Q and A: Why have our most popular pages disappeared from Google?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks again for your help a couple of years ago. I need some more advice now and I don't even know where to start troubleshooting. About a week ago I noticed that the bulk of our most popular pages no longer seem to be on Google's radar. I'm talking about pages that used to show up in the top 10 results for typical searches in our industry. Currently, those pages don't show up AT ALL in Google's results, or Google offers a comparatively irrelevant page, like our home page or links page that might happen to have the keywords in question.

This problem is only with Google, not MSN or Yahoo. Probably began during the last 30 days. Other pages come up in Google SERPs just fine. Also, I checked our Google Webmaster Tools and everything looks OK - sitemap downloaded OK, all pages (including the problem ones) indexed. PR for the problem pages is unchanged (lackluster 2-3, but at least not lowered). The only thing I did different was to use a new sitemap a couple of weeks ago. Any ideas?

Rick

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Rick

I'm getting a lot of similar questions to yours at the moment and I'm convinced it is the result of a major tweak Google has made this month to their PageRank algorithm (not to be confused with the Google Toolbar PageRank green bar). Here's my reasoning:

• None of your pages show up in Google's Supplemental Index, indicating those pages haven't been removed from Google's main datacenter.
  
  
• Google is currently showing 179 pages from your site as being indexed, whereas Yahoo is actually showing over 300 pages indexed, indicating that Google may be suppressing the value of some of your pages.
  
  
• You didn't tell me the search query that returns the rankings you are talking about, but if you were previously ranking well for those terms and you've not changed the pages, then it's probably an external cause rather than something you did to cause the ranking drops.

Google makes small tweaks to their ranking algorithm on a regular basis. Some of these tweaks involve the addition of code filters to detect and suppress code it sees as artificially influencing your page's relevancy. It may be that the new algorithm includes a new filter that has picked up something on your pages Googlebot doesn't like, for example, excessive keyword repetition or duplicate content. Many of your pages have almost identical content to each other, which could have triggered a suppression filter.

Also, you have quite a large number of backward links showing in Yahoo (over 300) but only 8 showing in Google. It may be that Google has decided many of those backlinks are not relevant and has suppressed any influence they previously had on your rankings. The reciprocal link swapping concept you use on your site and the advice you give to potential link partners is quite flawed. It will likely only attract links from very low quality sites, diluting your own site's link popularity as a result. Many of the sites listed on your links page are completely irrelevant to your site. Read my link swapping rant for more info.

Finally, keep in mind that thousands of new pages get added to the Internet every day. Chances are that some of these might be targeting the same keywords and phrases that you are. If those pages are better optimized than yours, yours will naturally be pushed down in the results.

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