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
powerplates.org.uk – ranked #9 on first day
With the SEO we have done on our first day of launch we are ranked number 9 on Google for an exact search of “Power Plates”. We feel this a great achievement for our first niche site. We have had some useful feedback as well so already have some improvements we will be making to the site. We are really enjoying this and the buzz we have both received from creating and launching the new site and this site is great. We look forward to this continuing as we create more sites. We are finding our way in the affiliate world and are already networking to get help and to offer our advice where we can.
Affiliate Project UK – Top on Google – Ranked number 1
Day 9 for Affiliate Project and we are ranked number 1 in Google search engine for both the entire web search and for uk search. This is for the broad keyword search affiliate project. We are really happy with the results. According to Google Adwords Tool we can hopefully expect to get approx 5,400 hits per month on those keywords searches, providing we stay at the top and people decide our site is interesting enough to want to click through to.
Here is proof:
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Sponsors / Adverts
