Help!!! My site is gone from Google!!!!

Not my site but I spend quite a bit of time at the Google Webmaster Groups and I see this topic come up all the time. The typical premise is someone has a site that was doing fairly well in Google for a while and suddenly it is nowhere to be found.

Many webmasters are under the misconception that once they achieve quality SERP rankings they will stay there. Of course, this is not the case. There can be many reasons why this happens including a penalization and outright ban, increased competition, or loss of link love from their backlinks.

This discussion focuses on the loss of link love because it is something many webmasters overlook. A lot of Webmaster make the false assumption that Google's backlinks analysis is fairly static and that every link is a good link and will always remain a good link. This is simply not true. When Wikipedia went no-follow to all external links there was an influx of webmasters that came to the group because they were losing rankings. A quick review showed that they were getting a lot of link juice from Wikipedia and since they went no-follow that link juice dried up. Since many sites are beginning to no-follow their links this is becoming a bigger issue. Besides no-follow issues there are other ways that link juice can dry up and cause your site to start losing positions. These include (but are not limited to):

• Backlinks being removed from sites.
• Sites that had a good status being penalized or de-indexed, which are no longer passing any value.
• Algorithm updates at Google that have more stringent linking standards. One such example is the ability to find too many reciprocal links in a link profile.

If you see your site start dropping in Google it is a good idea to look at your backlinks and determine if any of these factors are present (after you verify that you are not penalized or banned). Losing 1 or 2 high quality links can have a huge affect on your rankings. Building and maintaining links is a huge part of any SEO efforts and it should be an ongoing process.

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