Vanished from Google... H E L P

[Robban]

Hi All SEO Experts.

I recently discovered SEO and been loving it. My small and professionally narrow site's Alexa rank jumped from camping at mid 3 mil to now 700K's. in less than two months.

Had achieved some cruicial industry search word / query Page 1 rankings on Google, which had started to migrate nicely everywhere!!!

Then Last week My website host Godaddy.com (which I have sworn by until now) went down. My site and Godaddy's site was down over nite ONLY. And guess who came crawling that very night..,

Yup - Google did and God knows how many others and I was GONE. Totally gone. The only one Search word/query I still show no 1 on is if you search my exact name. All the hard worked Industry terms like "billboard design" & "Freelance advertising design" where I was Page ONE and top 1-5 + about another 50 great relevant keyword results are all GONE. Buhuuuuuu. What to do...??

I am one of those who religiously check my stats (which is why I discovered this) and I have dropped from well over 2000 page views a week to about 1600... the difference is about all my search engine traffic.

Please everybody. Help. How long will this last. when will Google come back. How often do they crawl..? Will I come back as strong as before... Should I switch hosts.? Does other hosts go down as well... ? (this I believe was the first time since I launched April 03) Should I resubmit.. Help.


Help. Help Help. Any ideas comments stories, sympathy welcomed and needed... Buhuuuuuu......

[awall19]

Generally most SEO people will say GoDaddy is evil, as they had many problems in the past.

Alexa is really unstable at those numbers, just one person visiting your site can change it by over a million.

If you want to stay in the index get a bunch of good incomming links.

[minstrel]

I just tried to visit your site now and the server is down again...

GoDaddy hosting has reportedly had problems before - it might be time to think about another host.

[Mel]

HI Robban

Hard to tell when google will next spider your site but if its down more than once when Googlebot comes calling you can expect the visits to become less frequent.

I would be gone the next morning if my webhost was down more than an hour.

Godaddy has had problems with Google in the past, and my advice would be to run not walk to a good solid web host who can offer you hosting with a dedicated IP address and support where you see results in minutes not hours.

Good hosting is not expensive, but it can be hard to know who are good hosts and who are not.

You might want to look at http://www.findmyhosting.com/ if you do want to consider a new host. This site offers impartial reviews of hundreds of hosting companies and allows users to rank those hosts and comment on their performance.

[Robban]

Thanks for your kind responses. I did not want to turn it into a webhost discussion but I am ever thankful for the heads up with Go Daddy. Until now I thought they rocked. I have been so inspired by this whole web developing and seo thing that I want to do a few more sites geared towards the general public - so I really need to know about GoDaddy's search engine un-friendliness. Which hosts are search engine friendly? GoDaddy will hear from me tomorrow and I will consider switching.

Can't believe Aaron himself answered my posting : ) Aaron and his site have been INSTRUMENTAL in my "meteoric" rise from nowhere to somewhere in my web traffic and ranking. I have read just about EVERY word of your site and if anybody don't know of it yet check it out at http://www.search-marketing.info

I even signed up for your newsletter but it never came. You answered a question off the site and I ordered the NL. I guess I should go there and re-sign-up for it.

My Alexa ranking (3mo avg) has actually been quite correctly reflecting my steady increase in traffic. It has been exciting to watch since Nov 24 when I discovered seo. My own webstats confirms that my increased (lower) ranking is correct due to major increase in traffic.

Back to my dilemma. How long will it take before I am back high on Google on my keyword hi-ranks? Should I resubmit my site? Any other ideas and thoughts please POST.

[Robban]

Full two weeks have passed and I am still nowhere to be found on key searches for billboard design and creative advertising and all my other high rankings. What to do? I had got so high and now it's all gone. When will I be back? Do I need to resubmit my site to Google and others...? Please help?

