My site was number 1 for competetive keyword on Google now completely gone- what should I do?

[Adam.Whittles]

You can do a 'site:yoururl' search in Google to see if your pages are still indexed. If you feel you may have received a penalty then a full site audit wil be necessary.

[RyanKent]

Google makes around 50 changes to their algorithm each month. Any one of the changes could have negatively impacted your site. Most commonly, one of the bigger changes such as Panda or Penguin is involved, but that is not always the case.

The site search mentioned by Crimson will indicate whether or not you have been removed from Google's index, but that is rarely the case.

Diagnosing penalties can be quite complex. If you can take a look at your Google Analytics and determine the exact date your traffic dropped on the given keyword, that information could be helpful.

[TBKO]

Just yesterday.

It was #1 for a long time prior now it s not in the first 6 pages.  It is still indexed via site:URL but it not where it has been for a many months even years

[irvingw]

Perhaps your link building company got a lot of spammy links with that exact anchor test and now Google is responding in kind. Find these links and try to get rid of them or work on getting quality links to counteract the spammy links.

[GrouchyKids]

Don't be too quick to think the worst.

Recently one of my clients changed their geo settings they ranked but not in the UK.

Send me the URL and the target keyword and I will take a quick look.

Justin

[RyanKent]

There are many possibilities. The best best would be having a SEO consultant experienced with diagnosing penalties take a look at your site. If you wish to try and resolve the issue here are the first steps:

• Are there any other keywords affected?

• Have their been any changes made to the page which was the target URL for that keyword? Have their been any other changes made on your site related to that keyword? For example, adding a new article or page using that keyword?

• What changes have been made on your site in the past 60 days? Include any coding changes, hosting changes, Google Analytics or WMT changes, etc.

• Have you, or anyone on your behalf (employee, SEO consultant, web developer, etc) violated any of Google's Guidelines? Built manipulative links, hide keywords using CSS tricks, etc.

[TBKO]

Wow thanks for the great responses - it is really appreciated

I think I may see something that may affected this.  When I do back link check there are NONE.  I just purchased and moved this site to my hosting about 2 weeks ago.

I am waiting for our webmaster to start working (he is in Vietnam) tio make sure the site was copied over exactly.

Can anyone recommmend

a.  a software or method to determine if a site has been copied exactly as it was at the former hosting

b. the most reliable back link check service

THANKS AGAIN!

[TBKO]

Wow thanks for the great responses - it is really appreciated

I think I may see something that may affected this.  When I do back link check there are NONE.  I just purchased and moved this site to my hosting about 2 weeks ago.

I am thinking the backlink pages that had been put there by the former owner were not moved over properly by my web guy.

I am waiting for our webmaster to start working (he is in Vietnam) tio make sure the site was copied over exactly.

can you recommend

a.  a software or method to determine if a site has been copied exactly as it was at the former hosting

b. the most reliable back link check service

THANKS AGAIN!

[RyanKent]

There are many variables with comparing your old site to the new one. Ideally you simply leave the old site up and can compare it both visually and by crawling it with the new one, assuming this was a simple change of hosts.

Regarding checking links, there are many services and none of them are comprehensive. They all work by various methods of crawling the web which is tens of millions of websites with trillions of pages. If you want the most comprehensive report you can combine the following tools:

Google, Bing, OSE, Raven, Majestic and AHREFs. Each of these tools will miss some links captured by the other tools. It's the nature of trying to collect data on such a large data source that is in a constant state of change.

[TBKO]

xx