1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page

[GMD1]

1 of the sites i work on  (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before

[RyanKent]

Hi David.

I took a look at your site and was unable to locate any reason as to why your home page would be penalized.

When you say you "apply for a review", you filed a Reconsideration Request? If so, what exactly is Google's response?

To confirm a page is de-indexed, you can do a site:www.eva-alexander.com search in Google. Is that how you determined the site was de-indexed? I am wondering if your ranking bounced and you simply did not find it where you expected to see it in search results.

A few other things I noticed while looking at your site.

• you have a huge meta keywords tag. It has no value in SEO and I would suggest removing it.

• your meta description is very long and most of it will never be seen. I would suggest shortening it significantly. Do a Google search and take a look at home much room you have to work with in a search result.

• your home page title tag targets 5 phrases plus your brand name. Your efforts become diluted. I would suggest simply targeting your brand name and possibly one phrase.

[GMD1]

i request a reconsideration and then it pops back onto google with its original rankings.. but im not sure why its being dropped in the first place and google aren't giving any feedback?

[RyanKent]

Have you checked Webmaster Tools for a reply? Normally you will at least receive a "there is no manual penalty in place" type of reply.

[GMD1]

ye i got this

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.eva-alexander.com/,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.eva-alexander.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.

Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.

If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.

If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

but doesnt answer the issue of why it has dropped off twice now?

[gfiorelli1]

Seeing your home page I notice how there is a big bunch of text under what is the real footer of the site design.

That text has been clearly added to try to better the on page optimization and, even though it is visible to the user (but with a very little font), when you read it seems written as having the robots in mind more than the users... in fact the repetition of "maternity" in every possible variation is at the limit of the keyword stuffing. That could explain why it gets de-indexed automatically (it does not seems a manual penalization)

What I suggest you is to optimize the home page for your main KW and not trying to have it ranking for all the KWs possibile.

For instance, choose "maternity wear" and try to have it in the most important "places":

1. title html (as first words)
2. h1 (that means as the alt text of the logo, that is now Eva Alexander)
3. using it in the "essential" "the view" and "twilight beauty" text

Deleting that bunch of text below the fold.

About on page optimization, I suggest you to read this evergreen by Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization and to wisely use the suggestions the on page optimization section of the SEOmoz Campaign you surely have for this site can give you.

Finally I will start trying to plan a better link building campaign, as the quality of the links actually pointing to the site (and the home page) is quite low. I see you have a blog: start using it in order to create a voice about "maternity" and "maternity issues" (not just fashion)... for instance about Pre-Maman way of life and therefore use it in order to start outreach actions.

[RyanKent]

That response indicates there is no manual action being taken by Google. That means your site is receiving an algorithmic penalty. Your site's re-appearance had nothing to do with your reconsideration request being filed.

I think Gianluca shares a good assessment as to why your site may have issues. Try to present your page for users, not search engines. Someone has clearly spent a lot of time stuffing the title, meta tags and page with a lot of unappealing content which appears to exist to manipulate search engine rankings. Try following Gianluca's advice and your rankings should stabilize.