I've been working on the "heat pump" site in my sig since July and was having some success with steadily increasing rankings for their main keywords. Until a few weeks ago when some of their main keywords completely dropped out of the search results (and they really should be in there somewhere!!??).
There is nothing concrete I can think of that might have done this (no black hat techniques) and they still have plenty of top ranking keywords. We have also attracted plenty of natural and relevant links but Google seems slow to acknowledge these in GWT.
It is the big referring half a dozen keywords that WERE hitting the top 3 pages but have now disappeared.
My client is pissed, im bewildered and im putting it up for consideration by you guys...
Points of note...
- The site is only 6 months old.
- There is a duplicate content issue as they have set-up some "partner sites" in the last few months that (despite my explicit instruction) have ended up being indexed. I've put in removal requests on GWT for all of these but the main site was around well before these copies appeared anyway.
- The whole of the commercial side is blocked from the SEs to avoid keyword targetting confusion and some duplicate content.
I've spoken to other
SEO buddies and the only conclussion we can come to is "sandbox" issues with the age and competitiveness of the keywords but if anyone can see anything eles i'd be very gratefull. One other issue which has occured to me is that Google has messed about with the index and back dated some stuff?
Cheers...
Matt