Google rankings vanish
Monday, April 7th, 2008There is nothing more frustrating than working very diligently to reach good search engine results only to wake up one morning and find that you have completely disappeared from your standings in all keyword searches. The first thought is, “Oh CRAP!” and that is quickly followed by a “WHAT THE HECK DID I DO WRONG?” After taking time to double check your Indiana Web Design for anything Google would frown upon, you hope that maybe it was a fluke. That Google rejiggered some settings and that you will come back in a few days. Once post I read mentioned that Google may have attempted to access your site to index it while your server was down or upgrading (which what are the chances of that happening) - but it did to me last week. I was enjoying top rankings - in the top 3 for my local keywords and within the top 20 for statewide and last week simply disappeared from the top 100 altogether. The Indiana Web Design pages are still indexed and you can still find them on Google, but just nowhere for the keywords I was once ranked for. In doing some research I found there could be a multitude of reasons why this has happened. Here are a few:
- Google was indexing my Indiana Web Design website and the server process was interrupted - either the server was down or in the middle of updating a file(s) or under maintenance.
- I have a Google Penalty against my website (finding out what that is has turned out to be quite the challenge - if in fact there even is one.
- Google has updated it’s method of indexing and things will return to normal in a few days.
All these are options that could have effected my website - but determining which one it is has been frustrating and incredibly challenging. I do hope it returns or I will be in some trouble. Although the research has been good - not at the most opportune time for me with my project list, but still good to know. I have found a great resource for such problems with this post (there are many great posts and I have read many in the past few days).


