Google you bastard!

[EDS]

Hey guys,

I've been ranked 1st listing for "bdsm blog" for months now, recently got 1st page for "bdsm stories" been seeing a massive increase in google traffic in the last 2 months or so.

today I check my rankings, and I'm gone...simply gone from the listings! I checked google webmaster tools, shows I'm still indexed, but the most recent I can go is 1 week ago I think.

ugh.

I mean thank god all my eggs aren't in one basket, but this was the first site I ever built, is my main blog, and my main source of traffic aside from the paysite.

anyone else mysteriously have pages dropped?

Whats funny is some of my posts are still indexed, but my homepage URL is gone. Is google dancing?

I know last thursday there was an update because my paysite for certain keywords went from non-existant straight to page 1 for several keywords, but as far as I know, this "ban" or whatever of my blog only occurred at some point this morning or late last night.

[mynameisjim]

Don't get nervous just yet. Google just did a PR update that is still rolling through so some things may be in flux.

Last month I had a blog go from about 2K google referrals down to barely 50 for a few days. Then it came back and is doing better than before.

[EDS]

I'm paying premium wages to have elderly women cross their fingers for me! I'm hoping it works!!

[nolimits4]

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/google-...e-we-go-again/

[Hammer]

A blog's traffic doesn't count on one keyword or phrase sending traffic to the main blog, you should be getting all kinds of bondage and bdsm related traffic to all of your posts if you're writing decent blog posts and you blog is properly SEOd.

The old lady crossing her fingers technique can work for you but only if the old ladies have been properly bound and have ball gags in their mouths.

[Cozy Monica]

Google is always moving around, so never freak out until a change has been around for more than a couple weeks.

My site dropped from a number one spot it held for a few years to nowhere to be found. They penalized it for who knows what and gave me a PR0 (had a PR5).

I had to send a lot of emails and work really hard, and it took about six months to get a PR ranking back, and a year to get it back up where you would actually find me in the first few pages of results.

I'm still trying to get the front page back.

It's very frustrating, but the whole "don't put all your eggs in one basket" is a very important lesson.

[EDS]

good lesson indeed, I'm glad I learned it from this awesome board and you pros before I had to learn it myself

I have other blogs that are still ranking fine, and the paysite is doing better than ever...however the blog that seems to have been effected is still my oldest site, and the biggest blog in terms of traffic, however the others aren't that far behind - so while its not killing me, it certainly hurts.

Hammer: I never relied on one keyword really, I had about 5 or 6 keywords and phrases combined that were bringing in close to 1k uniques daily from google - and they've all been dropped, as well as the lesser keywords that were bringing in a few hundred uniques have been dropped aswell.

oddly enough though with enough digging through google I can still find some of my posts indexed, but can't find the main URL indexed anywhere.

...ah well...go old ladies go! Or else on Hammer's instruction I must ball gag you all! rawr!

**and there was a great wail of dismay from old ladies everywhere**

[phuckbunny]

I was just about to post about whether there is a google update going on as one of my crap blogs which was holding steady at around 400 uniques a day just dropped to around 40.

On the other hand, one of my other crap blogs which was doing poorly is up to around 500 uniques up from being at the bottom of the barrel a couple of months ago andI rarely update that one whereas the former I tried to put more effort into.

Taking it one step further, I have what is essentially a splog on a free host that has been holding steady at around 3-400 uniques a day, knock on wood; which is great because it's for a high convertin sponsor that converts at right around those figures so I can count on at the very least around $20 a day from that one splog alone.... Nontheless...

IMO low traffic sites like those of mine that I mentioned will still be underperforming than my best blogs which get 2-4K uniques per day....though its hard to track your sales if you're dealing mostly with ccbill sponsors.

[Cozy Monica]

This is why I try really hard not to rely on Google. I like Google and it's traffic, but I try to see it as a bonus.

[Hammer]

I wasn't saying that you relied on one keyword, I was commenting on what you said, which was that you had been #1 for one and just got first page for another but then disappeared.

I don't like to assume, so are you using Wordpress? If so, are you using the SEO plugins and did you set it up so the urls use the title of your post instead of the default numbering system? Do you make sure to get good keywords into the titles and then use them a few times in the articles?

