Q and A: Why has my site dropped out of Google?

Dear Kalena...

How are you ? I have received the beautiful certificate that you sent for having done the seo advanced course. I think I was in the first one that you conducted. Thanks.

I need some help.

It has been 7 months since my site [URL removed] dropped out of Google. It still has the pr and is visited by googlebot thousands of times every day. The google cache updates almost every week, before my site lost its google rankings the cache would update every day. It used to be number 1 for "work at home" and several other keywords, but now it shows below #170 sometimes, and most of the time not at all.

It still shows at #1 for allinanchor and allintitle searches for my keyphrase, but if you search for my company/site name, sites linking to my site show above my site, my site shows at the end of all others.

This happened in feb 2005, after I did a 301 redirect from all pages of another site of mine into a subdomain of my main site - The next day my site dropped out, and I removed the redirect immediately, restoring it to the way it was. But the ranking has not returned.

Can you give any suggestions ? My site is ranking well on msn and yahoo, but I miss the google traffic ...

I am forwarding all the emails that I have exchanged with google during this time. It has more info,

Awaiting your response,

M.

Kalena's Answer:

Dear M.

Great to hear from you! First up, your site hasn't "dropped out" of Google or been banned. If you conduct a search for your domain at Google (e.g. site:yourdomain.com), you'll see that Google has indexed and stored 39,800 pages from your site. It is also highly doubtful that a banned site would be visited by Googlebot or achieve a PageRank of 6 as your site has done.

Secondly, the fact that you can find your site in Google for obscure keywords, but not for more common ones, suggests to me that your site is suffering from what the industry refers to as a Google Sandbox penalty. Originally this was thought to affect only new sites, but recent forum speculation suggests it may also impact existing sites that undertake an extensive re-design or re-optimization. Your 301 redirect may not have directly caused a problem, but it may have signalled to Google a re-design and triggered placement of your site into the Sandbox.

Note this quote from the Sandbox article linked above:

"The sandbox filter seems to affect almost all new websites, with very few exceptions. It is important to note that the filter is not a punishment for anything the webmaster did with their new website. The filter is merely an initiation period for new websites.

The sandbox filter also affects more competitive keyword driven sites more than sites that key in on less competitive keywords. If your website focuses on very competitive keywords, you are likely to remain in the sandbox for a longer period of time than if you focus on keywords that are relatively non-competitive keywords."

Because your site targets extremely competitive keywords, it's possible your site may stay in the Sandbox for a longer period.

Assuming the Sandbox theory is the only cause of your rankings dilemma, you merely have to wait it out. HOWEVER, I have noted some intriguing emphasis in the emails you received from Google. Although they don't mention anything specific, they do make it very clear that you should closely review their Webmaster Guidelines in relation to your site. They also state in their most recent email:

"In general, webmasters can improve a site's visibility in our search results by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to it."

This suggests to me that your site's linking practices may be causing a problem of some kind, although your good PageRank score suggests otherwise.

Regardless, I would take a long, hard look at those Webmaster Guidelines and make sure your site is not doing anything that go against them. Having taken a quick look at your site today, I can already see a few questionable issues and design flaws:

1) Your site uses pop-ups. It's well documented that Google HATES pop-ups and may penalize your site for using them.

2) Your site contains a heavy number of reciprocal links, including some from link directories Google may consider to be low-quality, like Free For All and MLM sites.

3) Your site contains a large internal links directory consisting of over 1,000 links. Some of these links appear to be entirely unrelated to your site's theme.

4) Your site appears to be heavily optimized for the phrase "Work at Home". The number of links using this in the anchor text appears to be excessive and Google may therefore see your site as being over-optimized.

5) Google's Webmaster Guidelines specifically state "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)". Your site appears to break this rule on some pages.

6) Your site contains a very active forum area with a large number of posts, all including your target keyword phrase in the title tag and anchor text. This could also trip the "over-optimization" filter, as other forums have experienced recently.

A couple of minor design issues:

7) Your title tag contains a double colon (::). Although major engines seem to have no problem indexing it, try to avoid using symbols in tags as they may trip up search robots while indexing.

8) Your title and description tags contain an extra space between the keywords "business" and "ideas". This may impact your site's ability to appear in the SERPs for search queries on "business ideas" using a single space.

Now go read those Webmaster Guidelines!