Sudden dramatic drops in SERPs along with no snippet and no cached page?

[jamestown]

We are a very stable, time tested domain (over 15 yrs old) with thousands of stable, time tested inbound links. We are a large catalog/e commerce business and our web team has over a decade's experience with coding, seo etc. We do not engage in link exchanges, buying links etc and adhere strictly to best white hat seo practices.

Our SERPs have generally been very stable for years and years. We continually update content, leverage user generated content etc, and stay abreast of important algorithm and policy changes on Google's end.

On Wednesday Jan 18th, we noticed dramatic, disturbing changes to our SERPs. Our formerly very stable positions for thousands of core keywords dropped. In addition, there is no snippet in the SERPs and no cached page for these results.

Webmaster tools shows our sitemap most recently successfully downloaded by Google on Jan 14th. Over the weekend and monday the 16th, our cloud hosted site experienced some downtime here and there. I suspect that the sudden issues we are seeing are being caused by one of three possibilities:

1. Google came to crawl when the site was unavailable.
However, there are no messages in the account or crawl issues otherwise noted to indicate this.

2. There is a malicious link spam or other attack on our site.

3. The last week of December 2011, we went live with Schema.org rich tagging on product level pages. The testing tool validates all but the breadcrumb, which it says is not supported by Schema. Could Google be hating our Schema.org microtagging and penalizing us? I sort of doubt bc category/subcategory pages that have no such tags are among those suffering.

Whats odd is that ever since we went live with Schema.org, Google has started preferring very thin content pages like video pages and articles over our product pages. This never happened in the past.

the site is: www.jamestowndistributors.com

Any help or ideas are greatly, greatly appreciated.

Thank You

DMG

[RankSurge]

From looking at the site, there are seo best practices not being followed, but I don't think that is the reason for the drop (You have multiple H1 tags on the home page, there should be only one)

The Schema code shouldn't impact the site in any negative way as well.

Even if someone was link spamming your site, Google wouldn't count that against you, otherwise seo would only be about link bombing your competition!

If Google came to crawl the site and nothing was there, it might also have been the deep crawl, and that might account for the missing snippets.

The key here is not over-react. It sounds like you have everything in order, and might have just been a victim of bad timing.

I know it's hard to be patient, but give it a week to see if the snippets return once the fresh bot has hit your site. You might also want to send a message to Google through your Webmaster account, they are pretty responsive.

Good luck!

[jamestown]

Point taken on the multiple H1s on the home page. Good call.

Digging deeper into the matter, it appears a backup version of the site was up over the weekend and on monday. It is possible that a different robots.txt file was up.

Looking at crawl results for 1/16/2012, Google is showing some really strange things. Thousands of allowed/regularly crawled/.indexed pages are listed as 'URL restricted by robots.txt' for 1/16/2012.

We immediately made sure the latest robots.txt file (the one that should be up) had these pages as allowed, and it does, so we made sure that is the one in use. It may or may not have been over the weekend.

I resubmitted both regular and mobile sitemaps last night and both are showing with a checkbox today.

Hopefully this all sorts itself out in a few days. We certainly can't afford any meaningful long term issues with our natural search visibility.

Thank you.

Of course, I welcome additional feedback.

DMG