Geez, I’ve been blogging about Mission Impossible 4 and I was able to penetrate on the first page of Google, I was on the 8th spot to be exact then suddenly my site is nowhere to be found. I stayed on that spot for almost 1 week, now I can’t even see my site on the top 300 results of Google. Is my site penalized? and if it was, how will I be able to put it back in Google’s search results. The content of my post is original and it is consist of 500+ words. I also do bookmarking and blog review. I just don’t understand why it happened to me. Can anyone help me with this one? Please…
Did you checked your page load time? The recent panda update was for this purpose. Does your post have too many images and you have not optimized them also make a quick check. Do you involve in reciprocal linking? Do you make links in not organic manner- These are several questions of which you know the fact. Some times it also happens due to Google flux. So be calm if you are doing quality work according to guidelines of search engine definitely you will get the result.
I truly appreciate your response with this one sir, but to be very honest with you, though I’ve said that I was able to make my site ranked on that particular spot, I am still new to blogging and what I did is listen to my friends’ advises on how to optimize my site. I am truly not familiar with the things you are trying to ask me like the page load time, I’ve heard about Google Panda but I am not so familiar with how it works. As far as I can remember there were 3 images on my post. Hmm… I hope you won’t get pissed if i asked you what does reciprocal linking means. Another thing is that I am suspecting that bookmarking affected my site in a negative manner… What is your notion about this one sir? I’ll be really thankful if you’ll respond to some more of my questions… I sincerely appreciate your comment and I thank you so much.
Websites come and websites go. That can be particularly true for blog posts, which Google sometimes sees as transitory and less permanent or less relevant in the long term. Google likes ‘freshness’ - it may be that when your blog post was all new and shiny, you were getting tweets and links and likes and +1s and so on, which propelled you up the rankings, but after a week when your page has become old and tatty and frayed at the edges, all those tweets and likes and wotnot have died down, and so Google doesn’t rank the page so highly as a result.
If you’ve got a blog, you need to keep updating it. It doesn’t have to be every day, if that’s going to be too much of a challenge for you – either in terms of time/workload or just in thinking about new things to write about – once a week or even less often can be fine. Try to be regular in posting – it’s better to make one post a week than to send out four in four days and then nothing for the rest of the month. It tells Google that your blog is active, it gives googlebot a reason to keep coming back and re-crawling your site.
As for the other things phillip mentioned:
[list][]Google Panda: this was the codename given to the latest update Google made to their ranking algorithm, and its purpose was to promote sites that had original content, and demote sites that had scraped, copied or syndicated content. If you wrote your article from scratch and you haven’t reposted it on loads of other sites then you’re doing exactly the right thing.
[]Page load: if your page loads too slowly then Google can sometimes drop it down the rankings a bit. The best way to check is to look at it on somebody else’s computer, or on a browser that you don’t normally use, to make sure that it isn’t caching any files. If it takes ages and ages to load then that might be causing a problem, although I don’t think it would explain a drop of 300 places; Google were at pains to explain that this factor was not intended to make major differences to the rankings, but just to ensure that really slow sites didn’t outrank fast sites that were more-or-less as good.
[]Reciprocal linking is when you link to another site and they link back to you. Unless there’s a good reason why this will be beneficial to your readers, it’s best to steer clear of this, because it’s a common tactic of spammers.
[]Bookmarking is unlikely to be doing you any harm. If it was that easy to penalise a site by social bookmarking then it would be way too easy to penalise your competitors’ sites by the same process … and Google isn’t going to do anything that helps people to do that![/list]
I hope that answers some of your questions – you might also like to read our SEO FAQ, which has loads of useful information and tips in it.
The problem with suddenly ranking into the top of searches is that your site may be a target of scrutiny either by Google or other competing sites (which will attack you by reporting to Google any terms and conditions violation that you might have). You appear to quickly, you might also disappear too quickly. The things that Stevie D mentioned are good points to look at.
You might also like to recheck your friend’s tip for optimization, some of them might be violations of Google terms and conditions.