Even if you are doing everything right, as has been said, it's very unusual to get a good ranking for a certain page and then retain that ranking permanently. Think about this. How many thousands of new pages are built each day that compete with your pages and what are the chances that once in a while some of them are bound to rank higher than one of yours and bump you? Then of course there's the fact that Google is always trying to improve their results and keep rankings from getting stagnant.

[TopBucks Lilit]

Actually all the Google mess started back on the 11th of Dec. 2007 when suddenly some of good and big sites completely disappeared from Google's index. In a few days they were back in the index but lost about 70% of Google traffic. Several good sites were affected by this so-called "update" (so called - because nobody really knows what's going on) on the 21st of December and now as I can judge according to the posts we see the 3rd stage. It really doesn't look like a penalty so it's pretty early to start panic. Such updates usually happen each year before Christmas - some sites get affected, the others - not. I know several people whose sites were affected in the past. In the first case traffic returned as misteriously as it disappeared after 54 days, next year the "dead" period lasted for 18 days.

What I see now - Google updates serps, cause they differ for the same keywords from day to day. Usually Google's more stable with it.

[EDS]

Hey Hammer,

Yup I'm using wordpress with all-in-one-seo going, and my posts are set by post title as opposed to the default

Starting to get more worried, as usually when google dances you can see your sites bouncing around, whereas the only way I can find my page in google is to actually type in domain.com - which at the very least proves that the site is still indexed.

Also I just realised that my main page seems to be massive, clocking in at about 300k - I see many other big blogs clocking in a little lower than that...should I consider yanking graphics or shortening the amount of posts with pics on the front page to make it lighter? I should do this anyway to make it more surfer friendly - so I'm gonna do it either way, but is that a possible reason for a sudden drop?

google webmaster tools still saying I'm ranked #1 for those keywords, but don't know how current that is.

Totally understood about competing with the plethora of new sites hitting the net daily, however I do remember reading somewhere that age of a domain/website plays a factor into your rankings?

[LincolnLog]

My site if pretty new and almost completely driven by google traffic, was getting ready to hit a all new high this week and then yesterday came around and my traffic dropped to about a quarter of what it was. ;(

Im disappointed, im just thinking that if i keep working it will come back... was making some good progress - dang.

[crockett]

I used to have some very good top spots on both Yahoo and Google for a site that has been online since 2001.

When Yahoo switched from using google results a few years ago, I got banned because their scripts screwed up and listed my serp listing but the link went to another site which wasn't mine.

As a resualt of that, I've never been able to get my top spots on Yahoo back. I've also lost a few top spots on google with a heavy traffic hit and have yet to regain them.

I've come to the conclusion that the search engines are evil dirty things and are ment to drive webmasters crazy.

[LincolnLog]

I actually havnt dropped at all, all the numbers were not reported, went back and looked again and the updated traffic was on target.

whew

[EDS]

Ok google your a little LESS of a bastard, but still kind of a bastard :P

what was previously position #4 on page 1 has miraculously returned to #3 on page 2 and what was #1 for 2 phrases is now #8 on page 1

guess other people SEO'd better than me recently, which is funny because I like quadrupled my inbound 1 way links (through A>B>C) over the past month or two - and their all from relevant sites. Strange...oh well guess I gotta work harder!

Hope they don't dance again, unless they dance up!...for me! lol

[EDS]

Holy shit!

Just checked, and my paysite is ranked 6th on page 1 for "bdsm"

woot! I checked about an hour ago, so they must have changed within the last hour. Hope the traffic picks up! I would think "BDSM" has a whack load of searches daily, at least google keyword tool says it does.

go go finger crossing old ladies!

[EDS]

hmmm I didn't know cookies effected search results

I just cleared my cookies, searched BDSM again...number 4 now, page 1.

[mynameisjim]

That's on google.ca, the Candada one. Still good though so keep it up.

Oddly the .ca returns 63 million results for BDSM and the .com one returns 23 million.

[EDS]

Wow your right. I've been up for like 18 hours - I think I got excited a little too fast rofl.