Page drops from index completely

[russell_ms]

We have a page that is ranking organically at #1 but over the past couple of months the page has twice dropped from a search term entirely. There don't appear to be any issues with the page in Search Console and adding the page on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url seems to fix the issue.

The search term we're tracking that drops is in the URL for the page and is the h1 of the page.

Here is a screenshot of the ranking over the past few months: https://jmp.sh/akvaKGF

What could cause this to happen? There is nothing in search console that shows any problems with the page. The last time this happened the page completely dropped on all search terms and showed up again after submitting the url to google manually. This time it dropped on just one search term and reappeared the next day after manually submitting the page again.

akvaKGF

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Russell

I would have to see the URL but it looks like a duplicate content problem. Have you recently written a blog post with a very similar title?

Is Google respecting your canonicals?
Is the page in your sitemap?
Is it over optimised? too much repetition of teh main keyword?
Has someone stolen all of the content creating cross-site duplication?

There isn't a lot to go on but I agree it's very unusual!

Regards Nigel

[russell_ms]

Thanks, Nigel. Your responses are actually quite helpful pointers. There's a possibility that Google is flagging it as duplicate content as perhaps the content on this page is a bit sparse. We have two posts - first post is a "What is this type of document you need" and the second post which is a link to a template for that doc. The template one is the one that has dropped twice. Here is the search we're dropping from occasionally. Interestingly enough, Google is indexing the public Google Doc our page points to and including that in search results.

Excuse the bitly links, just trying to avoid the search terms showing up for others to find.

To answer your questions directly:

• Google seems to be respecting canonicals
• Page is in sitemap
• Perhaps too much repetition? Maybe we should expand the content a bit
• This may well have happened as we have seen a few sites "republish" some of our content.

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

I had a simlar issue on a couple Wordpress freebie sub domains I made while conducting reputation management for clients. What had ended up happening was The site would index immediately and then 24 hours later be ghosted completely.

Turns out I was submitting the news sitemap that it automatically generated and being that I wasn't in their list of approved news sitemaps, I guess it just ripped everything out, as I'm sure the news sitemap and the regular one had the same pages listed just with more detail on the news one.

I doubt it's the exact same occurrence but if you recently submitted a sitemap, I'd check it closely, as it has been known to trigger a similar problem, at least for me!