Holiday hijack lowers Google ranking

[Event36030]

A client of ours made a mistake that has dropped their Google rankings. They posted a holiday greeting on our homepage for several weeks, and now the search engines are not picking the page up at all. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to repair this?

[GCSMasone]

What was the greeting? Did the just add the holiday greeting or did the add the greeting and delete other content?

[EGOL]

Please explain "hijack".

I doubt that a holiday greeting in place for several weeks will cause a problem with rankings - unless that greeting deoptimized the page.

[Event36030]

They replaced their standard home page with a flash holiday greeting.

[EGOL]

Was that done by client or real hijackers?

[Event36030]

Client

[TechMama]

As long as you replace the flash with substantive relevant content and link to the homepage from other internal pages or outside sources, there is no reason the page should not be re-ranked (based on the new content, overall authority of the site through other content and backlinking, etc.)

It was not likely that this was a penalty, just a drop in any searchable ranking as a response to a lack of content on the page and therefore, there was nothing in which to rank the page for any particular keyword or authority by Google.