Here today, gone tomorrow, here again!!

[denemante]

I'm at a complete loss at the moment. I've been working for some time on my site's SEO. A few months ago, I decided to give it a break, focus on other stuff, and see what would happen with my SEO work to-date by just leaving it be. So I haven't touched it in a few months.

About a month ago, I checked my stats to find that I was top 100 for a few competitive keywords up from the 500 range a few week earlier. That's progress. I was there for a few days - then I was gone. I continued to check - nothing for another week. Then suddenly, I'm top 50. I was there for a few days - then gone. Several weeks have gone by, and I'm now not listed anywhere in the index. Again - I haven't touched a thing on the site.

Could perhaps I have been invisible for a while, and when I finally started to get rankings, Google inspected my site with more of a fine-toothed comb, and only after I had higher rankings was my site more scrutinized - and they found something they didn't like and dropped me?

[AnthonyCea]

Did you ever run any automated link networks, submit to reciprocal link directories or purchase links from other webmasters or link brokers?

[projectphp]

Happens all the time, partly because Google has many, many datacentres. Don't stress.

[denemante]

I've swapped links, but only manually, and I've tried to check out those sites linking to me. Plus, I only have perhaps 30 or 40.

I'm aware of the datacenter issue - but I also thought that at some point, wouldn't results stabilize on the "main" Google? Or is there no such thing, and "Google" is really many different datacenters with constantly different results between them? If that's the case, then which datacenter should one use to benchmark their results?

[denemante]

I forgot to mention - I have about 1000 products in Froogle. You have to re-upload your feed monthly to keep it live....it's been a bit more than a month - so I'm surely gone from Froogle for the moment. While I'm sure Froogle/Google denies this - perhaps my being in Froogle helped my rankings...

[AnthonyCea]

How many pages are indexed when you run:

site:mywebsite.com

:confused:

[denemante]

"6 sites of about 28"

I recall that being much higher...

Also, my stats so tons of traffic from certain keywords during the period when I was ranked (go figure), and none now. If I'm still up in one datacenter and not another (or when I did see my higher rankings it was just because that was the DC I was connected to), this still doesn't line up.

Traffic was there from Google -and now rankings and traffic are gone - when I've changed nothing...

[AnthonyCea]

Keep an eye on indexed pages, keep running the same command over in post #6, unless your pages are indexed it is impossible to come up in the search results!