About to hit the panic button...

Ok everyone, I’m officially about to hit the panic button. We have a website that has been up for about 2 and one half years, has 1000’s of indexed pages, and is a PR6. Our site has been steadily climbing in the SERPs thanks to the great info I have read on this board over the past couple of years. Everything has been going great with the occasional bump in the road, but slow and steady progress upwards nonetheless. Then all the sudden tonight – BAM! All our pages dropped completely off the radar screen. I don’t mean for some of the terms, I mean for everything. Even if you put our website directly in the search we are on the 3rd page! Now, if I put www.ourdomain.com it still shows up so I know we aren’t blacklisted, but if I just put ourdomain we are on the 3rd page. The results for other terms are much much worse. We are talking about a site that had some unbelievably strong rankings for a very long time and then BANG – see you later.

Thank god that we get a lot of traffic from the other engines and word of mouth too, but we have come to enjoy the free traffic from Google.

The website is www dot pokersourceonline dot com if you are interested in taking a look and giving your opinion. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I look forward to your replies since I will be getting little to no sleep tonight!

I see 90,000 pages indexed for your site.

I am in the UK and on DC 66.249.93.104

I can't coment on your rankings for targeted terms. For yourdomain as one word I don't see it not even on the 3rd page.

There has been a lot of delisting going on lately. I know I have a large directory that has had lots of pages de listed. The thought is that as google has just done a lot of deep crawls the index will be fully repopulated soon. I guess they are still tweaking and sorting things out after bigdaddy update.

Don't hit that panic button, panicing at a time like this is the worst thing that you can do.

If you have had good rankings and not changed much then don't worry.

On that note, can you think of anything you have recently changed that could cause this?

Stay calm, friend This http://zoomzoomseo.blogspot.com/2006/03/big-problems-at-big-g_114316540140815672.html has been happening to a lot of people. I manage over 30 sites and over the last 4 weeks I have seen most of them have their indexed pages nosedive and be banished deep in the SERPs. However, once they "re-emerge" - which for me seems to be taking about 3 weeks, they get all their pages indexed again and return roughly to their old positioning. Have patience

A lot of your links come from a small number of sites, if they've been discounted by G it could explain your situation.

<added>

I'd have some concern with the links from Collegehumor, I can only see them in the text-only cache amongst a bunch of porn ones.....

I have had the same problem.

I have been climbing very steadily over the last 18 months, I have been top 3 for all my keywords. Today after looking at my traffic its just dropped by about 75%!!!

I have dropped to the 3rd page from being in #1 spot for my main key phrase, and most of the other 80/100 phrases i have been working on that were all page 1/top 4 positions have plumetted

I have made no changes for approx 3-4 weeks, so cannot understand , most of my compeition sites are still there.....I hope this is a reindexing issue and I come back soon....any advice from any one would be great.

just to confirm from looking at my stats, this happened at 00:01 on the 26th april GMT

Our site has held first page top three for years, even through Florida 2003. Today page 6! Yet a competitor stays the same, why???

Hi HarmoneyOnline,

Well im glad that it wasnt only me...however I cannot understand this, link:www.mydomain.com still show the same amount of links, nothing has changed on my site, Im still on DMOZ and other big directories, how on earth can we start ti investigate such a problem.....is it too early to write to google or is that pointless?

Harmony, how long has G been showing "1-3 of about 6 links"?

With 30,000+ results in a "contains the term" search, that number is ludicrous...

tstolber

Thanks for checking on that for me. The fact that we aren’t even 3rd page for “mydomain” in the UK makes me even more worried.

About your comment of us changing anything… We are always in the process of changing something or tweaking something, but we have never seen these results. Just as a side note, we have also never practiced any black-hat SEO tactics.

With that said, we did do a big site upgrade in the past months. As a part of the upgrade we did a bunch of 301 redirects and changed / added a bunch of content. However, I don’t think this upgrade is a part of this problem. All of the 301 redirects showed up in about a week to 10 days. I was very impressed at how quickly everything changed over and how smooth. All the pages that were a part of the 301 redirect have already returned to their old ranking position or higher. It has been that way for weeks, so I think we can discount anything that happened with that.

However, the most recent change does have me a little bit concerned. We operated another website called Poker News Daily that just recently moved over as a part of Poker Source Online. This site had about 500 news articles and interviews (all original content) that we have accumulated over the past year. We decided as a part of this new upgrade that everything would get better rankings if it was on our flagship site, so we moved it all over. We did a 301 for each news article and I’m now seeing 3 copies in the G index for each page. Here is an example of what I’m talking about:

I can't paste the link here directly b/c the forums is messing up the link. So, go to G and search for "favorite had to have been Barry Greenstein, however, as he was in" with the quotes and then click "repeat the search with the omitted results included."

The old page was www.pokernewsdaily.com/news.asp?news=342 and it indexed the following now:

www.pokersourceonline.com/news.asp?poker=342

www.pokersourceonline.com/news/poker~n~342~Simon-Says.htm

www.pokersourceonline.com/news/poker~n~342.htm

The 2nd link - www.pokersourceonline.com/news/poker~n~342~Simon-Says.htm is what we intended everything to get moved over as so it would be a static page with the title of the article in the URL. I know I shouldn’t panic, but this is the last thing we changed, so we are putting all the links back to
www.pokersourceonline.com/news.asp?poker=342 so G cannot find the other 2 links anymore and it will remove them from the index. I still can’t see how this would produce such grave results, but I guess anything is possible.

thetafferboy

Thanks, but I think I might have a stroke in the next 3 weeks <sigh>

glengara
Actually, we have links for 100’s of sites, but G only displays a “small sample” of them. The collegehumor link is only about 2-3 months old and one of only several links we have. Even without the collegehumor link we ranked very high for several terms. I personally can’t see that link being an issue. In fact if half our links were removed I would still expect to show up number one for “mydomain”.

da95649

Do you show up #1 still for “mydomin” ?

This happened for us around the same time da95649, EST

*In fact if half our links were removed I would still expect to show up number one for “mydomain”.*

Indeed, so either it's a temporary glitch or you've been pinged, and if the latter the likely suspect is your linkage.

I Am the only one who has the reply and the solutions to all you problems .



*In fact if half the links were removed I would still expect to see the number one for “mydomain”.*

So the best Reply to this problem is to log on to he "thedomainnames.com" then wait and see what could come out of it

how do you know the way out of this problem of a thing

Thank you for the flowers, but I still don't feel better

*how do you know the way out of this problem of a thing*

Never said I knew the way out, just speculated on where the problem may be ;-)

For example, Y! shows 485,000 links to that site, but I can't find any links pages, odd or what?