Hello darrens, and welcome to the forums.

Yes, we've been seeing a number of similar reports here, and so far no common factors have come to light to explain it. If this happened 8 weeks ago for your site, I doubt that Caffeine is the issue. I assume your domain root is still in the index - correct? and if so, is it getting any traffic from Google at all?

We have the same issue with home page not showing up on two kws but internal pages in top ten in google. Home page was in top ten eight weeks before. Home page shows up on certain three kws in top ten.

On new google caffeine home page and internal page show on top ten on kws.

Hi,

Yes, home page is still in the index and yes we are still receiving traffic from google.

Very strange and i have spoke to other webmasters that have experienced this ...
Hmmm ...
Anyone else have any thoughts ...

with regards to the 'caffine' update.

I first noticed a big drop when google published the test search ip address where you could test the new caffine results. At this time my site was ranking as normal in google but in the caffine results i saw the big drop.
I hoped this was because the caffine rusults were on a .com (us) and im .co.uk (uk) .... but then a few weeks later i noticed the same drop on the normal google .co.uk results so i guessed this may have been caffine rolling out.
I guess it was more like 6-4 weeks rather then 8 weeks - sorry!

can someone share their thoughts on our situation?

a little more information ...
Remembering my home page (this is the page that has been dropped) has 3 main keywords.

I have just noticed (today) my home page is at the top of page 2 for one of my key words :) yipee ....

However something very strange ... there is NO cached version on google of my home page?
This is not a new site and has been around the top of the serps for the last 4-5 years?
so why the jump back for one keyword and NOT the other 2?
and why no cached version on google when the site has been around for 5 years?

Just my thoughts. I've had sites dropping from good first page results, to being essentially non existent. This seems to be recent and I honestly wonder if this is the new Google. That quest for fresh means you don't really hold any solid ground anymore. My opinion only. Now, I would also suggest that with Google right now, there is no use worrying where your rankings are from day to day or week to week. I will chart my yoyo's and see if that comes up with anything. I just don't sweat it anymore. I pretty much know that it's coming back, whether it's a day or a week. I see it more like a scramble first page results now. A little of this a little of that. Usually that means shifting sands.

Hi Darrens.

Have you been doing any aggressive linking lately using your main two keyword phrase?

Wayne.

@ bekyed ...

no ... infact have not actively done anything to push the serps as the results have always been good enough!

Hi Darren,

I am new also to the forum.

I have YOUR same problem.

I was ranking #1 for multiple keywords that surround my core term. Lets say Luxury Widgets thats popular so is my search term. So.....

I ranked:
#1 Big Luxury Widgets (40k searches monthly)
#1 Affordable Luxury Widgets (40k searches monthly)
#1 Expsnsive luxury Widgets (40k searches monthly)

The best one I had was

#10 Luxury Widgets (1 million searches)

About 6 weeks ago like you something happend my term Luxury Widgets dropped to about position 114 no place, then 124 and my other top #1 positions using the same term dropped to about postion 3-5.

My traffic dropped from 15,000 unique views to about 6000 unique views ( I love how big G plays games with us taking away our livelyhood in a matter of moments. Webmaster tools is pointless and finding out my robots.txt has some error is not the real problem.

I bleieve after vast research as this is my entire life at 43 to earn a living, and Big G doesnt care that the problem is not unique, I have it , you have it and a handful of others. The core term in my example Luxury Widgets is gone. It also happens to be the most searched for in my industry.

I do not see the person holding the coveted position of #1 for that term suffering at all. But all my little tail keywords are gone.

I use all white hat, nothing bad that I can think of. I use social bookmarks, normal simple things, I do not have budget for big seo company backlinks etc. I have bought links over the years my domain is about 3 years old. I do not have any idea why but coincidentally I suddenly show 9000 backlinks, i have no clue where they came from , most have anchor text, to low grade sites but I dont recall buying them and they might have been bought years ago, many have no webmaster to contact and private domains.

Its a wild goose chase trying to even figure if this is the problem, and if I can even get the links removed but I do not think that is it.

