Why has Google stopped indexing my page?

[Vision]

For the last 4 or 5 months i have been around the middle of page 1 of google for "blackstar amps"

The URL for the page listed was http://www.visionguitars.co.uk/blackstar_amps.html

For the last week ive noticed that google has stopped indexing this page and i'm no longer found for this search term.

Any ideas why this would happen?

Cheers

Mark

[discountfuel]

have you done something wrong, ie pay for dodgy links/visitors?

[crossdaz]

For the last week ive noticed that google has stopped indexing this page and i'm no longer found for this search term.

Any ideas why this would happen?



The depth of crawl will depend upon the authority of your site - if you have lots of pages then google will only crawl and index so many - so it is inevitable that pages will drop out of the index from time to time.

You can help the situation by trying to get more external links generally, optimising the navigation of your site and getting links which go direct to the most important pages within your site.

[Vision]

have you done something wrong, ie pay for dodgy links/visitors?


No, nothing like that, i did add a canonical url to my header (as suggested here) which is when things started going funny, i have since removed this and wondering if it will just take time for google to list the page again?

[Dom63]

First do not panic!

This happens regularly even to authority sites.

Have you built any new links recently from bad neighbourhoods, have you changed the content?

Despite what anyone says it is not difficult to place a page on google page one and keep it there.You just need to know what to do or know that your SEO company knows what they are doing.

I have same problem when something goes wrong with my car.I trust that the guys in the garge can sort it out as I know nothing about cars:)

If you need help let me know

Dom

[Parkwood IM]

Ignore all the scaremongering about linking from bad neighbourhoods etc as it's nonsense.

If that sort of thing was true, I wouldn't need to worry about improving people's rankings and could just drop a few bad links to reduce their competitors' rankings instead!!

Either the relevancy and/or authority of your page has been reduced somehow, or your competitors have been working to increase theirs (at least at a faster rate than you).

On the other hand, if you're not found at all for the search term, then Google is most likely just reassessing your page and it should be back again soon.

Cheers

Jon :)

[SEO Traffic Solutions]

A link from a bad neighbourhood will not affect your rankings. If Google worked this way then I could build these kinds of links to all my competitors to get them removed from Google's index. Google knows that you can't be held responsible for someone linking to you. If you link out to one of these bad neighbourhoods, that's a different story.

You're experiencing the Google Dance. You've made quite a substantial change to your navigation so Google is re evaluating where you should apprear in the index. Add 10 - 15 social bookmarks to the page that used to rank and your ranking should come back, often better than where you were ranked before.

This happened recently to a client of mine and they called me in a panic. I explained the above to them and, 3 weeks later they are now at number 2 in Google and getting 100+ searches per day just from this one keyword.

[Dom63]

Oops meant to write links "to" bad neighbourhoods..difficult typing and talking on the phone at the same time:)

Anyhow bottom line is do not panic.

If you want any advice get in touch

Dom

[seo next]

No, nothing like that, i did add a canonical url to my header (as suggested here) which is when things started going funny, i have since removed this and wondering if it will just take time for google to list the page again?
Did you do a 301 permanent redirect of some kind to correct the canonical url issue ?
What exact code was used..
Have you registered with webmaster tools ?

[Vision]

The code i was given was. .
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com" />Obviously i added my own URL in there.

I have removed it now.

Cheers

Mark

[Ali-v-8]

there is no internal link to the page from content.
End of nothing else.
Put a link to the pages so the get cached with each crawl no just when google come across a page.
Internal linking is VERY VERY important.
its a very simple fix.

[simon42]

I think you might of done something wrong regarding googles guide lines.

If you try googles webmaster tools that can help......especially the webmaster help forum!

Hope this helps!

[Vision]

There is a banner link on the left and also a link in the footer of every page (only recently) is that not enough?

[Ali-v-8]

contexual links are much better


There is a banner link on the left and also a link in the footer of every page (only recently) is that not enough?

[Codefixer]

The code i was given was. .
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com" />Obviously i added my own URL in there.

I have removed it now.

Cheers

Mark

That's obviously your issue, and you've shot yourself in the foot. Now you've removed it wait for Google to recache the page.
Here's an example of the effect the wrong use of the canonical can have.
http://www.michaelwall.co.uk/seo/canonical-link-element-mistakes/

[OldWelshGuy]

Why did you add the canonical tag into the page, is it a duplicate of another on your site?

[Vision]

Thanks, google nhas now re-indexed the page and we seem to be back to normal