How to find out why you have dropped in the google rankings?

**agentforhire** · 08-31-2010, 09:46 AM

I have recently dropped out of all google rankings for one on my sites. I was doing decent on the rankings and then this morning I can't be found. I am still finding pages on my site that are cached by google so I don't think I am banned, I just don't know what happened.
I have not been using any black hat techniques that I know of.

Any ideas of what may have happened?

**jyang** · 08-31-2010, 10:10 AM

A lot of things can happen, but if something like this happens, I ask the following questions:

What is your site and what were the keywords you were ranking for?

What are your link building techniques?

How long did you have the site for?

What recent changes did you make to the website, content and backend-wise?

It could also just be a blooper in the system, but let me know the answers so I can help you out.

**agentforhire** · 08-31-2010, 11:20 AM

Site is www.homesinlittlerock.net, Keywords were little rock homes #16 and homes in Little Rock #4

Link building through various forms. Blog posts, twitter, squidoo, digg, etc. I have also wrote articles on ezine. I have been submitting to a lot of free directories. No link exchanges though. Only one way links.

Had the site for at least a couple of years.

The most recent changes I have made is submitting to multiple free directories. I don't know if that is what did it or not. I didn't think that was considered unethical.

Any help would be appreciated.

**jyang** · 08-31-2010, 11:40 AM

The good news is that you're not banned in Google and you still appear in the Yahoo and Bing results.

Free directories shouldn't be a problem and the other link building methods you mentioned are ok.

Have you checked your Google Webmaster tools to see if there are any errors?

Also, I checked your homepage source code and found this at the very bottom:

Code:

<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE"

Did you intentionally add that there?

**agentforhire** · 08-31-2010, 12:30 PM

No I did not put that on there. I did look at the source on some other point2 websites and everyone I looked at had that to.

**jyang** · 08-31-2010, 12:46 PM

Have you checked your Google Webmaster tools for errors?

Also, how long have you slipped from the rankings?

**agentforhire** · 08-31-2010, 01:14 PM

I have checked webmaster tools. Today is the first day that I have slipped. Yesterday I had a pretty good ranking.

**jyang** · 08-31-2010, 01:26 PM

I'd ride it out for about a week and see it it comes back. I've seen this happen before and Google gets crazy sometimes and in a few days it's like nothing happened.

I would recommend keeping an eye on your search engine traffic numbers from Google and your webmaster tools for the next few days.

Keep me posted.

**agentcampus** · 10-28-2010, 06:18 AM

nobody really knows what google algorithms are, all we can do is follow the normal link building way and hopefully all our efforts would benefit. I can't say that your site has been sandbox because as you said you had this site for a couple of years now. The only decent way to look at this is google made an update and saw that most relevant websites compard to you for those keywords.

**skovats** · 10-28-2010, 08:28 AM

An associate of mine disapeared the other day from a page 1 ranking, position 4 for 'website design'. Funny, he showed up on 4 or 5 other ip addresses, except his own. Sure enough, next day he was back. Never panic after a day or 2, always give it a weeek. If it ever happens, monitor your analytics and make note of traffic, either going down or staying the same.