Google Hid My Blog! What can I do?

[chris.whiteley]

I was just curious if any of you could help me out on this one. I have a blog about the World of Warcraft which I have had for a while, but did not try to SEO until the begining of April. I worked pretty hard at it and managed to rank number 4 on Google for the phrase "wow gold farming"

I held this position for just over 2 weeks, and then I went away for a weekend to see that it was gone. In fact it was not even in the top 100 of Google. Can anyone shed some light as to how or why this happened. Is this something I have done or should have done, or is it just Google doing what it does best?

Here is the site: WoW Gold Farming | World of Warcraft Tips

[skleiner]

How long has it been gone? It is still indexed..

[chris.whiteley]

I know that it is still indexed, my concern was that it dropped off of page 1 for my targeted keywords over night. I can't even find it on the first 10 pages.

I was curious if anyone knew why my site would drop off like that.

[Ferox]

Perhaps other sites ave improved their seo and now rank higher than you. Although 100 is a long way to drop in a few days.

[chris.whiteley]

The other sites have not changed at all. Most of them have not been updated in a year!

Google just really likes to kick me in the junk

[Shopping4Coupons]

I have experienced situations where I pushed a certain keyword exclusively for a new site and it was #1 for that keyword search then it was somehow banished days later. It sounds somewhat similar to your experience.

Here is what I think, I do not know if it is true or not and probably never will but here is my gut. The Google search engines are pretty automatic and some of us know how to "beat the system" I believe there is a human interaction of some kind on Google's part.

A sort of Google God or most likely hundreds or thousands of them help keep the playing field even in their eyes by changing what sites are ranked for what keywords . They look for sites that may have risen to the top of searches unnaturally or too quickly and push them back. Like I have said I have no proof of this but have experienced it more than once. The effect seems to time out in a few weeks or less. Once you are back you will stay back.

It is sort of like pushing the bully at school to the back of the line to wait his turn. If my hypothesis is correct you'll be back in a bit. The only other thing I can think of to not have this happen is to make sure you promote a few relative terms rather than just one and add backlinks more slowly so you will not get noticed as much.

Give me a shout when you're back on top so I can have more ammo for my theory.... and sorry for your loss, but I'm sure it is not permanent.

[The University Kid]

How old is your domain? May be the Google Sandbox.

[Bloggeries]

I was thinking Sandbox like Jason said originally. Seriously though could be lot's of other things. Maybe someone linking to you took down a link. Maybe other sites are building tones of links with the anchor your competing etc.

Even though it's tempting; best advice is to never disclose when a keyword is bringing it in for you. Others will naturally hunt it.

Any update on it yet?

[trishacupra]

I have a couple of ideas you could chase up.

First, there's a post here that talks about being dropped by Google due to being hacked by a spammer. It also has some advice on what to do.

Second, it seems you're using StatCounter, which I used to use years ago. I think you've got it set to 'invisible mode' and from what I heard, Google doesn't like anything to be hidden to the human eye on a page.

I'd replace StatCounter with another stats system. But I'm not totally sure this is the reason, or if what I just said is totally true. It's worth looking into, though. Maybe even just making it visible would solve the problem. I don't know.

Third, just give it some time. Maybe Google is just doing a Google dance or something mysterious and when the dust settles, your position will rise again.

You're still actually in the index, right? I'd only start to really panic if you were completely gone from Google altogether.

Good luck!

[Ferox]

I don't think statcounter is an issue. I have it on three blogs and they get indexed fine, as well as earnng themselves little pageranks. Anyway, google analytics is invisible, most traffic trackers are. If they had a blanket rule of not liking anything invisible then they'd penalise people for using their own services.

They don't like invisible words though, where you change the font colour to match the background colour, so you can stuff keywords into a page that your readers don't have to read.