Odd pattern after site got deindexed and reindexed again

[bukhlawfirm]

I had a very interesting experience with one of my sites happening for the last 4 months.

The site is for a professional service in a highly competitive market (NYC). There was an algo penalty several years ago that was recovered through new content and lots of quality links (mostly, media).

We were #3-15 for the main money keywords before we changed the site into Genesis. We tested the site on a shadow server where we put the no-index attribute in robots.txt. However, when the site was migrated back to a live hosting, we accidentally forgot to remove it, so the site got de-indexed by mistake.

The error was detected nd corrected about 5 days later, however the site did not appear in search for the next few weeks. After that, the site jumped bounced back. BUT, it had #1-5 positions instead on all money keywords. This lasted for 5-7 days, when the site bounced back to #3-15 positions again.

We've been putting a lot of investment and effort since that but the site never got back to #1-5.

Any idea on why this can happen? We have better links than competitors. The professional is a nationally recognized media person. There might be some older toxic links that give a little bit of penalty?

Thanks in advance!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Arkady

This sounds like just normal fluctuations in the SERPs. You can use Mozcast too to watch how volatile search results are.

A couple of things I would look into:

• Local SEO (Moz)
• How to Do a Content Audit (Moz)
• Guide for Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz - you mentioned checking backlinks, just a good habit to get into)

If your rankings are all back to normal then that's great! I would just use the above as value add to the site and your ongoing maintenance and see if you can catch some easy wins. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any question - good luck!

[bukhlawfirm]

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for getting in. I beleive I see the SERP fluctuations on a daily basis, but that exact thing was surely off the loop. Possibly, Google took into consideration some penalizing factor that it hadn't  measured in right after the site was re-indexed. That's why I thought of some toxic links that were re-assessed.