Google's new page additions

[Ospree]

With this week's 1billion pages added by Google to their index, I watched my position drop from the #1 position to #8. Still within the Top 10, but I am perplexed by the placement of other web sites that have no apparent relevancy to the search terms utilized or to the service offered. Can anyone explain, what I consider to be the polluting of irrelevant returns,how I can adjust to Google's "indexing" algorithm?

[Mel]

HI Ospree:
First of all I am not at all sure that your drop in ranking had anything to do with Googles supposed addition of pages... or even that they really added them.
The reason I say this is that while Google says that they are

Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages

if you do a Google search for the word "the" you get back 5,490,000,000 pages returned! And this same search has been showing around this number of pages for several months.

If you can provide us with a URL we can look at your site and see if there are any problems we can help you with.

[bobbyeg]

Recently Mel's great detective work found that my robots.txt file was at fault for my lack in search engine placement. After correcting that problem, my site almost immediately came up on the first page of google and yahoo. My placement on google for "ocoee river rafting" was up to #6. I felt like Christmas had come early for me. As of yesterday, my site has "disappeared again" on google and yahoo or at least as far as the first 100 rankings go www.RollingThunderRiverCo.com
Any thoughts or should I just pull the rest of my hair out? Thanks.

[bobbyeg]

meant to post this as new thread. sorry. not enough coffee yet.

[Mel]

Welcome back Bobby (or should that be sorry you're back again?)

I see 38 of your pages in Google, but for some reason contents of your home page have dropped out of Google and it is indicated as only partially indexed with nothing in the cache for that page.

I do see you at #12 in Google and #6 in Yahoo for Whitewater rafting Nantahala River which is the phrase your home page seems to be optimized for, though I seem to remember that you liked the term whitewater rafting Ocoee river.

You can verify that your page is missing by searching Google for cache:http://www.rollingriverthunderco.com

I can see no reason that your page should be missing, unless you happened to have a server down when Googlebot came to call.
Wouldn't hurt to submit your page to the Google add url page.

Your home page does not seem to me to be well optimized for white water rafting nantahala river or white water rafting ocoee rive, it seems to concentrate more on Rolling thunder river company and sure enough even with your home page contents missing you rank #1 in google for that term with 84,000 results returned.

Your pages may have been considered new when they finally got spidered, and google sometimes gives a temporary raning boost for new pages, which are then assigned a more permanent ranking at the next up date which just occured a few days ago.

<added>
You may not be aware that yahoo switched over from Google results to its own search engine a few days ago and you have only 1 page in that index which serves both Yahoo and MSN or about 35% of the search market. Your optimization company should get your pages indexed there or you should consider paying for placement of a few of your most important pages there.

[bobbyeg]

Mel, thanks for much for your feedback. Will look into it. I may still have a few hairs left in my head.