My rankings are the same on caffeine www2.sandbox but only on the current live site are they a problem with big G. I have heard that about 4-6 weeks ago via many threads, forums, etc that Big G tried to roll back their rollout of caffien and have more work to do.

But who knows, links, Big G rollout, my robots.txt has an error oh god....the thing is this I am white hat all the way competing agains very big corporations and I beat them out it was not easy, and very hard..and still I dont convert many internet browsers because they dont like buying my product online.....so my converions are low. And competing against giants, my entire day is seo whitehat all day.

Big G is not fair this time, speculating what may or may not be wrong is simply forcing many to buy ppc leads. My theory is that either caffeine rollout, the new changes of google cramming ads into their results somehow changed the algorithym or simply - there is no reason. They do not tell us what we are doing wrong. IF I had a penalty i would be shocked, if I am suffering temporarily great....but in the mean time I have a family and son to support....and Google smiles and tells us relax, sit back, it should come back.

Not nice. Bottom line. There is no ryhme or reason you know if you did something wrong and fritzing with your site map aint gonna do anyting.

[edited by: tedster at 3:00 am (utc) on Sep. 30, 2009]
[edit reason] use "widgets" [/edit]

I've also had my home page seemingly dissappear. It has been replaced by other close-to-the-top pages.

i.e. when I do a search at google for <site name>, I used to get <sitename.com>, and then a 2nd indented result, say, <sitname.com/abc.htm>.

Now, when I search for <sitename>, <sitename.com> is nowhere to be found, and the 1st result is say, <sitname.com/xyz.htm> and the 2nd indented result is <sitname.com/abc.htm>

In addition, I used to have 5 different site links at google when I searched <sitename> now those are gone.

I generally have great ranking. By coincidence, over the past 8 weeks, I have "lost" ranking 3 times (August 10, August 20, Sept 29), meaning, page 1 / position 1 positions have dropped, usually to 2nd page, position 1, or even lower.

I did notice for a short period, I had a link for my home page in this form: http://www.sitename.com:443.

I again "lost" my rankings ysterday, and am assuming I will get them back in a day or 2.

Does this my experience sound familiar to anyone? Any comments? ; )

[edited by: tedster at 3:15 pm (utc) on Sep. 30, 2009]
[edit reason] de-link the example url [/edit]

From what I understand you are able to find your site that is good....Google Sandbox, Serp issues, Caffeine roll out, backlinks, god who can guess all this.

But 2 days, if that is so you are very lucky. Frankly there is something going on with something with google algorythem or with caffeine rollout (did u check your results there the address is www2.sandbox.google.com or we all coincidentally have done something that we are obviously unaware of.

Right now, for me, www2.sandbox.google.com = www.google.com.

HOWEVER! ; )

When I search at google.ca, or even mobile google, my rankings are FINE, and they never move around.

(Yup, just checked again now: mobile - page 1 / #1; google.ca - page 1 / #1; google.com, page 2 / #1.)

P.S. Twice,I was back in 1-2 days, once it took about a week. I am out again now, so far, about 30 hours...

Add me to the woe list :(
My search engine ranking was slowly climbing from page 3 , moved to page 2 and I was predicting hitting page 1 in a weeks time. And boom! Thrown to page 100+ only for 2 main keywords, the rest did suffer a bit but not as much(those keywords are relatively low traffic). The site was started around sep 20 or so and did grow well for the intended keywords. This activity started around Oct 15th or so. So there is something common in our sites that the new algo doesnt like...Please let me know if people are interested, let us pool in info of our sites to find some common link that the new google system doesnt like..
I did make a small change to a page structure which resulted in some 20 odd 404 pages, I have applied for removal of those 404 pages from the search engine index for all by using the webmasters tool(almost all has been removed by google as well), submitted for reconsideration. Still cant figure out the problem. I havent done any blackhat stuff or any link building excercises, I had scheduled link building for the end of the month but this happened and now i am lost. The moment I make a post in my site, the page gets indexed within 30 seconds.