Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?

[hoosteeno]

I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes.

The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course).

The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index.

Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category".

• If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category.
• If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.)

What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day.

wE0Bn

[willcritchlow]

Hi hoosteeno,

It's obviously tricky to diagnose specific technical issues in the abstract, without looking at the specific site, but here are some resources and ideas that might help:

1. Rand recently talked about ranking fluctuations on whiteboard Friday - that'll be worth checking out
2. Major site redesigns can cause quite a bit of fluctuation, but you don't want to wait around to find out weeks or months later that there is a technical issue, so I would suggest working through this checklist
3. It's worth checking whether you have accidentally caused a load of new on-site duplicate content with the recent work - that's one other thing that could cause weird in / out fluctuations

Hope something there helps. Good luck!