Our domain name no longer ranks in Google.

[ep90]

We get a lot of repeat users coming back to our site by typing in our domain (with out the www and .co.uk) into google. This was fine as we were no.1 for that term but about three weeks ago we stopped ranking on our domain name (it was on page 6 but seems to move around the low page numbers) We'd been no.1 on the term since we launched the site about 2 years ago.

We are now having to run an adwords ad on our domain name which is getting a 85% CTR so clearly it's our site people are looking for. I thought the whole point of google was it helped people to find what they want?

Does anyone know why this has happened and if there is anything we can do? Is it just a case of waiting and hope it comes back? I've checked google's webtools, we had quite a few duplicate titles and meta description tags so I've fixed those. Most of our affilate links go through a redirect page though there are a few banners that do not.

Any ideas?

[Subbynet]

Sadly I can't help but think the whole point of Google is to make you pay for PPC. Its a company with shareholders after-all.

[Tezza]

Maybe a penalty has been triggered. If you think it may be a dupe issue and have fixed it then your going to have to wait and see if your listing comes back, but that could be a while. It happened to Seoinc a few years ago, they lost all of they're PR and ranks, but they now rank for they're website name and have PR back, but they're listings haven't (they ranked number 1 for 'seo'). But it took ages for it to come back.

I gave up on my last high flying site as I was never able to salvage my high ranked terms in a competitive business when Google 'punished' it for no reason. I was fighting for months to try and get the traffic back and in the end I let it go. The domain is now owned by someone else and is parked.

I hope this doesn't happen to you, but I wouldn't hang around waiting for Google to bring your domain rankings back to life, it may be better now to make a plan B and use PPC to get your return customers before your competitors take them off you, or alternativly get another domain and use a 301 redirect to let your repeat customers know that the domain has been changed, a branded domain that is ranked top of Google for its brand name, hence the next time they are looking for you on Google they will use your new sites name.

OR : If you was using a .co.uk then swap to the .com if it is available.

In the meantime, if ever your listing comes back then you could use your first sites rankings to redirect new customers and pass link relevancy over to your new site.

It could however just be Google tampering, they tend to make mistakes and rollback they're algorythm for a second try. Try Google Datacenter Watch Tool - view and compare Google Datacenters to see test runs on Google datacenters. If this is the case then your ranks may come back sooner than first anticipated, at least, I hope they do.

Good luck,
Terry

[philhancox]

Originally Posted by Subbynet Sadly I can't help but think the whole point of Google is to make you pay for PPC. Its a company with shareholders after-all.

This is sort of true. Google is a company and makes its money from advertising, but the difference is that Google is quite user focussed. By creating the most relevant results and much more relevant than those of other search engines, users are more likely to use Google than it's competitors, and therefore there are more people to see/click the adverts. This is how Google has got to where it is today.

[philhancox]

Originally Posted by ep90 We get a lot of repeat users coming back to our site by typing in our domain (with out the www and .co.uk) into google. This was fine as we were no.1 for that term but about three weeks ago we stopped ranking on our domain name (it was on page 6 but seems to move around the low page numbers) We'd been no.1 on the term since we launched the site about 2 years ago.

Does the domain contain keywords that there is competition for? If so, is the site (or homepage) optimised for the words in your domain as well? Has competition stepped up efforts for optimising for those keywords?
It does sound more like some sort of penalty though, without knowing more about the actual url.

[ep90]

Thanks for the replies, the keyword is not that competative - quite a few of the results on the first page of results are people linking to our site! We have got the .eu and .org domains which are parked at the moment. If this is a long term problem then we could possibly use those.

How can you find out why google has penalised a site? We have added some hidden div's using css, that are toggled via javascript. This was done about 4 months ago though and it didn't seem to have any effect on google results at the time. Could this be it?

[DioBach]

I've had this happen to me several times in the past on some of my domains. Some have been out for over a year, others popped back in after a few months. One of the big triggers for it can be getting lots of irrelevant back links. I think using the old DP Coop was responsible for the damage. Have you been getting lots of naughty back links recently?

[Top banana]

I know you may want to do this, but without knowing the domain it is very difficult to say what the problem is.

I would happy to help but without the domain name it would be a wild guess.

[ep90]

Originally Posted by DioBach Have you been getting lots of naughty back links recently?

No, signed up for a directory listing with Yahoo a while back, not really done much else. We've got a few links on high PR sites that are relivant to our site, but not many. Most of our inbound links come from forums.

[tbp]

It may be that there is a temporary glitch, I`ve had it before where sites have fallen down the rankings unexpectedly, but after a couple of days to a week they were back at their previous positions.

It may be that you have triggered a penalty, as the others have said. If you log in to Google webmaster tools, there should be a message in there telling you what you have done wrong, and also giving a link to submit a reinclusion request.

One of my sites got a penalty for "hidden text", which wasn't really, it was just the title of the site under a graphic representation of the title, so people could see it if they couldn't view images. I got banned from google, but check webmaster tools every day, and got a message straight away. The site then vanished 2 days after the message telling me it was being banned. I then removed the text and submitted a reinclusion request. 2 days later my site was not only back in the index, but had risen to number 1

If you haven't check webmaster tools. If you have an account already set up you should have a message in their if you have triggered a penalty. If you haven't got an account, set one up asap (its very useful anyway), although i`m not too sure whether you get a message when you set up the account is your site is banned.

If you don't have an account at webmaster tools, you can set one up for free at:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

If you haven't had a penalty, it shouldn't be too long before your normal position is resumed, although each time this has happened to me i`ve moved up into a higher position than I had before.

I really don't believe that this is an excuse for Google to make money by forcing you into PPC. There are a lot of rumours about how google forces people to give them money, ups PPC rates at Christmas, blah, blah, blah, but from my experiences none of them are true.

[Mogga]

google is as google does.

I bought two domains around the same time. One does ok in google and the other just isn't listed. Same process used for each site and it just didn't work with one. Quite bizarre,