Reader Rescue: Why have my pages disappeared from the Google rankings?
Today’s question is from Helen, who writes:
Hi Kalena,
After several years of hard SEO work my home page finally got a #5 ranking by Google and most all my second tier pages were ranked at #4. Then suddenly a few months ago most of my 2nd tier pages dropped to “no ranking available” even though my home page stayed a #5. I’ve compared the code on the couple of 2nd tier pages that still have a #4 rating to the ones that got dropped and can’t see anything different. My entire site has about 400 pages. I’ve started social bookmarking my 2nd tier pages and still no difference in the ranking. Can you possible guess at an explanation of why I suddenly got dropped, when I didn’t do anything differently?
Thank you so much.
Helen
Hi Helen
My first guess was that your 2nd tier pages had been banished to the dreaded Supplemental Index, but I’ve just checked and none of your pages show up in the supplementals, so that’s good. Google is currently showing 356 pages from your site as being indexed, so that’s also good. Yahoo is actually showing over 600 pages indexed which is interesting considering you claim to have only 400 pages!
However, you didn’t tell me the search query that returns the rankings you are talking about, so it’s a bit difficult for me to determine reasons for the ranking drop. But a couple of things could be causing the drop:
–> Google makes small tweaks to their ranking algorithm on a regular basis. Some of these tweaks involve the addition of code filters to detect and suppress code it sees as artificially influencing your page’s relevancy. It may be that the new algorithm includes a new filter that has picked up something on your pages Googlebot doesn’t like, for example, excessive keyword repetition (as exists on your home page), or keyword-stuffed alt tags.
–> Thousands of new pages get added to the Internet every day. Chances are that some of these might be targeting the same keywords and phrases that you are. If those pages are better optimized than yours, yours will naturally be pushed down in the results.
–> Because you have quite a large number of backward links showing in Yahoo but none showing in Google, it may be that Google has decided many of those backlinks are not as relevant as they used to be and has suppressed any influence they previously had on your rankings.
You should also follow the advice in this post about Google Webmaster Tools to ensure your site is being indexed correctly. Hope this helps!
Kalena
Got a web site problem? A question about search engines? Email me via kjordan[at]sitepronews.com with “Reader Rescue” in your subject line and I’ll do my best to answer it here.
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