website missing from google listings?

[Herd]

Hi,

I am working on a popular slots website. It used to rank on the first 1-2 pages for the term "slots"

The domain is 3 years old. Its well developed, looks good, gets great traffic, unique content, lot of work goes into it, and its 100% legitimate with no fancy stuff.

This week, it disappeared from the google listings, for all search terms.
I cant find it anywhere, unless i do obscure sentence searches.

If i search for the domain name itself, I can find it.. but, nothing for the 100's of slot search terms.

Any ideas on what could be happening guys?

 

[lots0]

Without doing a lot of research it is impossible to tell exactly what happened.

What I would suggest is that you go over your site with fine tooth comb, looking for violations of the google rules.

If you don't find any violations (don't forget about link trades) or after you fix any violations you find, submit a reinstatement request to google, through their webmaster tools. It takes a few weeks, sometimes as long as a couple of months before they look at your site.

Google now lets you know the outcome of their reinstatement 'examination' of your site.

Don't know if your buying or selling links, but if you are, FYI... it can be a real problem with some of the folks on the google quality control team. And they are the people that make the decision if your site stays or goes in google.

I hope this helps, but you probly heard the same stuff elsewhere.

Good Luck with your site.

 

[Herd]

Thanks lots0! We'll definitley look at making a reinstatement request. Actually didnt occur to me to do that. As far as any violations - nothing. We've looked at buying, but have never bought, and we've never sold.

I was hoping there might've been a massive update happening at google, and we were "dropped" then moved back up into better positions.. but after nearing a week.. freaking out!

Thanks again.

 

[lots0]

NP

I have a few questions that may help figure out your problem... maybe...

Have you checked your back links to see if you lost any important links?

Are you seeing any 'strange' referral URLs or back links that end in a blank page or something else 'odd'? (use yahoo site explorer to check your back links.)

Have you recently seen a good sized jump in bandwidth usage without corresponding page views?

***

Just a pro-active suggestion, but I would check your server for any 'out of place' files and maybe have macfee or one of the other anti virus vendors scan your site.

There are only a handful of things that will cause google to drop a site like you describe.

I suggest a process of elimination.

In my opinion, the worst thing you can do is panic and start listening to all the snake oil SEO's out there. Stop and take deep breath...These things take time. If you have a clean site and you are offering value/benifit to your human visitors google will bring you back, I'm sure of it... seen it happen many many times before.

 

[alex777]

Herd, google is playing with new "caffeine filters", you site may be filtered for some reason.... I have the same problem with some sites.... there is nothing you can do about it, I've tried everything. Only time will tell... But dont give up trying and good luck!

*** Reconsideration requst may help you, but the chance is very little because affter "caffeine update" i guess they have a Millions of pending reconsideration reqests.

 

[Herd]

Herd, google is playing with new "caffeine filters", you site may be filtered for some reason.... I have the same problem with some sites.... there is nothing you can do about it, I've tried everything. Only time will tell... But dont give up trying and good luck!

*** Reconsideration requst may help you, but the chance is very little because affter "caffeine update" i guess they have a Millions of pending reconsideration reqests.

Thanks for the info, very much appreciated! But tell me.. whats a caffeine filter?

 

[alex777]

The new filter for the new Google caffeine, with different rules.

Google have an algorithm and a filter (which filtering a results). No one can tell you exactly how this filter works, only G knows it

 

[lots0]

No offense meant, but someone has been reading crappy SEO forums that are FILLED with really bad SEO info.

The caffeine update happened last July, if a site were hit,the site would have been hit then, not seven months later. (Not many sites actually were hurt by caffiene, caffeine was a hardware update. No dramatic change was made to the google algo, other than what was needed for the new hardware.)

Here are the facts about the google caffeine update, from the horses mouth so to speak, Matt Cutts the head guy at google quality control.
More info on the Caffeine Update

I was also assured by Mr. Cutts just last week that the turn around time for reinclusion requests is averaging about six weeks.

