Ask HN: My blog has disappeared from Google for no reason, can anyone help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2492723

by StavrosK • 15 years ago

9 12 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hello,

I recently reskinned my blog (http://www.korokithakis.net/) and moved to another CMS, getting rid of tags, categories and a few other frills.

My Python tutorial, for example (http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python/), used to be listed second or third for "learn python", now it's not even in the top 100. The URLs haven't changed and I've set up redirects for the ones that have, my robots.txt is blank, Google Webmaster Tools reports no problem but none of my pages/tutorials appear anywhere in the first few pages of Google (most of them used to be in the top three).

Does anyone have an explanation or a conjecture of what might have gone wrong? As you can imagine, going from second to nowhere is rather disconcerting :/

Thanks.

infinity• 15 years ago

Just a conjecture: I have noticed that some sites nearly vanished from the Google search results after a layout relaunch, even if the actual content is still there and the URLs did not change. After some time the sites were visible again - this could be weeks or even some months. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by changes of the entire site or large parts of it. Maybe there is some kind of global re-evaluation of the site going on at Google... but only some Google engineer could tell us about the details.

I would expect that your blog will soon be visible again. Maybe it helps to be a little bit more active than usual, like writing more articles, getting some attention from the web, and finding some alternative ways to get visitors to your site.

But as I wrote, this is just a conjecture. Solid explanations regarding search engines and their secret ranking algorithms are nearly impossible most of the time - too many variables are involved and the web is just so very big...

StavrosK6• 15 years ago

Hmm, you're right, thanks. I am planning to be more active, this is actually why I migrated the blog to new software. I'll wait some more, but it's already been a week or two. It's just odd, it's not just that the pages have dropped a few spots, they're all entirely gone.

spyrosk3• 15 years ago

Hi Stavro, how long has it been since you made the changes?

I've seen a couple of times similar behavior where a site disappeared from google's results for a couple of days, after some content and theme changes but everything was back to normal after that. In any case καλή τύχη.

StavrosK6• 15 years ago

Hey Spyro,

I made the change on the 16th, so it's been nearly two weeks now... Hopefully it will return, it was very nice to be able to say "I'm ranked just after python.org for 'learn python'" :/

Thanks for your help!

spyrosk3• 15 years ago

Hmm that's quite longer from my past experience, but not unheard of. What troubles me is that your pages haven't disappeared completely from Google's index, e.g. if you enter "site:korokithakis.net" there are 302 results returned.

Perhaps Google has reevaluated your ranking for these keywords, as there are a lot of PR6-7 sites but yours is a PR4 (at least according to the SEO Site Tools extension).

Your best bet is to follow infinity's advice and start blogging more frequently, while targeting specific keywords for your posts.

calebhicks• 15 years ago

One thing you did by getting rid of tags, categories, and possibly 'a few other frills' is you demolished a huge internal linking structure that existed on your page.

Just like every external link pointing to your site gives you 'link juice' (I hate that term, but can't think of anything better right now), each internal link on your site passes that juice around.

If you had a nav bar or widget pointing to your categories pages that then pointed to the posts in that category, that gives you tons of internal links.

Also, having a large number of internal links shows the search engines that the site is well maintained. Getting rid of the majority of your internal links could certainly have this effect in the search engines.

StavrosK6• 15 years ago

Ah :/ I had no idea that internal links were that useful, thank you... I'll try to add tags again...

Ask HN: My blog has disappeared from Google for no reason, can anyone help?

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