Niche site dropped from #1 position on Google overnight

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Gary · Posted in General, Google, Search Engine Optimization 

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.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Niche site dropped from #1 position on Google overnight”

  1. Darren on July 24th, 2009 5:58 pm

    Gary,

    I tried to post last night but the comments were not working (now fixed).

    I did a quick search last night on Google and your site is back at the number 1 spot.

    The home page was last cached on 23 Jul 2009 20:26:39 GMT so it may have only appeared recently. A check of your stats may give you a better idea.

    Darren

  2. admin on July 24th, 2009 8:27 pm

    Thanks Darren, Yes it seems Google had dropped us because they crawled our site when we experienced problems with our data feeds. Paul had accidently dropped the table, but we sorted it out and just had to wait for google to re-crawl our site. Although we did increase the crawl rate from the Google Webmaster tools.
    Its all part of this huge learning curve in Affiliate Marketing and how Google works:)

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