Main page dropped - and recovered after a few days. But why?

[bluemi]

Google once again makes me wonder what is actually going on. Here is what has happened:

About a week ago the main page of one of my sites suddenly dropped. It still appeared when I searched for the company name but only on 3rd place, and an interior page had moved to the top. For any other search it was completely gone.

We then did a few things:

- Fixed our Google Places listings. The company has 6 branches in different locations. It also has 6 Google Places listings but so far all under the same name, only with different addresses, so we made it "Company Name - Location A", "Company Name - Location B", and so on.

- Removed a Facebook widget from the main page. It was only there, not on the interior pages.

- Speeded up a pretty slow iframe which is pulled from another server with caching and Gzip.

Apart from this we didn't do anything. Since yesterday the site has fully recovered to its prevous positions. The question for me is, does this have anything to do with the changes above? Or is Google simply a bit messed up right now because of all the Panda and Penguin stuff that is happening? I can add that we haven't been using any funny linking schemes. In fact the site has a pretty good number of quality links. Over-optimization also doesn't seem to be a problem.

[oriontis]

The same thing happens to me. Also today when I did a direct search for my website there is a 3rd as many results? this really bothers me I don't understand how last week I could have 30k results for my site and this week I have 9k?

[illya]

I have had the exact problems and things are back to normal.
I removed an iframe also and did some xhtml validation.
But also in the same position as you.
I have no idea!

[steveschmidt85]

Google once again makes me wonder what is actually going on. Here is what has happened:

About a week ago the main page of one of my sites suddenly dropped. It still appeared when I searched for the company name but only on 3rd place, and an interior page had moved to the top. For any other search it was completely gone.

We then did a few things:

- Fixed our Google Places listings. The company has 6 branches in different locations. It also has 6 Google Places listings but so far all under the same name, only with different addresses, so we made it "Company Name - Location A", "Company Name - Location B", and so on.

i dont think this could be a problem. My competitor having 500+ locations with same name. Many times its not in our hand as well. Google is generating place listing automatically from local websites

[janeth]

I saw the same thing happen on two of my sites. I've started hitting the social media sites again to try and build up my social profiles.

[raj kumar]

Google once again makes me wonder what is actually going on. Here is what has happened:

About a week ago the main page of one of my sites suddenly dropped. It still appeared when I searched for the company name but only on 3rd place, and an interior page had moved to the top. For any other search it was completely gone.

We then did a few things:

- Fixed our Google Places listings. The company has 6 branches in different locations. It also has 6 Google Places listings but so far all under the same name, only with different addresses, so we made it "Company Name - Location A", "Company Name - Location B", and so on.

- Removed a Facebook widget from the main page. It was only there, not on the interior pages.

- Speeded up a pretty slow iframe which is pulled from another server with caching and Gzip.

Apart from this we didn't do anything. Since yesterday the site has fully recovered to its prevous positions. The question for me is, does this have anything to do with the changes above? Or is Google simply a bit messed up right now because of all the Panda and Penguin stuff that is happening? I can add that we haven't been using any funny linking schemes. In fact the site has a pretty good number of quality links. Over-optimization also doesn't seem to be a problem.

You are talking about what, local listing or organic ranking?

[janeth]

This is from another thread.

I posted earlier (in my very small network they seem to have helped) but have just read this post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuo...penguin-update - which deals largely with post-Penguin problems caused by numerous (1000s) footer links with the same anchor text.

Let's play a game of…what if!

What if Google made some changes to their algorithm and they realized those changes affected some websites that should not have been affected?

What if they reworked the algorithm so it no longer affected a particular website. Allowing that site back into the results?

Now we’ve got people yelling that their site disappeared and then reappeared, for no apparent reason.

http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster...w-days-But-why

Then we have SEO’s yelling they’ve figured out the problem. While common sense Joe, sit and figures they must be tweaking some stuff.

Google just laughs at everyone who think they figured something out?

[aruldave]

This may happen due to below two reasons
- giving outbound links to a spam website
- If search engine crawlers find sudden increase in inbound links

[shakir]

Like this up and down happened always and many r effecting ... some are effect and never recovered.. for me effected for few weeks then then got previous position.. This is not serious issue..need patient... normally after like this drops all r in confusion.. do many things on the site , doing reconsideration request, changing the site , BL etc.... at last the result will be zero and never back by this over optimization..better is do not do anything more.. just wait until 1 or 2 months and in this time update content and avoid link building.. if not back then go for any procedure...

[SteveGerencser]

Lets follow up Janeth's very reasonable post. Google admits to approximately 500 algo updates and tweaks a year. Assume that they only work M - F. That gives you about 250 days or 2 tweaks a day. If you site bounces for 3 days, 6 updates have happened. Which one did it?