On page 1 yesterday, totally disappeared today

[minorgod]

In the past couple of days I made some slight tweaks to the title tag and meta tags on my real estate school site.

All I did was change our title from "Online Florida Real Estate License Courses" to "Florida Real Estate License Courses" and cleaned up a few meta tags to remove some off-target keywords.

On Monday we ranked 8 on Google for "real estate school". On Wednesday we moved up to 7th place for "real estate school". Today we have totally disappeared. I went through every page of results and then noticed a link to "repeat this seach with ommitted results". I clicked the link and our site was listed right where it should have been the first time. I then repeated this just to make sure, and it appears that our site is now removed from the ommitted results too. Needless to say, this has killed our business overnight and I'm freaked out. Aside from uploading an archived version of the page and requesting a respidering, I have no idea what to do. Matt Cutts, if you're out there, please help. If anyone else has a clue, I'd love to hear it.

[Irishjim]

For the past three weeks we have been experiencing this phenom on a number of formerly highly-ranked pages, Minor. Frankly, we're at a loss for what to do about it.

I woke up this morning and finally said to myself (because we have so few visitors these days to talk to), what the heck. Let's keep building great pages and good friends.

Hopefully someone can shed light on this.

[Purple13]

HI Irishjim

Is it possible that when conducting their last crawl, there was a blip in either your server or Googles that your site got ommitted from the index?

I have known this happen before. A couple of days later, everything is back to normal (we hope).

Have you tried a Google Sitemap and submitting that. That should get your site re-noticed more quickly and also provide Google with a 'deeper' insight into your sites content and how frequently it is updated (using the frequency field).

I'd recommend that as a starting point as it never hurts anyway and if you were 'missed' in Google's last trawl, you don't know how long before they come looking again.

Has a site you had a major inbound link from gone down or no longer visible? That might affect rankings?

Try searching Google for your URL to see if they have any version cached at all. If not, my first suggestion is the answer.

Good luck.
Jonathan - www.fabulousphotogifts.co.uk

[minorgod]

I knew I wasn't alone in this, but it's nice to hear it from others, so thanks for the reply Irishjim. Sorry you're having the same problems.

I'm going to leave the altered homepage up for another day and then revert to our archived version tomorrow if this hasn't sorted itself out. I sure do wish Google had a 1-900 number I could call to get a verifiable cause for ranking changes like this. I'd pay $50 a minute at this point just to know what happened. Our homepage still ranks the same for every other keyword search I've checked, so I know we haven't been banned for anything (I hope) and I don't use any sneaky SEO tricks so I don't see why we would have been banned for anything. One thing I have been doing a lot of lately is submitting our site to any directories I can find with at least a PR1. I wonder if having new inbound links from crappy sites could have caused it?

Being a webmaster of a site with good rankings for competitive keywords is becoming a real emotional rollercoaster these days. One day you feel like a genius, the next day you feel like an idiot, and in either case you're never quite sure why. Sigh.

[HHI_Golf_Guy]

How many of Google's datacenters did you check? Depending upon time of day, current search traffic levels, and the whims of Google you can get results from any of a number of DC's.

In the future, if you made changes and then can't find your site in the SERP's you can type in site:www.yourdomain.com and see the pages indexed for your site. You can then see the title/description that G is using for the pages and the corresponding cached page and cache date.

Today on DC http://72.14.209.104 I show you at #7 with a cached date of 10/17 and the title tag as "Online Florida Real Estate License Courses".

[lutenegger]

I've dropped completely out of rankings before. Only to comeback a day or two later. I've read somewhere that, you don't always search the same database with google. So one copy of the data might have you where you expected the other might not have you at all.

I redesigned my website about 5-6 months ago and lost all my street cred (pagerank) with google went from a 3 to a 0. Wonderful...now google won't broaden the index of my site, I even went to the trouble creating a Google sitemap, which seemed to do more harm than good. Home and one other page are the only ones getting indexed now. I've check the log files and googlebot's hitting every page but it apparently hates the site. Thankfully, this is just a personal site, but the results don't make me happy.

Yahoo! and MSN I'm having no major problems. As much as I dislike Microsoft they index new stuff fast.

Erik Lutenegger
www.lutenegger.com

[minorgod]

Hmmmmm, that's strange. I just did a search at the address you listed and I'm not seeing us (except in the paid listings). Could you verify that search one more time for me. Also, I'm not using an exact match, just typing in "real estate school" without the quotes. Let me know if you still see us there. And thanks for the tip!

[minorgod]

HHI_Golf_Guy, thanks for that tip. I went to http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php and checked all the datacenters and didn't show up anywhere in the top 10 results. I then repeated my search with 20 results and we were in most of the datacenters at around 13 or 14th position (though not in the datacenter that is feeding results to my region). I never thought that changing my meta tags would affect my Google ranking at all, but apparently Google doesn't completely ignore them because Google is still showing my old title, so I know it isn't the title that caused it. The only other thing I changed was my meta tags, specifically my meta title, meta keywords and meta description. I guess it's back to the archived version of my page tomorrow.

[sudhani]

Yes - your site is banned.

The reason - Hidden text through CSS.

Here is the code:
#logo span{
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
display:none;
clear:none;
height:0.0px;
}


You clearly know that you are doing this - its just a matter time before Google could catch you and Ban your site.

First, fix your site and file a reincluson request: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reincl...request-howto/

-Sudha.
www.aniseo.com

[minorgod]

Yes - your site is banned.
The reason - Hidden text through CSS.

Thanks for your comment sudhani, but can you back that up? If the page is banned then why is it still showing for every other keyword search I do? Try searching for "florida real estate license course" and you'll still find us in the #1 spot. That hidden h1 tag has been there for months and is a common CSS technique touted by all the CSS designers out there as a way to maintain accessibility while still displaying a graphic instead of the text header. You'll see the same thing done on all the CSSZengarden sites and many others. It is my understanding that this is not offensive to search engines so long as it's not abused, but I've had no luck getting a definitive answer from anyone. If you're right, then I really wish the so-called CSS experts would stop recommending the technique (which you can find detailed on many CSS blogs). I'm just trying to redesign the page to be strict XHTML/CSS, and it is my understanding that hiding a few headers so that graphics could be used for the visual display will not cause problems. If it does then I will definitely be removing the hidden heading. I'm not trying to do something sneaky here, I'm just following what I thought were acceptable uses of CSS. Please tell me if you are certain I am wrong, but if you're not positive please make that clear too because this issue could affect many CSS designers. I'm not trying to start an arguement here, I just really thought that was an acceptable practice and I need to know for sure before I have to rework all my CSS pages and resubmit the site, so thanks again for looking at my site.