Single, high ranking pank disappears from Google?

[friendlymachine]

Hi all,

The question I have concerns a high ranking page on my site that has disappeared from Google. It was in the top 5 for the target keyword and it currently ranks 3 on Bing.

I recently migrated my domain (one month ago), but it seems to have gone very well. No other pages have taken a hit like this. The 301 redirect is in place and working well. I've used the Moz Tools to see if anything is weird, but it all looks fine.

Oh, and yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools - no messages and other related pages on my site are ranking on the second and third pages for the terms. Also, the site is consulting services - nothing dodgy.

Any ideas? Why just this one page? What are my options?

Thanks for any advice you may have.

John

[GCSMasone]

Did you greatly change the page's content, headers, titles etc . when you made the switch to the new domain? Did you keep a lot of the same internal linking as well? All of these are things that I would check into for the page.  Also, make sure that the page is craw-able by a Google bot. These would all be first things that I would look at.

[RebekahMay]

^ This

Also make sure that your canonical tags (if you had any) aren't pointing to your old URL.  Common issue if transferring over all content.

[friendlymachine]

Everything is exactly the same. I was very careful and since it took the hit, I've triple checked. It's the same. Very curious.

[GCSMasone]

The next thing I would do is check the backlinks to the page in Google Webmaster tools, Opensite explorer and Bing Tools. Are they of low quality? Lots of spam? Do you only have anchor links pointing to the website?  I suspect that one of these are the case if everything else is well.

[friendlymachine]

They're good. I'm wondering if Google has a penalty in place, but can find no evidence of it. But other pages with similar content are ranking. It's good content, in fact one of my most popular pages. Weird.

[friendlymachine]

I checked this. This page is a popular tutorial on a technical topic that was kicking ass in the rankings and has utterly disappeared. I did the backlinks check and honestly, Opensite Explorer is not very useful most of the time. Outdated and very incomplete. I checked GWT and Bing Webmaster Tools for backlinks and it came up with with relevant links I was really happy to have. Hundreds of good ones, nothing obviously spammy. I'm at a loss with this...very difficult to understand and hurting my site a lot.

[TinaGammon]

I think it will reappear in a few days anytime I have made changes like that Google will usually remove it for a few days and then re-list it. It is weird just that one page took a hit though.

[friendlymachine]

I hope you're right...it's been about a week. Thanks for the encouragement!

[friendlymachine]

Ultimately, what I had to to was go into GWT and request that the URL in question be added to the index. It reappeared today, three days after my request and three weeks after disappearing.

[TinaGammon]

Thanks for the update! I am glad it worked out for you.