Jonathan Leger – SEO And Internet Marketing Blog Internet Marketing Blog

My Site Is Gone!

Yesterday your site was in the top 5 results in Google for your keywords. Today your site is nowhere to be found. You spent the last week building new links to your site. Did you overdo it? Did you "break the rules"? What happened!?!

First, take a deep breath and relax.

Good.

Now, let's talk about why this happens, why you usually shouldn't worry about it, and when you should.

Why Your Site Disappears

Especially when your site is new, it is not at all unusual for it to be ranking very well one day, and then disappear from those rankings the next day. This is especially true after you do some link building to your site.

Here's a scenario:

1. You build a brand new site (or go back to work on a site you haven't done anything with for a while).
2. You start building links to that site.
3. After a few weeks your site jumps into the rankings for the keywords you're working on. Yes!
4. Another week or two later it disappears from those rankings.

It's at #4 that most people freak out, but you really shouldn't. That's because of #5:

5. A few days later your site pops back into the search results, often in a better position than it was before.

If you're not doing anything spammy or evil, #5 is very likely to follow #4. Let's talk about why.

Why Does Google Do This?

It might seem like Google's goal is to give you a heart attack, or at least put the fear in you, but it's really not (though those two things might be side effects of what they are doing).

What's happening is what's commonly referred to as the "Google Dance." You see, Google has a massive index, which it updates on a daily basis as it discovers new links and makes adjustments to old links, removes dead pages, etc. But because Google's index is so huge, it takes a while to recalculate all of the ranking information for your site in among all of the others.

I'm not sure why Google doesn't keep a static version of the search results up while making these adjustments, but they don't. Perhaps it would require too much overhead, so it's just easier for them to do real-time updates like this. Whatever the case, these updates mean that your site will jump around in the result list, often disappearing altogether for a couple of days, until Google finishes its little "dance", at which point your newly acquired links will often make your site appear even higher up in the results than it was before.

When Your Site Doesn't Come Back

If your site does not return to the position it was before (or at least on the same page) within a few days (at most 3 in my experience), the next step to take is to make sure that your site is still indexed by Google. To do that, go to Google and do a site search on your domain name, like this:

site:jonathanleger.com

Replacing, of course, jonathanleger.com with your own domain name. If Google returns a list of your site's pages, then you're probably fine. If it doesn't, that means Google has decided that something you did was bad and has removed your site from their index altogether.

Coming back from being deindexed is tricky, and is beyond the scope of this blog post. More often than not your site will still be indexed even if it doesn't come back into the rankings.

Why Didn't My Site Come Back?

The primary reason this happens is that you got too many links too fast and then stopped getting links altogether (or slowed down a lot).

You see, if you get a huge number of links to your site all at once and then stop growing your links, Google will rank your site well for your keywords pretty fast for a while. But once it sees that your links have stopped growing, it assumes your site's popularity was short lived and drops it back out of the rankings again.

That makes logical sense. If a site is suddenly popular because of some big event that happened which caused it to get a lot of publicity, it makes sense to keep that site high in the rankings for the duration of that notoriety. But once the jets cool off, it doesn't make sense to keep the site ranking so well.

That's why it's important to grow your links slowly over time. If you tapper off your link growth (or just get a small number of links over a long period of time), then Google doesn't usually drop your site out of the rankings like that.

So instead of getting 1,000 links in one week, getting 10 a day for 100 days will keep your rankings stronger for a lot longer! If you've chosen your keywords carefully, your site is likely to hold its position until a competitor comes along and gets more links than you -- in which case it's time for you to go back to work and go through this experience all over again.

Summary

Google will often drop a site from the rankings if you get too many links too fast and then stop growing your links altogether, so be sure to grow your links slowly over time if at all possible. But even if you do everything right, Google will "dance" for a while after you grow your links, bouncing your site around in the search results for a few days before it settles back down.

One more point: once your site has been established for a while (usually six months or so of steady link building), the dancing tends to stop happening so much (if at all). At that point your site can usually sustain short bursts of big link additions without Google going crazy on you. In the beginning though, you just have to expect this kind of bouncing around.

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