Site disappeared from google, But I have no idea why - help!
 

Hi,

My site is only a few weeks old, and one of our articles had been holding the number 1 slot on google for over a week, but yesterday, it disappeared completely from google, under the search terms that it was number 1 with (it is still there with other search terms, although they have to be quite specific).

So, I have had a search for what may have happened, and I have come up with a few possibilities, but I'm not sure how to remedy them, so I could do with some guidance please :)

Spammy links? I'm not entirely sure what this means exactly, but I havent been posting links everywhere.

Duplicate pages? - The only duplicate things on my forums are some guides that reside in their own specific forum, and then are linked to from a general guides forum. Could this be it?

Hidden text? - I haven't put any there, and no-one else has access, so can we rule that out?

I use the DCSEO linkback plugin, and I was getting hundreds of linkbacks from all over the place, including google.** urls that I never even knew existed.

Some of the linkbacks included some spurious search engines, and I ok'ed them once and then blocked the rest - could this be it?

Also, a lot of people have been linking to my forums from other genuine sites and forums, so could google have interpreted this as spamming?

And one last question. On my google account, it says that my site is included in the index, and I cant see any indication of anything wrong.

Any help would be appreciated :)

Thanks

Dave.

SEO or not, your site is crawled by google from time to time, not only once... and if a page is more interesting in keywords than the article you're talking about, his ranking may change or even vanish...

SEO actually does not help your site a single bit relatively to ranking on google... it help navigation, nothing more...

Welcome to the world of SEO.

Honestly google does alot of changes and alot of random factors that no one in the public knows. You did the best you can but sometimes some things just get moved.

I wouldn't panick just yet. Give it a few days. I've had this happen loads of times, especially when launching a new site.

You've confused me. SEO only helps navigation??

I saw that behavior on mine the first weeks!
But I don't worry, I keep working to get in the top ;)

Ok, navigation: browsing, crawling... it helps the search engines to find the right content of your page...

that does not mean your content is of any value...

That's all part of the practise of SEO. If you SEO your site, you concentrate on factors that WILL improve your SERPS, that includes creating good content. It's no good SEO'ing by way of creating good navigation and internal link structure, only to direct Google to pages full of useless content.

Preciously. Content is king.

Have a blog, and one article is ranked #8 below a very large internet site it's about. Didn't do any SEO, heck zero keywords at the time and the blog was half done (not even the archives or Feedburner was setup). But the Goggle bot came by after a Technorati ping on a hot topic, and it rose past the top 10. Got 1000 uniques out of it, as well (not bad at doing nothing).

So that showed me 3 things.

1. Keywords really don't matter with Google.
2. Site design didn't matter (good markup does though...XHTML Strict!!).
3. Content is all that it cared about.

So now blogging on those concepts, and getting excellent results. :)

If you had had the google webmaster console up and running, and you get blacklisted, they normally tell you why in there :)

I don't dispute that content is extremely important. It's very unlikely you're going to rank well for an article full of repeat keywords. However, that doesn't mean that keywords don't matter. Hitting #8 without SEO in mind might be great for you, but why aren't you hitting #1 if your content is so good? Also, you have to consider your competition. If you have little competition for a particular keyword, then it's easy to rank well. It becomes a lot harder when you're targeting highly competitive keywords and not bearing SEO in mind.