Site suddenly disappeared from Google - Help!

[Nathan]

I agree Michigal. You are correct that PR 0 is not always a penalty, and this case it probably isn't.

For some reason I had thought that Future Conscience was a blog that had been on this forum a good six months ago. I didn't realize that it was actually a new blog.

I jumped to conclusions, assuming that the blog was an older, established blog with PR that had suddenly dropped to zero. And that is usually a bad sign that you are being penalized. Sites don't usually go from three or four PR to zero unless they did something wrong or they really messed up and lost all their backlinks.

I didn't realize that Future Conscience was such as new blog. You are correct in saying that for a new blog the PR will wobble up and down and that PR zero is not bad. In fact, for a new blog PR zero is theoretically better than PR NA.

Anyway, next time I'll have to remember to ask questions before I jump to conclusions.

[FutureConscience]

Just dropped out of search again for 'future conscience' - spoke too soon!

I believe this is what they call the 'google dance'?

[Nathan]

Well, it should balance out in the end. Just keep working on promotion and you'll do fine.

[FutureConscience]

I'm not too worried about it now to be honest, more fascinated by the process and trying to make sense of it...

Most of my hits are coming from other forms of promotion - and I'm happy to just keep building up content and visitors in this way and then let the search engines kick in properly in a few months.

[FutureConscience]

Although I'm still not too concerned - I was put in a bit of a mood today after doing some more searches for my site.

You know what gets to me the most? That the scraper sites (which are only scraping the first paragraph, before linking to my site thank G-d) are ranking on the first page for many terms and I'm just not. So my article is hitting keywords, and thankfully getting second-order links through it seems, but my site is NOWHERE to be seen (and yet has 100 pages indexed).

The problem I have is just how random it seems. It comes and goes, and I am using as a basis for my comparison the search term "future conscience" which if you test yourself you will see that almost all of the first page or so are items either posted by me on forums or social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook.

I'm really stumped. Webmaster Tools have me listed as having 25 links (Yahoo about 4 times that), which is more than they thought I had before I dropped out of the rankings. I'm still indexed. Keywords well represented without going overboard. Pages are properly titled and named. Google Webmaster Tools has an inbox which has had NO messages from Google about any kind of violation on my behalf. I resubmitted my site for consideration following this unexpected disappearance, and have received a message back saying it has been reviewed - no change.

What the hell is going on?!?! Would love to know, purely from a curiosity point of view! The ONLY explanation I have is that the site is not old enough, and that the new change in algorithm has put site age as far more important than it used to be.

Bah humbug!!

[FutureConscience]

For anybody interested in my plight - or suffering from the same - I found this recent article which explains everything I've seen almost perfectly:

Google's Sandbox Still Exists

Basically, it looks like my site is screwed for some unknown and arbitrary reason until Google decides - again for unknown, and quite likely arbitrary reasons - that the site is 'worthy'.

Let's see just how long that is...stay tuned, and please support Future Conscience in our fight against the Google search tyrants!!

[FutureConscience]

So we've had some movement on this ongoing saga (I'm presuming here that people are still interested in hearing how things go...if only to keep a record for future reference).

'Future Conscience' we now return at spot #5, underneath things like our Twitter feed (#1) and my introductory post on here (#4).

'ways to secure social network' we now rank at #45. This was our best traffic spinner a few weeks ago, and then we disappeared completely so I am happy to see it back in the first 5 pages! ('10 ways to secure social network' is at #14).

'signs of a dangerous cult' we are at #19 - but it is great to see that both the Digg link and the Care2 link are first page.

'future ethics blog' we are at #37 - however our introductory post at Digital Point comes up #1 (yay!).

There are many others, but I won't go through them all. Basically, it seems like for now we are out of whatever sandbox or lowered ranking we may have been - great news and Google traffic is returning!!

What are the lessons learned from this?

1) That new websites may just disappear from search rankings for no understandable reason.

2) That if you continue to produce content regularly (and we do so about 6 days a week) then Google will soon recognise that you are a worthwhile site.

3) Links from social media such as Twitter, Digg, Facebook and other such networks are worth so much - because they will often list much higher than your site does for competitive keyword phrases.

4) Forums are a great way to get these highly ranked links as well. Many of my posts both here and on Digital Point come up very high on the rankings. Blog Catalog seems to fare pretty well too.

5) I've learned a whole shed-load of stuff about SEO due to this momentary panic

Here's hoping it stays this way and continues to grow as we get more back-links and add more content. But for now, I'm well happy again!

[ChickenFreak]

Bagaskara, you said in another thread that your blog is not for readers, that it's just for a search engine contest. (If I understood you correctly.) If that's true, then Google is absolutely correct to downgrade or ignore your blog.

Google's not there to play a pure SEO keyword game, uncontaminated by those pesky users. Google's there to _serve_ those pesky users.