Q and A: Why is Google only showing our site for one search term?

Dear Kalena...

Thank you for this post. That's fairly reassuring.

However, for the search term 'serviced apartments wokingham' it's our sister site, www.deepblue-apartments.co.uk and NOT the www.deepblue-apartments.com that appears.

The latter site (our main and most important site) now only shows up (3rd position) for one search term, 'serviced apartments uk' after doing very well for all our important search terms. How come?

Is that a typical symptom of an algorithm update?

I hope it settles soon as we depend on Google for our main source of business. Any idea how long before our listings might resuscitate? This has been bad for around two weeks.

Best wishes,
David

Kalena's Answer:

Dear David

From where I sit, your main site does indeed come up for the search query 'serviced apartments wokingham', in first place, in fact. The first listing I see is this one for your company together with links to two of your sites, a map and a blurb about your company courtesy of Google Local.

Your "sister site" as you call it comes in at position 5 for the same query. And speaking of sister sites, it seems that you have a range of sites containing substantially similar content. I've noticed at least 3 while researching your question. Google specifically advises against doing this in their Webmaster Guidelines:

"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content".

I'm not sure what the logic is behind promoting multiple sites, but if your rankings have suddenly dropped in Google, it could be that Googlebot has detected duplicate content and is filtering it out or ignoring it altogether. You might want to reconsider your strategy there.