Can a google data refresh knock your pages out of the rankings?

[franchisesolutions]

I see that around mid November 2013 a handful of my sites pages dropped off of Google completely. It was around the data refreshes in November, and while everyone says it doesn't effect that much I was wondering if anyone knew if it could knock some of my pages out of the rankings for a specific keyword.

Note - we had previously held muliple listings for different pages on our site for this particular keyword. Google kept the highest ranking and knocked the lower ones off. See attached image of our keyword ranking history to see what I mean.

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[Cyrus-Shepard]

"Data Refresh" could refer to a few things. Google updates it's data centers constantly. Or you may be referring to an algorithmic data refresh as it applies to Penguin or Panda.

Oct-Nov of 2012 saw many Google updates, and it's very possible your site was effected by one of these.

Do you have access to Google Analytics for the account? If you know the exact dates that you saw a traffic loss, you can match these up with the known dates of the algorythm changes.

In addition to SEOmoz's Google Algo Change History, there are a couple of tools you can use if you have access to Google analytics. Both are free:

1. Panguin Tool
2. Sistrix Google Update Tool

(the sistrix link isn't working for me right now, but I'm hoping it comes back online)

Once you know why your rankings/traffic dropped, you'll be better equipped to address the issues.

-cyrus