Missing in action!!!!

Yesterday I was second on msn.com and 1st on msn.co.uk for the keyword flatmate (also was number 1 on bbc search).

Today I did a search and I'm not even on the first 20 pages!!!!

Any ideas?

Have you checked to see if you're still in the index?

well all the gunk come up when i put my site in msn seach http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=www.flatmate.me.uk&FORM=QBRE

Just find it wierd its there one day at the top and dissaperes the next, wondering what can cause something that extreem

Ah right think I may have spotted what's happened.

My site uses php so when people went to different sections like:

www.flatmate.me.uk/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3

I changed that to be more search engine friendly so they now appear like:

http://www.flatmate.me.uk/content/section/4/33/

Could this be the problem as MSN has the content of my site indexed under the old index.php?blahblahblah way instead of the new??

Could be... but doubt it. I came into this forum to see if anyone else was having wierd SERP droppings like you and me. I was #1 and #2 for two rather competitive keywords and was recently dropped and left hanging on 20+ pages down. I haven't done anythign wrong though... so I am thinking sabotage or algo hiccup. Not sure... look forward to anyone else stepping forward.

SEOdevhead this might be of help to you as well as some others but only if your site is a joomla type site.

When I changed my site from the /index.php?/blahblkhal etc I had to configure a htaccess file which I screwwed up and it was basically blocking bots etc (wondered why I kept getting 404 when i used some metatag analyzers). I killed the htaccess and put the site back t php urls and bots now pick it up again, might take a while to go back up but i think this was the problem ;)

MSN seems to shuffle the top sites on some of their SERPs. I have a site that is constantly at the top and then on page three - then back at top for dozens of different terms. This has been going on for over a year.

I can count on nice traffic from MSN for this site but I never know which pages it will come from next week.

I hear ya EGOL, it can be frustrating. In my case, we are the authority for this specific "topic" and it hurts to see us lose our ranking for whatever reason, because we get traffic solely from the search engines. What hurts is there is a new website out there that is copying our website almost to the tee, and they are now ranked #1 for all our major keywords we were ranked #1 and #2 for. Worst of all, their website isn't even hosted, it's a blogspot blog. I wouldn't be so frustrated if this were not the case, but it hurts enuff to fall out of the SERPs, but then to see a copycat that doesn't even pay hosting take your spots... I'm furious.

SEOdevhead whats your site?

i would agree its frustating but before my screw up i was above the affiliate that i make money out of so i kinda know where your coming from but for me to provide better info than the site that makes money out of subscribers is essential therefore providing more rounded info is the way i plan to get hits from search engines.

If you are the authority then you should be getting a lot of traffic through links - natural ones. I would get on a link building campaign and get the links that naturally belong to you. In fact, I would improve my content and send out requests for unrecip links.

Yea EGOL, that is the thing. We have the most quality and one-way links for our topic than any other website in our space. We blow them away, because like I said... we ARE the authority on our subject. As far as backlinks, we have at least 3x more than the next competitor and much much more content... not to mention our web standards/accessibility/validation is spotless. The nature of the subject this website is for is not really conducive for drawing lots of traffic through links. We basically are a pure search engine website because we answer a question that people have and take to the search engines.

My biggest gripe is that a blogspot blog has taken over us. Worst of all, they are basically emulating us (only about 10% though) and have horrible backlinks. The backlinks for this blogspot site are not even topical to our industry and the only BL's I have found for this site are on mortgage websites (not even close to our subject), affiliates link exchanges, and crash and burners... all of which I would think would put up red flags. Our BL's are beautiful, topical, varied anchor/descrips, quality sites, etc. Not to mention lots of them. I don't get it.

Like I said, I hope it's just some wierd algo hiccup, but it has been awhile and I'm still on page 9. How a blogspot that is only 3 months old can overtake me like this is ridiculous. If MSN is allowing such nonsense.. they have no chance.

Just going back to the original thing that I was having probs with it defo was my htaccess

Back on the firstpage of msn and bbc searches so i think this just shows that changes can screw up your msn ranking pretty quick although with there bot on speed it'll go back where it was once fixed ;)