Lost Rankings

[Mike]

Overnight, I seem to have lost the majority of my rankings. Key phrases, long tail, they all seem to have gone.

I haven't made any drastic changes to the site, so I'm a bit confused why they've all suddenly gone. Are they likely to return? I wouldn't normally be so worried, but like I say, the majority have disappeared.

Anyone else had anything similar recently?

[ZigE]

Checked for hacked hidden/inserted spam links? Could be a Manual edit for a bad link profile.

Whats the site? It really could be a number of things

[Chris]

It sucks when this happens. Has happened to me before with my coupon site, it went from making $20k a month to $2k.

Luckily that was when I had just diversified into ecommerce so my own income stayed level. Which is why I preach diversification so much now.

Of course, when I lost them, it was a global change in how links are calculated that did it, I wasn't singled out. The rankings of mine that I monitor appear stable so it isn't a global thing.

Hopefully it can be temporary, every once in awhile you can lose rankings for a day and have them come back, likely for technical reasons, if not, you gotta worry.

http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/google-ban/

[Mike]

Unfortunately, this is my best site. It's made big progress this year and is my biggest earner, so to lose these rankings hurts big time.

I'm hoping it will be temporary, but I find it strange that nearly all my pages seem to have dropped.

[Chris]

if you don't want to share it publicly, share it in the private forum... thats what its there for.

[ZigE]

You could also post on the google webmaster forums, theres often google reps responding there. If its a penalization of some kind, often you can fix it and file a re inclusion request & be back up and running in a month or two.

Hopefully its an indexing error, maybe check for dupe content scrapers. Check your google.com/webmasters/ for any errors

[Mike]

Thanks for the replies, I will reveal the site in the publishers forum soon.

It looks as though traffic is down about 60%, so a pretty big chunk. I've been set back to the point I was 12 months ago which is disappointing. I suppose things can only get better, I hope

As for diversifying, I'm going to look at ecommerce. Being in the UK is something that doesn't help and at the moment, I don't have any ideas on what to sell.

[Mike]

Oh, how long do you think until I file a reinclusion request?

[Chris]

3 days just to make sure it isn't a temporary fluke I think.

[Mike]

Yeah I'll do it tomorrow then...

Any idea of what I could say? I haven't made any changes, as I don't see that I'm breaking any of their rules.

[Chris]

Without know the site it'd be hard to say for sure... I would do something like

I have this site which recently lost all it's google rankings and I cannot figure out why. My site is good for reasons x y and z. To my knowledge I have never broken your webmaster guidelines, and I found no information about a penalty in my Google Webmaster Central console. I request reconsideration.

[Mike]

Sounds good, thanks Chris.

[TryUsOut]

Hey dude, how long has it been since you first saw the drop in your rankings? You mentioned that you made no drastic changes to it, any minor changes that might have triggered your dilema? As what other have already pointed out, it can be a number of reason.

Anyways, wish you get it resolved asap...

[neala]

My google ranking was cut in half about two months ago. Traffic dropped, advertisers dropped, income dropped.

It's been ugly. I contacted google and submitted a reconsideration request. Nada.

The only thing I can think of is that I've been successful at selling text links. I also include a lot of unpaid links because I run travel websites and it makes it easier for my readers to learm about the destinations.

I think the combination did me in.

On a brighter note??? My advertisers are leaving and perhaps my ranking will improve eventually.

[Mike]

Well mine is still down, 50-60% I'd estimate. I wasn't selling text links or anything so I haven't a clue why it happened.