Thread: Site Disappears from Google overnight

You did not say which site went missing but from looking at the sites in your signature the first 2 look like they might be identical sites with different urls. If it is one of these sites you might have run into the duplicate content filter.

Originally Posted by rentec

Does anybody have experience with this? I've been tracking our sites very carefully. Every day, the site has been gaining a placement or two in Google; however, last night it up and disappeared. It isn't listed within the first 100 pages whatsoever any longer.

Any resource out there that might tell me why? Google webmaster tools doesn't tell me anything is wrong, yet I can't imagine I dropped below the 1000th position (a roughly 940 position loss) overnight. =o

I have had this happen....mine always come back quickly (within 24 hours), HOWEVER, I am kind of an seo purist and rely only safe methods. If you have tried any tricks lately this may be the reason you lost placement and your return may require some more time and some adjustments.

I hope you're not using any black hat method because this is one of the reason why it's happening. Check for duplicate content or maybe your site had been hacked or spammed by hackers.

Please check Google guidelines for more infos about your site problems. Good luck!

As per bizcoaching's post, the first 2 links in my sig are very similar sites. The 2nd is in effect a second domain which lands on a targetted landing page specific to it's keywords, and all the links on the site refer to the primary site. The content is shifted towards those keywords as opposed to the first site where the content is shifted towards the sites main audience.

Would that be considered "blackhat"?

All advice is greatly appreciated.

You can have more than one keyword for your main site and it's ok but too many is bad. This is a form of blackhat:

Keyword Stuffing:

This involves the practice of overusing a word to increase the keyword frequency on a page. Most modern search engines now have the ability to analyze whether the frequency is above normal level.

Hidden or Invisible Links:

When a webmaster creates multiple sites on the same or similar topic and links them all together through invisible links. The multiple sites may or may not have unique content, in most cases they do not.

Hidden Text:

Putting text (usually keywords) where visitors will not see them to increase a page’s keyword relevancy. This is commonly done by making some text the same as the background color of the page ie. White words on a white background.

Meta tag Stuffing:

Repeating keywords in the Meta tags more than once and/or using keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content.

Link Spamming:

Google considers page rank through link analysis, the more web pages that link to your website the higher the ranking. Some webmasters may create multiple websites at different domain names that all link to one another. This is the worst form of back hat seo techniques.

Cloaking:

This technique involves showing visitors and search engines different
versions of a page.

source: buzzle.com / The Dark Side of SEO: Black Hat SEO

I think I may have figured out the issue. At least a guess.

I had a sitemap.xml on there which was accurate, and I accidentally over-wrote it the other day with an invalid one. Probably confused Google into removing our listing temporarily. I've now restored the correct sitemap.xml, and hopefully Google will pick it back up soon.

have you tried looking at dnscoop.com and looking at your stats? It could be that you got dinged on the PR "page rank" side of Google, listings often change and you could be under a different category.

Wow, this must be extremely disappointing. Google is known to change the rules overnight. However, this is a bit extreme. My guess is you will reappear if you've used pure methods to get there in the first place. If not, I recommend getting a SEO consultation quickly to get back on track. Good luck.

If you site is about 2-8 weeks old, it's been sandboxed. No big deal and it will play the Google dance for a while until stabilization...