My site has disapeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why?

[Ron10]

my site has disappeared from the serps.  Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why?  It used to rank around 4 for the search "austin wedding venues" and it still ranks number three for this search on Bing.  I haven't done any SEO work on it in a while so i don't think i did anything to make Google mad but now it doesn't even rank anywhere in the top 160 results.  Here's the link:

http://austinweddingvenues.org

Thanks in advance Mozzers!

Ron

[CandymanKen]

Shot in the dark here, but have you checked your Google Webmaster account for any messages from Google? I know some folks whose rankings went way down and didn't know why until they checked and found the dreaded "unnatural links"  letter waiting for them.

[Unity]

Hi Ron,

The first thing to ask is when you were seeing your website ranking around 4th how did you do this? Did you use a ranking tool or your browser. The reason I ask is that when using a browser your search results can be personalized to you. So if you often go to your website then you may see it for a keyword search when really it isn't placed there. To be sure exactly where you rank use a non-personalized search or a ranking tool like the one on SEOMoz.

Second, it doesn't look like you are doing anything odd on-site (i.e. no black-hat seo tactics) so that's good. And, your backlinks are low so not sure if that would be the case but you need to have a look at Google Webmaster Tools to confirm.

Thirdly, a drop in rankings could be due to competition. If your competitors are actively optimizing their website and building quality links and you aren't then they can knock you off the rankings.

Hope that helps some.

Davinia

[Debdulal]

when did you lose the ranking .. seem like EMD is the culprit but no way to tell unless we have the exact date

[Bo-Jangles]

Good advice from these people.  Check Google Webmaster tools for any notifications.  I'm leaning towards Deb's explanation: Exact Match Domain.

You only have 17 root domains linking to you.  Try to increase that

You also only have 2 pages indexed in Google.  Have you submitted your sitemap to them?  Have you checked to make sure you aren't blocking the bots?

[Bo-Jangles]

One more suggestion.  You are not using .htaccess to either force www or force non-www.  From the way you typed your link above, it seems you don't want to use www.  Therefore, put this in your .htaccess file..

# Redirect www urls to non-www RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.austinweddingvenues\.org [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://austinweddingvenues.org/$1 [R=301,L]

Be sure to also specify this in Google Webmaster tools.  You will need to verify that you have access to both www and non-www, so do that first before adding the lines above to your .htaccess file.

[Ron10]

No, i always keep my customized search set to off. i checked my ranking by typing in "austin wedding venues" in google in internet explorer.  This isn't just a simple drop from competitors building links and knocking me down a few places.  my site has disappeared from the serps.  any clue as to why this happened?  I'm stumped....

[Ron10]

I just read up on the EMD algo change and i think that was it.  i'm going to have to build more links to get it back i think....thanks everyone for the input!

[Ron10]

I just checked and don't see any messages that are saying i have an issue.  I think this was EMD.

[Ron10]

Yes, i think it is EMD.  i'll build more thanks, thanks for the input!

[Ron10]

One more question....being as this site has very few links, would it hurt or help to add about 10 of the highest page rank directory links on the seomoz directory list before getting some natural links first?

Thanks again everyone!

[CMC-SD]

Actually, what you need to build is more content.