Sitelink Disappeared from SERPs

[Aviatech]

Hi everyone,

Something weird has happened to one of our client's site.

First of all I want to explain that the client's name is something like a Person Name plus another generic keyword, for example Truxy Lawyers.

Before when you searched for the brand keyword (in my example Truxy), Google would show in the SERPs the client's site as first result with six sitelinks below.

Now when searching for the same branded keyword (for example Truxy), Google doesn't show the sitelink anymore, but the first result is the home page and the second and third results are subdomain pages. Does anybody know why Google all of the sudden decided to stop showing the site link?

Things get more weird when you search the complete brand name "Truxy Lawers" for example, because in this case Google shows the site link.

Does anybody know what has caused this?

Thank you!

[Catalyste]

Hi,

There is several possible reasons for that to happen, I'm actually thinking of 4 possibilities :

1- Maybe Google did a rollback in the past due to Algo updates or the SOPA protest. In which case, it should be back within a few days to 1-2 weeks.

2- A Penalty on domain level. Did you see a huge drop in traffic in Analytics ?

3- Google decided it wasn't creating any value so he remove all the link at once, which would be weird all at once.

4- Change in the URL structures on the site which you probably would be aware.

Did you have those sitelinks for a long time ?

Sometimes these types of changes are from Google testing and implementing of new stuff. Google seems to be doing a lot this month with the Google Plus your World they put in place on January 10th, they did also played with Crawler Bots speed for the SOPA Blackout this week, I would on first tought without seeing anything, tell they probably Roll Back a bit, so this should fix itself alone.

By the way SOPA is evil !

[Aviatech]

Thank you Cypra for your answer.

What is a rollback exactly?

I don't think the domain has been penalized because Google displays the sitelinks for if you search "Truxy lawyers" and I also looked at GA traffic and it's stable.

The site links have been there since Google introduced the new way of displaying the SERPs.

[Catalyste]

What I call a RollBack is when Google goes back in the Past in terms of ranking. It happens sometimes when they run a new Algorithm or changes. They show older results in some datacenters while updated in others.