[jwm5411]

Robban, the same thing happened to me. Right after my site was up and beginning to climb in rankings, when I had few incoming links, my server burped for about 12 hours one night...Google must have come. I was out of site for about 3 weeks on Google. The great group here told me not to panic and get more links.
Once Google found me again everything was back up. Actually it was about 10 days after the next bot came through. Check your server logs to find out when you were visited. You will get back to where you were.
It seems that things are more stable the more incoming links to your site. It seems that your site is more stable in the search results if Google finds you more than once a month. If you are down during the few times the bot trys you...oops.

[Mel]

HI Robban:
It is normal for new pages to rank highly for a few days and then to drop until the next google update, which should be in the next two weeks or so.

[Robban]

Thanks guys - I track my keyword search results often and keep a journal of my positions. (I am doing this for practise for my next BIG sites) My search word results have not been fluctuating very much AND only improvements for most parts. ..so to be gone so drastically was a shocker. Another element I should mention. I had just recently added some affiliate content. Could this have played a part...?

[DreamingEagle]

I have tried this on three sites which disappared on the January 24th update, and it worked on all three.

www.fleege.com disappeared under "billboard design".

Searching "allintext:billboard design", and it returns to #2 position. Searching "intext:billboard design" reveals the current search results.

Could this all be as simple as Google changing the default for search terms from "allintext:" to "intext:"????

If so, what can we do to get back?

[Mel]

well... no since the default google search never was allintext.

Allintext: is a special search which looks for the words in your search term only in the page text and ranks your page against others for the same search, and thus is an indication of your page contents comparative ranking for that keyphrase.

Intext:looks for the first word of the search phrase in the page text and the subsequent words anywhere else that Google indexes.

[JuarezTourGuide]

Originally Posted by Mel

well... no since the default google search never was allintext.

Allintext: is a special search which looks for the words in your search term only in the page text and ranks your page against others for the same search, and thus is an indication of your page contents comparative ranking for that keyphrase.

Intext:looks for the first word of the search phrase in the page text and the subsequent words anywhere else that Google indexes.

Yes, I read the definitions.

I just found it strange that, in my case anyway, using "allintext:" returns the *exact* results it did pre-January 24th. Nauturally I was aware of the top 10 at all times under my keywords. Conversely, "intext:" delivers the exact results as Google delivers post-January 24th.

[Robban]

I am learning more about my Google dissappearance. The odd thing is that I dissapperead completely on some keyword searches only:

Like "billboard design" This was a very important keyword query for me. I was on page 1 at about 3,4 position. Now I am not in top ten Pages!!!. Another one that dissapperead was

"freelance advertising design" again an important and Page 1, high postion for me previously - NOW not anywhere in the top 10 PAGES.

Any clues how I dissappeared on these positions that I have held for quite a while previously.

What about this?

I did add some affiliate html content to my main page...also just about the time as my site was down. It's a column on Design books from amazon. It's on the left side so the html would be quite high on the page. Could this have afffected my ranking or lack there of...

Any ideas or comments are still very much needed. Thanks.

[Robban]

Never did get back back my keyword positions...so I it probably was due to adding some amazon affilate content after all. I had enjoyed some very hard earned positions for key outdoor billboard creative key words and all of a sudden they were all gone and still are. So I better ditch my appliate book column from amazon and see what happens. I need to get back on key billboard design key word searches.

[Mary T]

I have only one site, destinationsbelize.com, which is a travel and saltwater fishing site for Belize. Until about 4 weeks ago, my site had consistently been in number 1-4 in Google on a number of search terms, including the all-important one, Belize fishing.

Then - gone! I think I'm ranked around 230+ right now, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why.

My site is content rich (at least that's what my visitors tell me), I don't spam (at least I don't think I do), I try to provide helpful information, have a site index page, provide navigation text links, try to have quality links out and in rather than quantity, etc., etc., etc.

I've waited to see if things would straighten out, as some people suggested. Now, I just don't know what to do.

And, this is particularly serious given the location of my business - a small village of about 500 people in southern Belize. Not only I depend on my site for a living, but also quite a few fishing guides and small local hotels and guesthouses.

If anybody has any suggestions, I'd sure appreciate hearing them, or any information that I could review, anything at all that might shed some light on this.

