears on the site, does it not come up)?
Click to expand...

I'll check some basics, like the robot.txt

It does appear, yes, if I type a sentence of text lifted from the site itself into the search box.
 
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If Blackhat seo is not the reason then you seriously need to work more on the seo part. Your competitors are working well and that's the reason you have lost your position in the Search Engines. You need to concentrate more on Link Building (Text Link as well as Image Link).
 
Hmmm.

I think I might have an idea whats wrong.

Google webmaster tools is saying the following about my sitemap.xml :-

All the URLs in your Sitemap are set to the same priority (not the default priority).
Click to expand...

I checked the sitemap and it actually isn't all set to the same priority so it's strange how the error is being thrown up.

I used a sitemap generator to make the sitemap and set the "priority" feature to "automatic" before generating it.

Going by the forums on the generators website, there are a few other folk having the same issues with their sites falling off Google etc.

So it might be that, still not sure though. Google webmaster tools tells me that the Googlebot crawled the site 4 hours ago so it's still being crawled.

Josh-A said:
If Blackhat seo is not the reason then you seriously need to work more on the seo part. Your competitors are working well and that's the reason you have lost your position in the Search Engines. You need to concentrate more on Link Building (Text Link as well as Image Link).
Click to expand...

I honestly don't think that's the reason m8. The site has been online since early 2007 and like I said, has always been on page one and in the top 5 results ( it's actually usually in the number one spot ).

I have a feeling its something technical and to do with the redesign, possibly this sitemap issue.
 
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The only thing is I'm not keen on posting the actual url as it will get spidered and pop up in any search results along the line, leading back to here showing me asking about the problem, lol. :p

I suppose I could post just the name rather than a url.
 
Draeger said:
The only thing is I'm not keen on posting the actual url as it will get spidered and pop up in any search results along the line, leading back to here showing me asking about the problem, lol. :p

I suppose I could post just the name rather than a url.
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Or a cryptic clue that'll help us find the site in question ;)
 
Google does like new content, but it prefers it to be added steadily and if you do a complete overhaul, Google often panics a little, drops you out of it's results while it does a full reindex and "re-trusts" the content.

What results do you get from site:yourwebaddress.com in Google?

Are your new pages being cached yet?
 
PMWD said:
Google does like new content, but it prefers it to be added steadily and if you do a complete overhaul, Google often panics a little, drops you out of it's results while it does a full reindex and "re-trusts" the content.
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This is junk, ignore this guy. Apart from possible sandbox effects (although there is a lot of counter-evidence for the supposed Google sandbox), Google doesn't care if you overhaul your pages (as long as your contexts are the same).
 
Running a search on the site:yourwebaddress.com throws up every page of the site so it is actually there somewhere.

It's strange, what I can't understand is why its done the same in every search engine I've tried. Bit of a coincidence really!!??.

Also, at around the same time I completely redesigned another clients website, pulled the old one and uploaded the new one. His search results are still showing up on page one for the relevant search strings.

This was exactly what I did with this site I'm having the issue with so I'm not sure why it affected one and not the other.
 
Hatter The Mad said:
This is junk, ignore this guy. Apart from possible sandbox effects (although there is a lot of counter-evidence for the supposed Google sandbox), Google doesn't care if you overhaul your pages (as long as your contexts are the same).
Click to expand...

Pipe down, I was assuming he hadn't just changed the stylesheet...
 
Draeger said:
Running a search on the site:yourwebaddress.com throws up every page of the site so it is actually there somewhere.

It's strange, what I can't understand is why its done the same in every search engine I've tried. Bit of a coincidence really!!??.

Also, at around the same time I completely redesigned another clients website, pulled the old one and uploaded the new one. His search results are still showing up on page one for the relevant search strings.

This was exactly what I did with this site I'm having the issue with so I'm not sure why it affected one and not the other.
Click to expand...

Maybe you were ranking well because of a superior domain or page age to your competitors, I think you'll probably need to do as has been suggested and re-increase your relevancy to the keywords through link building.
 
This same problem happened to me. My site was blacklisted because of a flaw in a JS script which allowed someone to insert a load of spam text below the </html> of my page. Google, fairly, deemed this unsafe and spam-worthy.

Check the Google cached pages to see if this is the case.

After I removed the code (and updated the script, of course), my site appeared in the search terms within a week at the same positions.
 
Hi,

I've checked the coding and there doesn't appear to be anything "untoward" in there.

As I said, not keen on posting a url on this site in case it gets linked back to here but if anyone want's to take a look at it, if you type indagatio into Google, it's the first site that comes up, if anyone want's a quick look at it. ;)
 
I can't see anything wrong. Maybe this is a coincidence. The site has no inbound links (apart from a completely unrelated website), there is also very little content.

What keywords did it used to rank highly for? I'm surprised it did at all (for those listed in your keyword list).
 
Content wise, all the text and wording is the same as the previous incarnation of the site.

The only real change content wise has been the addition of a bit of Flash, that's about it.

I haven't changed any keywords either ( not that keywords matter much to Google of course ) and it ranked highly enough before, perhaps because it was a slightly "niche" market it was aimed at.

The phrase "private investigations" and the name of a local area used to bring it up in search engines on page one for example. Now nadda.

I'm going to give it a few more weeks and wait and see. If it's still not appearing I am going to have to sit down and think a bit more about how to approach it.

I'm off to run it through IPB and see what that throws up.
 
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