Maternity Swimwear – back where we belong, #1
Checked Google this morning and Maternity Swimwear is back at number 1 for the non-exact global search term maternity swimwear. Phew. We are well chuffed as it was a bit of a shock to come in yesterday and find it had dropped from the face of the earth, or should I say Google earth.
So what happened. Ok I’ll admit it, it was me! Me and my fat fingers, or fat mouse clicks. Well not all me. I’ll explain. I was updating our database on Wednesday and instead of emptying our product table to re-import the changes I had made, I dropped the table. This was quickly rectified by myself and Gary and we quickly had the database back up and running, probably within 5-10 minutes. However due to a plugin that we installed, wp-cache, the site was cached and wouldn’t update even though we were running SQL queries so we knew the database was fine. This wp-cache meant the site wasn’t updated for a good while and during this time it appears Google crawled the site, received the cached SQL and PHP errors and added entries into our robots.txt file. This then meant Google thought the site was invalid and dropped it.
What did we do to rectify it. Well we searched for reasons why a site can be dropped. We had heard of this before, duplicate content, bad code can be some of the reasons so we did a quick check, no problems there. So we used Google webtools. We then found out the robots.txt had changed and a lot of Disallow entries had been added by Google. So we removed the invalid entries and increased the rate at which google crawls the site in the hope we get back up there. Then this morning we have checked and there we are, number 1 in Google again. We are chuffed as we have worked really hard to get this site to number 1 in the first place so it was a bit of a shock to not find it up there yesterday. However we have learnt from this. Onwards and upwards.
We have said this many times before but this is all a learning curve. In hindsight maybe it was good for us to experience this as it improves our skills in this business. We had to diagnose what had happened and put in place corrective steps to get it back. It only took our site down for 1 day. Not bad if you have many sites, but when you are starting and only have a few niches it can make you panic. Ok it can make me panic but then I am a worrier. Good job Gary is the calm collective one. I just run around screaming.
Niche site dropped from #1 position on Google overnight
Today we noticed that one of our niche sites had dropped from Google for the keyword search terms maternity swimwear. We have started to analyze the site to try and figure out what could have made this suddenly drop 
A quick look at Google Webmaster Tools and we noticed our Robots.txt file had several disallows for most of the main pages, but not the home page. We are not sure why this happened. The only recent change that we are aware of was that we updated the product feeds and had accidentally dropped the table in phpmyadmin. We had quickly re-created the table to update the product feeds, but for about 3-4 hours our site was not showing the products. We think this was because of the wp-cache plugin which has been causing us lots of problems recently. We had disabled this ages ago but it still seems to be caching. We knew the code in our php file hadn’t changed and that the sql statement was working ok, so must have been the caching problem.
Our site has been in top 3 position for almost 1 month now, soon after the launch of the site, so we are really confused why this would suddenly disappear.
We have also posted a question on Google Webmasters Forum, but some comments we got were not very constructive. We know the site needs some improving and will make some changes over the next coming weeks to help with this, but why would our site just drop.
A site:maternityswimwear.org.uk shows our site is also still indexed, so it doesn’t appear to have been penalised. Google Search for www.maternityswimwear.org.uk is still there.
Our only conclusion is that Google bots had tried to crawl our site when there was no content effectively so because of this our site has dropped to page 9 instead of page 1, position 1.
We will wait a few days to see if Google bot puts our site back where it belongs, at the top 
Has anyone else experienced this problem, or can provide us with some advice, we’d like to hear your comments.
Family Business website facing Google indexing problems
Recently I have developed a website for a family member and after finishing the design, the next stage was to get it indexed into Google. Well we had problems at the first hurdle as the site was taking ages to get indexed even after posting here about it, which usually helps for our other niche sites.
I noticed that the site was indexed when typing in site:domain_name.com but it was only showing the website domain name and no meta description.
After analyzing the site, I came up with the following problems which could explain why it was not showing properly, but this is still unclear as to what the exact cause was.
- Robots.txt file was set to Disallow /
- We set this up while designing the site as didn’t want the pages to be indexed with incorrect content or pages and then have to ask Google to remove certain urls etc.
- We had modified this to Allow / quite early on, but maybe it was taken some time for the google robots to pick up these changes. The robots test showed the correct information - We had some javascript on the main home page, this script was a basic expand and collapse text script so had hidden text but when clicked would display the text. This could have been seen by Google as spamming as we could be hiding keywords. But I’m sure loads of other sites use this and don’t have any indexing problems. Anyway this has been changed now to click through to another page, so no more javascript
- No 301 .htaccess redirect file set-up so that our non canonical domain http://domain was not being redirected to the http://www.domain… etc. This could have been seen as duplicate content across the domain. This has now been set-up.
Well a few days later and more of the pages are being indexed with the description. Still though the home page or root of the site isn’t showing the description and I’ve triple checked the code, its no different than some of the other pages codes.
For those interested the family site is Expand Internationally or http://www.expandinternationally.com
Any comments/suggestions welcomed
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