Q and A: Has my domain glitch caused permanent de-ranking in Google?

Dear Kalena...

I let my domain www.visaplace.com expire, but I re-registered it within 24 hours. The site went black in the interim and it took about a 1/2 day to be repopulated online. However about a week to two weeks later I noticed that Google dropped my rankings for virtually all of my key words. I am totally invisible online now whereas I was well ranked before. I was told by my SEO person not to worry because once Google spiders my site again a few times I will get back up to my original positions.

My SEO person looked at my site and said nothing has changed and I was not blacklisted or anything. He said I should be back up within days to a few weeks. My question is: Is explanation credible? Is there another possible reason why I am de-ranked? I am really concerned.

Thanks so much
Michael

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Michael

Your SEO is right. What's probably happened is that Googlebot tried to index your site during the time the site was down and so dropped some/all of your previously cached pages. This can happen from time to time, especially with hosting outages etc. Obviously, if those pages were previously ranking well for certain search queries, but the pages have temporarily disappeared from Google's data store, those rankings will disappear too.

I see now that Google last cached your page on October 19 so all seems to be well again. I'm not sure how many pages were indexed before the domain problem, but Google shows 79 pages currently indexed.

To check if any site is listed in Google, you can use their Site Status Tool. If your SEO is worth his salt, he will have created a Google Webmaster Tools account for your site and uploaded an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps on your behalf. This will tell Google how many pages your site has and what the URLs are so Googlebot can index it accurately. If you think Google has dropped some pages, be sure to have your SEO update the XML file and ping Google from within Webmaster Tools when it's uploaded.

If you want to keep close tabs on how/when Google indexes your site, ask your SEO to provide login access to your Webmaster Tools account or set one up for yourself.

Need more than advice? Take a Search Engine Marketing course online

Subscribe via: Yahoo Feeds | Feedburner | Technorati | Bloglines