

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

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

~~~
StavrosK
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.

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calebhicks
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.

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

------
spyrosk
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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!

~~~
spyrosk
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.

~~~
StavrosK
Ah, that's too bad then. All the tutorials used to be on the top of the
results, so wouldn't they at least slip a few places down? I don't think
they'd get removed completely if that were the case...

~~~
spyrosk
Not necessarily, for example your "Learn python in 10 minutes" post appears as
a PR0 page, thus it won't outrank your competitors. Keep in mind that this
could be just a temporal glitch and might get fixed automatically if/after
your page is assigned a higher PR.

You mentioned that you've set up redirects from the old site to the new one,
are you sure that your content doesn't appear twice, using different url's?
(ks.net/node/1 and ks.net/tutorials/First) This will be penalized by Google.

Also your /tutorials url redirects back to the main domain, is this by
accident?

~~~
ddemchuk
There is absolutely no correlation between having a high Page Rank and
outranking competitors. Go search for "hacker news" in google and you'll see
that www.thehackernews.com (a PR 0 url) outranks twitter.com/hackernews (a PR
6).

The reason your site dipped out of the rankings is because when Google crawls
a site and there have been significant changes to the structure (new theme,
new internal linking structure, missing pages, etc), they yank you out of the
index in order to reevaluate your proper position before moving forward. This
can take a day, a week, a month, or half a year to recover; there is no way to
predict how long it will take.

Try and replicate as much of your old site's structure as soon as possible,
and just give it time.

~~~
StavrosK
I will do that, thank you. The old site structure was quite messy, with ugly
URLs and links going back and forth to pages. I think this new scheme is much
cleaner, now, as it's just a few links to pages. I'll try to add some
categories or tags, though, and see how it goes.

Thanks again!

