Any Ideas What Could Have Happened?

will575

I've been working on my seo for a few months. Almost immediately I went from the total google abyss to at least being the second hit if I searched for my company name w/o a location (there are about a dozen Cottonwood Builders in the U.S.) and the first hit if I added location. within a few weeks I was finding myself on about the 5th to 10th pages for several searches and then I started showing up on the second to third page for a couple of searches and was occasionally even hitting the first page. It was never real consistent. I could hit the 2nd or 3rd page for a given search one day and the next day be on the 6th page. But everything seemed to be moving in the right direction. Then I seemed to be consistently on the 2nd page for 1 search: "remodeling las cruces, nm" this went on for like 2 weeks. then 1 day I wasn't showing up in the first 10 pages. I searched by Co. name. My home page didn't show up at all, some of my other pages showed up further down. Some fragments of my old website are apparently still up from my old ISP and those pages can be found on google. All of my pages except my home page can be found if I tailor the search right and look several pages in, but google will not find my home page at all, period. I haven't hooked up with any link farms, haven't used any shady seo guys, I've just been building a few links and tuning and adding a little content.

I've registered on a bunch of internet yellow page type sites like yellowpages.com and have gotten a few jobs that way. They have all had their sales people calling wanting to sell me a premium listing or PPC or SEO. One in particular, Super Pages has been particularly aggressive. I told the salesman I am working on my SEO any might be interested in PPC in the future but not right now. About 2 days later my free listing disappeared off superpages and all of their subsidiaries. I called the salesman and he said it was a "glitch" and they would fix it and pitched PPC/SEO real hard again, I still said no. The next day I was back on superpages etc. That was the same day my home page vanished from google! I assume this is a coincidence, but it makes me wonder. Could superpages have somehow screwed me with google to "encourage" me to use their PPC or SEO? The salesman was bragging about how they do millions of dollars of business per month with google. weird!

Again it's only the home page that has vanished from google.



My website is www.cottonwoodbuilders.com

Any Ideas?

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KHouse75

Something change with google it seems. Several months ago I could search for the name and square feet of a floor plan I bought to build and 50 web sites that sold the plan would come up. Now when I search, I'm lucky to get one and it's usually 2-3 pages into the search.

tinner666

Tis interesting. I google YOUR keywords. You were 2nd, by way of a biz listing. THough not sponsered links, most listings were services and directories of the area. Including Kijiji: which had crap for keywords and 0 PR.

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Frank Slate Roof Repairs, Richmond, Va.

dougchips

"Any ideas what could have happened?" = not enough links to your site

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To get the best replacement windows, or sun rooms contact the replacement windows experts at FHI Vinyl Window Company.

tinner666

Maybe you should add woodstove to your keywords? Those sites popped right up. Weird.

Add some different keywords and see what happens.

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Frank Slate Roof Repairs, Richmond, Va.

carlsore

Not enough links is a possibility but unlikely... I'd say it's simply the "Google Dance" sometimes it acts a little eratically when they are going through a major crawl/index/update. I would wait a few more days and see if something changes. If Google banned the domain (highly unlikely) they wouldn't index any of your pages.

Carl Sorensen

twinremodeling

Just wait a few more days and see again

tin man

Nobody or next to that will enter your name into google so why do you care?

dinkisdad

You could easily get on the first page of Google for Las Cruces home builders.

There are around 400 people searching for that keyword phrase, per month, and very light on competition.

Write an article 300-500 words long targeting those keywords. You would probably be on the first page inside of a week and maybe inside of a day. Then just link your article to your website and badda boom badda bing.

It's free to do. Just write an article about home building and don't write a sales pitch. That'll at least get you to the first page then you'll have to do some other things to keep your self there. And if you play your cards right you could get just about every listing on the first page. That's domination.

Dave

A W Smith

Same thing happened to me, I then made a bunch of changes in desperation. I couldn't even find my page with a page title search!!! Right Carl? I even sent a re-index request thinking I was banned for excessive key words or something about two wees ago. Suddenly this past weekend its back up.

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Al Smith
http://www.awsmith.com

will575

Yes Al, that is exactly what happened to me! Update: It's back, but not quite as high as it had been at its best, which was right before it disappeared. Something we did find through webmaster tools was that Joomla had this "cool" (?) feature that allowed someone viewing the site to adjust the text size (what?) anyway, google was seeing this as three dead links! We removed that, I don't know if that was the problem or not.

Another question: I read somewhere, probably on this forum, that it is a good idea to have the url's for different pages to contain keywords that relate to the content of that page. I did that and I've found that google sometimes finds my interior pages on searches for the service that the page applies to, but it's buried pretty far down in the results. For this to work well does each page need links (PR) or would it work off of the PR for the home page?

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will575

Hey Dave, that's interesting! Where would I submit the article? Would that work for anything, like when does your roof need to be replaced vs repaired? (we get a lot of wind damage here) or how much will I recoup at resale on a remodel etc? How would I link to the article?

Thanks for the Idea!!! Now A need to figure out the implementation.

Will

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RidgeWalker

Just wondering, are you using a robots.txt file on your the server that host's your web site? If you don't know what that you can learn about it by visiting here. http://www.robotstxt.org/

dinkisdad

A few places to put articles fro free are. E-zinearticles.com, goarticles, hub pages, and you could create a squidoo lense at squiddo.com.

I'm sure there are many more but google loves these direcotories are free. Just read the terms and conditions for their website linking rules.

Dave

AustinReDevelop

Dinkis is right on. I have about 100 articles posted in various places and it really helps your SERPs. If you'd like to write a guest post or two on my blog I'd be happy to include a link to your site on each post. It's a great way to get links back to your site.

Joe

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Austin Remodeling
Contractor, Realtor, Investor