If you doubt my SEO knowledge or ability just google my handle, lots0. I been doing professional SEO for over 15 years now. I was doing SEO before it was called SEO... I even helped some of the current big names in SEO get started.

I still suggest a process of elimination.

 

[lots0]

Google have an algorithm and a filter (which filtering a results). No one can tell you exactly how this filter works, only G knows it

I gotta disagree with you, most folks that hold top five positions for any length of time in highly compeditive areas (where the big money is) have googles algo down perdy good.

It takes time, money, testing and a lot of burned domain names, but you can figure out EXACTLY what criteria google uses to rank and/or blacklist sites in their search results.

 

[Herd]

Doesn't matter about the google algo, personally i don't think google would ever let out what the algo is to achieve top spots, you can do things which will get you close, but you can't be 100% sure - the algo is always evolving.

Going back to my problem!!! I'll hit google with a reconsideration request.
I've gone through the site with a fine tooth comb, internal links, link backs, IP check, hosting, the whole lot.
Even down to server changes if any etc..

Nothing has changed, except addition of more content. Which has always happened on a daily basis.

Thanks for your help guys - I'll let you know what happens.

 

[lots0]

Well it sounds like your on your way back .

Please let me know how long it takes google to respond to your reinstatement request. Matt told me about six weeks and I believe him, but you know how these things go.

Just one more suggestion, if you have not done this already, you might want to consider it. In google webmaster tools there is now a malware checker for your site, you might want to run your site thru it, just to be sure, cuz even the best sites sometimes catch a nasty. And catching a nasty is a sure way to have google drop your site, just like you described yours did.

 

[Guard Dog]

Hope things are going better with your site. Did you find anything of note with Google Webmaster Tools?

Great advice from Lots0, thank you for that.

 

[warrichpk]

According to my information Your site in google dance,its usually happens when your are doing good seo,You can expect good SERP when your site come out from google dance.

 

[sampeter012]

We would surely have a look at the reinstatement request. There were no reports of violations because we have looked at buying, but before this we never sold.

 

[Vrindavan]

based on the description, i believe Google did not ban the site from the search results. So the site is still included in the search result.

 

[maxim791]

Ceck your website speed, this is also a mjor factor now.

 

[Aussie-Dave]

Ceck your website speed, this is also a mjor factor now.

Yep agree with that point.

I use a lot of WP these days and have been using the minify plugin I've also tried CDN too but as there are no CDN's in Australia the disadvantages far outweight the advantages for me here.

However if you based in the US, UK, EU using a CDN (content delivery network) or something like cloudflare.com should also speed up your site load times.

I use the following to test page loading speed. WebPagetest - Website Performance and Optimization Test it's great because I can obtain tests from many locations throughout the world.

I also use some tweaks in my htaccess which control header expire dates, compression and how pages, images are handled.

If you host with a Win Box this wont work, it only works with Unix/Apache:

# BEGIN Compress text files
<ifModule mod_deflate.c>
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php
</ifModule>
# END Compress text files
 
# BEGIN Expire headers
<ifModule mod_expires.c>
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 5 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 600 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds"
</ifModule>
# END Expire headers
 
# BEGIN Cache-Control Headers
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  <filesMatch "\.(ico|jpe?g|png|gif|swf)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(css)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(js)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "private"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(x?html?|php)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "private, must-revalidate"
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>
# END Cache-Control Headers

Using all of the above I managed to obtain a Speed Score of between 93 - 96 on most of my sites.


I dare say with the latest Panda updates and these tweaks, is why I've seen increases in my serps. Faster page loading should reducing bounce rate % too.

If your want to really get creative you can use things like sprites to reduce the number of connects to pull images. These a generally used for small *.png buttons etc...etc. In layman terms they are a group of *.png images all added to one image file. You call these via CSS and position them in a similar way to what was once used as mapping cordinates for say an active image area where the mouse could click a link for example.

Read up on it, it's an effective was to reduce image calls on multiple files to a single file instead.