From #1 to nowhere in 1 day...

Hello,

I'm new to this board and I'm owning a new product that I'm selling in stores and on my website. I always do alot of research prior to hiring anybody and also prior to working on anything for my business. As a result I came to the conclusion that I learn as much about SEO myself and work at improving the search ranking of my site. Reason being is that I simply didn't trust many SEO companies that work for the budget that I could afford - I didn't want to risk "shady" practices to hurt my rankings for the long term.

That said, I optimized the keywords on my site, I worked on good backlinks, I upadated content on my site, etc. etc. I noticed that my rankings were improving. I was about #8-#14 on Google for some specific keywords and yahoo and bing.com had me as #1 for one good one.

Next thing I notice that I went from #1 for a two word search on bing.com to being nowhere. How can that be? I didn't pay for backlinks, I didn't try to cheat my rankings, etc. Yet from one day to the next I go from #1 to nowhere. I stopped searching after the 10th page.

How can I find out what happened? Did somebody "attack" my site to hurt my search engine rankings? Currently I'm still #1 in Yahoo for that two keyword search but I only wonder what happens next since I went from #1 on bing.com to nowhere?

Any insight would be a very much appreciated.


THANK YOU.

Maybe they sanboxed you like they do in google.

may be you did some thing naughty some thing in the black hat area and they cough you

I think your site is sandboxed. Don't worry it will come back if you haven't done anything black hat. It might take a week or two or sometimes months if it's a brand new site. Also, try to get backlinks from authority site and it will help your site to re-appear on SERPS quicker.

life of course, provides choices....you could have spent some time - valuable time - searching for and vetting an SEO firm to run your SEO Campaign...

instead you did this -- "...I came to the conclusion that I learn as much about SEO myself and work at improving the search ranking of my site...

so your questions - and there are a few, eh, will need to be answered....so YOU must invest the time to search and read and learn. An SEO practitioner knows the answers to your queries and can provide same in a minute (incidentially the answers shown above too are all false...sigh)...but then you've gone the 'DIY' route...

so, to coin a phrase from Dr Phil -- how's it working for you so far?



Jim

Jim - I know you can be more helpful than thaaaaat buddy. Isn't his question on this forum part of the research process? At least we have a person here that writes well enough to understand and makes clear, coherent thoughts. That's few and far between when it comes to first posters.

DIYsmallbiz - None of us can tell you what happened without actually looking at the site, but it is very possible that you're doing something bad without actually knowing it. Do some research into common SEO don'ts. Things like cloaking, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, bad outbound links, hidden text, robot-developed content, poorly-chosen paid links, or overwhelmingly rapid link building can hurt you. The key is to keep your linkbuilding efforts genuine and natural-looking.

Not trying to be difficult here Aig.....but on point.

This forum is yes IMHO a teaching forum...and yes, if you come here to ask a question then yes, you will find help...

It's just that from what I've seen in the past 6 months or so, more and more SEO newbies are slagging off on ALL SEO practitioners as snake-oil salesmen, pointing out that they're going to 'DIY' it...and then ask for help.

I'd so much rather see NO mention of any of that...just a question. Maybe I did get the 'wrong end of the stick' but I'm pretty pissed on the various forums I go to on SEO that I see more and more and more of this....

$$$ buys talent. It's up to the buyer to vet the supplier and yes you can just as easily buy a 'pig in a poke' in SEO as you can for a restaurant meal or an oil change or whatever...

It's better to DIY, that I know...but I just am so dang tired of this kind of 'slur' first....followed by worse newbies offering up god-awful advice....sigh....

Hmm..maybe I'll change my own SEOChat style. I'll just not answer ANY thread till the newbie has like 50 rep pointss...you'all'd vet them, and I'd not help till they proved their 'worth' to me...

Nah...I hate that thought...but hey, ya never know, eh?



Jim

Could be anything really... If you haven't done anything wrong that would have them ban you then your site will come back soon. Ive had one of my sites do that before but it always shows up again where it was suppose to be.

I'm no professional on Bing, but it could be a few things. First off, how long was it at #1 spot? If it was only up there for a day then that means nothing. If it was up there a while, maybe some of your backlinks dropped you. Is your domain an exact match domain for the keywords that you are targetting? Usually for bing, the exact match domains get the #1 spot on their seach engine. Actually, almost always. Otherwise, It could be that other websites just beat you out for your spot.