Google dropped my site for all my keywords almost overnight

[villageloop]

For the past several years I have managed a site for a client and they ranked quite well for about 5 key terms.
Over this time, one word ranked page #1 (top 5) consistently and the others fluctuated between page 1 and 2. Not super competitive but the top keyword produced 5,300,000 results in google.
On Dec. 2 this particular keyword ranked #5 for my clients site and the other words were in the top 10 and top 20 positions.
Today, when I checked, the keywords do not rank at all. I have checked through 10 pages of results and no listing of my clients website.
The site is still indexed, we have not made any major changes in the last few months and nothing at all in the last few weeks.
We also checked in Webmaster Tools and there are no errors, sitemap.xml is OK with pages submitted and pages indexed.
Does anyone know if anything happened to Google recently?
The site is hosted on Network Solutions and the IP address does not appear to be banned.
Any help is appreciated.
THanks.

[urb100]

Can we see the site for more info.

I went through similar experience - fighting with google for months now.

[SemAdvance]

Hi

You may want to wait a day or three as this can be a temporary situation.

Was your server down for anytime at night recently?

Is your site URL still showing in the serps when you search google with the ful URL?

[claybutler]

I feel for you. Last May my site, that had kicked but in Google for over 7 years ,suddenly nearly disappeared. It has yet to recover. Link building, improving the navigation and adding new content has done nothing. Google crawls my site regularly, hundreds of my most important pages are indexed, no crawl errors, good PR spread out through many key pages....but still getting creamed in the SERP's. I didn't do anything. Google's algorithm is just having a hard time with my site. I'm going to add a blog next. I have a backlog of great content that I could make live immediately. However, my client's are all doing great and I use the same techniques on their site as I do mine. Just dumb luck I guess. Obvious errors aside it may be just your time to get shafted. Most of us get it eventually.

[HHI_Golf_Guy]

Google's algorithm is just having a hard time with my site.

Actually, I think it's your site that's having a hard time with the Google algorithm

[villageloop]

Can we see the site for more info.

I went through similar experience - fighting with google for months now.

It is a client's site and I can not release the URL at this time.
I would like to as I am sure it would help but I will have to obtain approval before doing so.
There site is very small and only has a handful of pages.

[villageloop]

Hi

You may want to wait a day or three as this can be a temporary situation.

Was your server down for anytime at night recently?

Is your site URL still showing in the serps when you search google with the ful URL?

I have heard that this could be temporary (hopefully it is).
Server was not down that we are aware of. (although I do know of another client on Network solutions hosting that went down for over 24 hours. Not recommended)

And the site still shows when searching for the full domain.

Interestingly this morning we discovered one of the key terms that has been on page #1 for years now, is today on page #79 (don't ask how we discovered this - there was quite a bit of luck involved). This is a 3 word key term "term1 term2 Services" and when I remove the middle term we are ranking on page #1 "term1 Services". How weird is that?
We rank higher for a shorter tail key phrase?

[james113]

I am thinking that maybe your site is being digested by the caffeine update to the Google algorithm. I noticed that one of my clients websites did this when I was playing around with it in the sandbox. His sight lost position on some long tail positions, but gained on a few short tail phrases. I can't wait till caffeine gets ahold of it










Freelance web designer in Hillsboro Illinois

[Clint1]

For the past several years I have managed a site for a client and they ranked quite well for about 5 key terms.
Over this time, one word ranked page #1 (top 5) consistently and the others fluctuated between page 1 and 2. Not super competitive but the top keyword produced 5,300,000 results in google.
On Dec. 2 this particular keyword ranked #5 for my clients site and the other words were in the top 10 and top 20 positions.
Today, when I checked, the keywords do not rank at all. I have checked through 10 pages of results and no listing of my clients website.
The site is still indexed, we have not made any major changes in the last few months and nothing at all in the last few weeks.
We also checked in Webmaster Tools and there are no errors, sitemap.xml is OK with pages submitted and pages indexed.
Does anyone know if anything happened to Google recently?
The site is hosted on Network Solutions and the IP address does not appear to be banned.
Any help is appreciated.
THanks.

Unfortunately that's a typical G stunt, especially for this time of the year (I've been hit by this BS of theirs SIX years in a row). All you can do, should do, is wait until mid January when they usually "decide to put all the deleted websites back" in the index. If it's not back by then, then you should start looking into other areas and probably post the URL. You don't want to do anything drastic that might end up actually harming your "potential return" mid next month.

[BluePlanet]

I have a large number of sites and host them on three different hosting services plus my own co-located server and have good positioning Google web pages for virtually all of them. However, only a handful sell anything. I have noticed the position of these sites can vary significantly. With tests, eliminating Google ads and other advertising, sales will go from nothing for a week or two to significant sales for a similar period. This is based on Google search results and it goes in a regular cycle. When sales are good I suspend the Google ads for that site and that makes no difference in sales but reduces ad expenses.

Google has also ripped me off on ads and I then turn those off for a while. Trying to contact Google is a total waste of time.