Q and A: Has an algorithm change dropped our site out of Google?
Dear Kalena...
Our website www.deepblue-apartments.com was doing very well in Google and then a few days ago we dropped out of the listings for all our keywords apart from one search-term 'serviced apartments uk'.
This is mystifying that only one search term - and a very general and competitive one - should continue to do well, while a more specific search term - 'serviced apartments wokingham' brings no results at all.
We suspected that the algorithm may have changed and we were also concerned that our links pages were too big and that some of our inbound links were of poor quality. We had many reciprocal links but I noticed that Google was only acknowledging a small percentage of these as incoming links - I presume they ignore poor quality inbound links.
We have temporarily removed our links page and replaced it with 'holding' page in case these pages were the problem - at some point I will restore the pages with fewer links per page and only good, relevant sites.
I've also checked several main pages to make sure that key-phrases were not being over-used and I've made some edits to see if that will help.
Do you have any insight why this should suddenly happen and looking at the site as it is now do you feel that it may bounce back soon?
Yours sincerely,
David
Kalena's Answer:
Dear David
I see your site listed in the top 5 for both phrases mentioned above. Your Toolbar PageRank is a reasonable 4 out of 10 and Google is showing around 63 backlinks pointing at your site. Google has also indexed 360 pages from your site. So no major concerns there.
I do happen to know that Google had a major datacenter shuffle last week and these tend to last a number of days. Some people in the forums are claiming it included an algorithm update and have nicknamed it the Jagger Update. People often panic during the "Google Dance" as the shuffle is more colloquially known, because their sites can shift position a number of times before the servers settle down and the results stop shuffling. My guess is that you did a check during one of these shuffles and now everything has settled again.
Don't worry too much about your links, Google does ignore the poor quality ones but will rarely penalize a site unless it is artificially inflating it's link popularity. Try to obtain high quality one-way inbound links rather than reciprocal ones, as they do more to boost your link popularity.
Our website www.deepblue-apartments.com was doing very well in Google and then a few days ago we dropped out of the listings for all our keywords apart from one search-term 'serviced apartments uk'.
This is mystifying that only one search term - and a very general and competitive one - should continue to do well, while a more specific search term - 'serviced apartments wokingham' brings no results at all.
We suspected that the algorithm may have changed and we were also concerned that our links pages were too big and that some of our inbound links were of poor quality. We had many reciprocal links but I noticed that Google was only acknowledging a small percentage of these as incoming links - I presume they ignore poor quality inbound links.
We have temporarily removed our links page and replaced it with 'holding' page in case these pages were the problem - at some point I will restore the pages with fewer links per page and only good, relevant sites.
I've also checked several main pages to make sure that key-phrases were not being over-used and I've made some edits to see if that will help.
Do you have any insight why this should suddenly happen and looking at the site as it is now do you feel that it may bounce back soon?
Yours sincerely,
David
Kalena's Answer:
Dear David
I see your site listed in the top 5 for both phrases mentioned above. Your Toolbar PageRank is a reasonable 4 out of 10 and Google is showing around 63 backlinks pointing at your site. Google has also indexed 360 pages from your site. So no major concerns there.
I do happen to know that Google had a major datacenter shuffle last week and these tend to last a number of days. Some people in the forums are claiming it included an algorithm update and have nicknamed it the Jagger Update. People often panic during the "Google Dance" as the shuffle is more colloquially known, because their sites can shift position a number of times before the servers settle down and the results stop shuffling. My guess is that you did a check during one of these shuffles and now everything has settled again.
Don't worry too much about your links, Google does ignore the poor quality ones but will rarely penalize a site unless it is artificially inflating it's link popularity. Try to obtain high quality one-way inbound links rather than reciprocal ones, as they do more to boost your link popularity.
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