I am no expert in these issues and all thoughts are my own.
I have 2 sites which have been suddenly dropped by Google and after exhaustive research i have come up with the following theory, please feel free to add your thoughts.
My site websiteguild.com held number 2/3 position for the search term websites for sale for over 6 months, it is now nowhere in sight for this search term.
Under the search term sell websites i hold position number 13 on Google.
Bearing this in mind, i have not been deleted from their database.
My links pointing to my site on Google are showing 16 previously well over 100.
My Alexa link results bring back over 800 links.
My site still achieves number 1 position on the search term websites for sale with dmoz.
My site hasnt changed at all, apart from a few very minor adjustments.
Conclusion.....
I think Google have had a breakdown and lost a great deal of data!!
My site has been indexed daily since dropping, and i believe this is because they are trying to replace some of the lost data.
Where have all my links suddenly gone?
Why would a good honest site with informative details be replaced with search results for dogs for sale, nasa items for sale, govnerment sales and Skye and Lochalsh Enterprise website.
These results dont make sense.
It has been going on for 3 weeks now and i am losing interest in Google, if it has been deliberate then they have made a grave mistake, i thing Google are too Intelligent for that.
Have they done it for financial gain? to make us sign up for adwords?
What are your views??
Regards
Paul Webb
Some people have suggested that Google has ruined the serps intentionally to make people go for their AdWords, but I just can't see it. They gained their popularity by producing the most relevant serps of all the engines and they are not about to intentionally produce rubbish results or they will follow other engines and become an also-ran.
There are some nonsense results for your searchterm (websites for sale), as you pointed out. That's partly due to the fact that, for Google, the term is "websites sale". They drop the stopword "for". Even so there are still some nonesense results.
I haven't heard the suggestion that Google has lost some backlinks data before. If it had happened, I guess that people all over the place would be saying that their backlinks have gone down drastically. I'd say that your backlinks are down because of the backlinks update a few weeks ago. It's not unusual for backlinks to go up or down.
The other problem with this 'lost data' theory is that Google runs a massively-distributed and massively-redundant system. And these guys aren't idiots. I am doubtful about any significant data loss.
Not sure about any of this, but I can tell you I lost about half of my 36 backlinks. Down to 19... Just before I fell out of the sky, and got deep sixed on "winnipeg web design" (from #1 to nowhere in the first 1000 results).
Certainly Google seems to have messde up - and, to be honest, I don't think Google is going to be too happy with the SERPs either. I think it's fair to say that we're not going to see the end of this matter for a while yet.
I know trhis is an older thread but .....
I just noticed this has happened to our site too.... I'm down to 5 links from about 20, so whats up I wonder.
Seems useless to go to the trouble of getting links only to lose them.... some that I have lost are from my own websites, linking to our main one, so I know the links are active.
I think that only links that are atleast a PR4 show now, atleast thats what I heard
I don't know about that, one of the links I still have, is from another forum from a thread that was written a couple of years ago. And forums don't have page rankings......
Google only shows links from pages with a PR of 4 or better, but that does not mean you don't have the links, just that they are not reporting them.
Your site does not show many links when using the LinkPop tool, a total of 89 links webwide and only 5 in Google.
It would be a good thing to submit your site to as many directories as possible, and to engage in a link campaign to improve your links, which can be very helpful to your rankings if you use good anchor text in the links, and make sure you use the same URL for your address, (i.e. use the www. in front of the URL always) as some search engines will see them as different pages otherwise.
You can get a free copy of the linkpop tool at: http://www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com/
I am not at all sure what the details of Googles new algo are and they change so fast that its very difficult to track, but so far It seems to me that there is a totally different method of selecting the batch of pages which they consider to be relevant to a particular search term before they start the ranking process.
I have concluded this on only anecdotal evidence, based in part on pages which used to rank highly for certain search terms, but which now rank 9999 or worse, but if you add a modifier to some of those terms the pages again rank #1.
I conclude therefor that the relevancy ranking algo is not all that different, but the method of choosing the initial batch of pages considered for rankings on that term has changed very much.
One interesting thing that I saw is that for one of my subpages, I rank really well for 'pegasus satellite', as well as for 'pegasus tv', but for 'pegasus satellite tv', I'm nowhere to be found. Go figure!
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