HLT1
04-21-2007, 08:49 PM
I don't know what's going on. I know we all have our own little worlds. Our own websites. Our own key phrases we shoot for. I know we all see ebb and flow. I know Google shuffles things around from time to time. And I really appreciate forums like this where people can ask otherwise fairly annoying questions like "HELP! WHY AM I LOSING RANKING!" and people will really try to help out, and do some research on the guys site, and give him some input.
That said...
Ill try to put this into a nutshell. We have been top ranked #3 out of 65 million search results for our key search phrase "hair loss" (no quotes) for over 6 years. That is a long... long time. And don't laugh. Its big traffic, and our site has grown into a large online community helping people with all kinds of alopecia related conditions. Even women and children. There are hundreds of pages of genuine support, good content, and a lot of informative, custom written articles. I believe Google has blessed us over the years because of those things, and we've been # 3 for nearly 6 years. Obviously we've moved around as things shuffled from time to time. No big deal.
In January I noticed that "65 million search results" dropped to "42 million search results". In February it dropped further to: "21 million search results" and in March and April it hit bottom at "12 million search results". Did google just delete 53 million websites? Along with those shifts, our ranking for the first time in 6 years slowly adjusted. When the search results total changed, so did our ranking. Made sense to me. Google had fewer results, and those that remained were moving around a bit. We went from Page 1 to the bottom of Page 2.
This week however? We are gone. Not even in the top 15 pages, from what I can see, for the first time in 6 years. Other incredibly cheesy, 3 page websites that have zilch for content are ranked but we are gone.
Obviously something is wrong. Either with our site, or with Googl'es handling of the search phrase "hair loss" (no quotes). My assumption however is the latter, not the former. Why? Because I checked Google Rankings engine, and now they no longer recognize the search phrase "hair loss" (no quotes). I got an error saying: "Exception from service object: Problem looking up user record. The typed word, hair loss is most general!" That never happened before either. Something is up.
Helpful Information (Hopefully)
On the possibility that this is related to me, and not Google, here are some important notes that might help:
* The site has not had any major updates to it in nearly a year. I know this can be a major issue. The site itself has thousands of pages (mostly due to the forums, and articles). We were adding 2-3 pages to it per week though, up until about 3 months ago. Maybe a "trickling of updates" was keeping us barely alive in Google, and stopping it just doomed us?
* I hired a link exchange manager and she has responded to the hundreds of link exchange requests we get every month. She has completed about 300 link exchanges with other sites. Part of me fears maybe one of them is blacklisted, and now we are too, but I have absolutely no idea how I could figure out which site on our list might be blacklisted by Google.
* We added a new store to the site, which replaced probably 30 or 40 pages of our site, and there are no set meta tags for those pages just yet. This means we *may* have lost about 30 pages (out of several hundred pages) that may have previously had meta tags on them (when the old store was up). I just hadn't gotten around to setting the meta tags up yet.
The bottom line? When we were #3 out of 64 million, we were getting 15 orders a day on our store. When we got pushed to page 2, that dropped to 6 orders a day. Now that we're not even in the top 20 pages, I am looking at bankruptcy, and this online community that helps so many people is going to fall apart. So I need to figure out whats going on....
Google has been unresponsive to inquiries.
KR
Founder, HairlossTalk.com
That said...
Ill try to put this into a nutshell. We have been top ranked #3 out of 65 million search results for our key search phrase "hair loss" (no quotes) for over 6 years. That is a long... long time. And don't laugh. Its big traffic, and our site has grown into a large online community helping people with all kinds of alopecia related conditions. Even women and children. There are hundreds of pages of genuine support, good content, and a lot of informative, custom written articles. I believe Google has blessed us over the years because of those things, and we've been # 3 for nearly 6 years. Obviously we've moved around as things shuffled from time to time. No big deal.
In January I noticed that "65 million search results" dropped to "42 million search results". In February it dropped further to: "21 million search results" and in March and April it hit bottom at "12 million search results". Did google just delete 53 million websites? Along with those shifts, our ranking for the first time in 6 years slowly adjusted. When the search results total changed, so did our ranking. Made sense to me. Google had fewer results, and those that remained were moving around a bit. We went from Page 1 to the bottom of Page 2.
This week however? We are gone. Not even in the top 15 pages, from what I can see, for the first time in 6 years. Other incredibly cheesy, 3 page websites that have zilch for content are ranked but we are gone.
Obviously something is wrong. Either with our site, or with Googl'es handling of the search phrase "hair loss" (no quotes). My assumption however is the latter, not the former. Why? Because I checked Google Rankings engine, and now they no longer recognize the search phrase "hair loss" (no quotes). I got an error saying: "Exception from service object: Problem looking up user record. The typed word, hair loss is most general!" That never happened before either. Something is up.
Helpful Information (Hopefully)
On the possibility that this is related to me, and not Google, here are some important notes that might help:
* The site has not had any major updates to it in nearly a year. I know this can be a major issue. The site itself has thousands of pages (mostly due to the forums, and articles). We were adding 2-3 pages to it per week though, up until about 3 months ago. Maybe a "trickling of updates" was keeping us barely alive in Google, and stopping it just doomed us?
* I hired a link exchange manager and she has responded to the hundreds of link exchange requests we get every month. She has completed about 300 link exchanges with other sites. Part of me fears maybe one of them is blacklisted, and now we are too, but I have absolutely no idea how I could figure out which site on our list might be blacklisted by Google.
* We added a new store to the site, which replaced probably 30 or 40 pages of our site, and there are no set meta tags for those pages just yet. This means we *may* have lost about 30 pages (out of several hundred pages) that may have previously had meta tags on them (when the old store was up). I just hadn't gotten around to setting the meta tags up yet.
The bottom line? When we were #3 out of 64 million, we were getting 15 orders a day on our store. When we got pushed to page 2, that dropped to 6 orders a day. Now that we're not even in the top 20 pages, I am looking at bankruptcy, and this online community that helps so many people is going to fall apart. So I need to figure out whats going on....
Google has been unresponsive to inquiries.
KR
Founder, HairlossTalk.com