Thanks much, I really enjoy reading everyone's postings. They've helped me quite a bit with my site (up until a few weeks ago, at least).

Mary

[sandyfeet]

Mary - I can really sympathize.
I have three sites for my town - South Padre Island, Texas - spionline.com; spirooms.com and spibreak.com. Spionline is the main site and has _always done well on Google - top three on a south padre island search. Just in the past three days I dropped down to 10-13. Stupid Brownsville airport page ranks higher than me. I have tons of useful, original info, I update every day or three and I know lots of relevant sites link back to me. What is going on? Google used to love me and now it is stabbing me in the back.
I feel like I have been struck down by the gods for some offense I cannot begin to fathom. How can I fix this when I don't have a clue what I am doing wrong?
It is very hard not to take this personally....

Lucinda

[Mary T]

Sandy:

All I can say is that I sympathize, too. I have NO idea of why my site was dropped, so I have no idea of how to fix it. I really thought I was providing valuable content, without spamming, without being too commercial, etc.

Doesn't make sense. Also, with a few exceptions, the sites that are now in the top rankings for my main search terms don't even know anything about the subject - they're just exploiting the surge in popularity of saltwater fly fishing down here in southern Belize -- something I think I played some part in creating, which makes the whole Google ranking thing doubly painful.

Mary

[Mel]

Originally Posted by Mary T

I have only one site, destinationsbelize.com, which is a travel and saltwater fishing site for Belize. Until about 4 weeks ago, my site had consistently been in number 1-4 in Google on a number of search terms, including the all-important one, Belize fishing.

Then - gone! I think I'm ranked around 230+ right now, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why.

...
If anybody has any suggestions, I'd sure appreciate hearing them, or any information that I could review, anything at all that might shed some light on this.

Thanks much, I really enjoy reading everyone's postings. They've helped me quite a bit with my site (up until a few weeks ago, at least).

Mary

Hi Mary:
If the keyword you want to rank in is Belize fishing, then you might want to optimize your home page for that terms as well as your fishing pages. Just as a starter, move your page title up to the top of the page, and then let perhaps rewrite it a bit:

<title>Tropical Belize Vacations including Saltwater Fishing, Fly-Fishing,
Snorkeling, Sailing, Kayaking, Jungle Exploration and Mayan Ruins</title>

Looks to me like you're trying to target at least eight different keyphrases there, which is very hard to do.

If I wanted to target Belize fishing terms (after I had done my keyword research and was sure that was the term searchers were using not belize fishing charters or belize fishing guides or...) I would rewrite the page title like this perhaps:

<title>Belize fishing. Salt water fishing and fly fishing combined with a tropical vacation</title> combined with a meta description like maybe:

Belize guided saltwater fishing including saltwater fly fishing, light tackle and flats fishing combined with a tropical vacation. Convenient and reasonably priced.

and then I would cut my keywords (for yahoo and MSN) down to perhaps:
Belize fishing,saltwater fishing,fly fishing,light tackle fishing, flats fishing,Belize fishing vacation,Belize saltwater fishing,Belize fly fishing.

Then you can optimize your page content for the three phrases you have chosen by using some H tags, alt tags with keywords, some keywords in bold and some in italic, and investigate the use of the title attribute with things like graphics and tables.
A list or two that has keywords in and use you keywords in the rest of your text so you have a good density.

Then start getting anchor text links with your chosen keywords.

You can also get tips by doing a search and looking at the top ranking sites. For instance if you search for Belize fishing out of the first ten sites eight have the word Berlize fishing first in their page title.

[sandyfeet]

Well, after moving me from #2 (where I had been for a couple of years) last weekend to number 13 for my main keyword phrase (south padre island) - after 3-4 days I have been moved back up to # 5 as of this morning.

There must be a lot of tweaking going on over at Google. Mary, I hope you are seeing some upwards movement for your site as well.

I have decided not to watch any more. Too scary and nothing I can do about it anyway.

best,
sf