My page has fallen off the face of the earth on Google. What happened?

Tormz

I have checked all of the usual things. My page has not lost any links or authority. It is not black listed or any other obvious sign. What's going on?

This has just happened within the past 3 days.

EGOL

Do you rank for your company name ?

Are you gettting SOME traffic or ZERO traffic from Google.

Tormz

Yes we are #1 for our company name.

Zero traffic from Google in the past 4 days. Well, I have gotten maybe 10 from keywords that include my company name.

I was #1-3 on about 120 keywords. Each one of them have dropped to below 100+ as of Sunday.

EGOL

OK... so you are not banned or whacked for malware.

Nobody will be able to diagnose this without a lot of guessing unless you provide a lot of information about your level of content duplication, link sources, are you being scraped, link destinations and more.

So, if you want to get deeper analysis the best thing to do would be to hire someone or post your URL so that people can look at the site. Still you will get mostly guesses as this type of problem is difficult to diagnose and requires more time than Q&A posters are able/willing to spend.

Tormz

I am new here so I will give it a shot.

My URL is www.akinsplumbing.net

Any other questions please let me know!

EGOL

"Nobody will be able to diagnose this without a lot of guessing unless you provide a lot of information about your level of content duplication, link sources, are you being scraped, link destinations and more."

What keywords you used to rank for and what recent work has been done on the site are also very important.

Tormz

No work has been done on the site in a while. Here is a list of keywords that I ranked #1-3 on each one. There are 2 or 3 that I am in the 60-90 range now. The rest are 100+. Also important to note that I have different pages for each City listed. So there are about 35ish pages that dropped completely.

alpharetta plumber
alpharetta septic tank
athens plumber
athens septic tank
atlanta plumber
atlanta septic tank
auburn plumber
auburn septic tank
bethlehem plumber
bethlehem septic tank
bogart plumber
bogart septic tank
braselton plumber
braselton septic tank
buford plumber
buford septic tank
centerville plumber
centerville septic tank
commerce plumber
commerce septic tank
dacula plumber
dacula septic tank
dunwoody plumber
dunwoody septic tank
flower branch plumber
flowery branch septic tank
gainesville plumber
gainesville septic tank
grayson plumber
grayson septic tank
homer plumber
homer septic tank
hoschton plumber
hoschton septic tank
jefferson plumber
jefferson septic tank
johns creek plumber
johns creek septic tank
lawrenceville plumber
lawrenceville septic tank
leak detection
loganville plumber
loganville septic tank
maysville plumber
maysville septic tank
monroe plumber
monroe septic tank
norcross plumber
norcross septic tank
oakwood plumber
oakwood septic tank
pendergrass plumber
pendergrass septic tank
plumber service
plumbing service
plumbing services
roswell plumber
roswell septic tank
sandy springs plumber
sandy springs septic tank
septic tank
septic tank cleaning
septic tank pumping
septic tank repair
snellville plumber
snellville septic tank
statham plumber
statham septic tank
stone mountain plumber
stone mountain septic tank
sugar hill plumber
sugar hill septic tank
suwanee plumber
suwanee septic tank
tucker plumber
tucker septic tank
winder plumber
winder septic tank

Thanks for looking!

EGOL

You have a lot of cookie cutter content..... the major content on the pages below is identical except that the city name is switched out.

http://www.akinsplumbing.net/plumber-service/alpharetta.html

http://www.akinsplumbing.net/plumber-service/braselton.html

Pages like these have failed in the google search engine since about 2004.

They get indexed, get ranked and then google drops all of them on your site except one or two.

If you want to compete for all of these cities you will need to invest in unique, original, substantive content for each city. Hopefully if you do that your site will recover but it might take a long time to get back.

Many people call these "doorway pages".

A quote from Google Webmaster Guidelines.... "Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content."

Tormz

Roger. What about the home page? I have that SEO'd for various keywords (was #3 on 'Plumbing Service' and no not shown).

EGOL

Your entire site is probably considered to be "cookie cutter".

PaulKMia

Hi there Ricky!

Check out the source code on your site. You're declaring your tag two times (two opening tags, one close tag), and the tag and other content are in a weird places because of it. The browser renders it okay, but from a code perspective (which I suspect is a bot's perspective), it's like a person with two heads. : ) Is Google's bot reading it right? Note that I just looked at your home page, your services page, and a few others... Hope this helps! - P

activitysuper

Could you not use the 'canonical tag' and link it back to a page which gets the largest volume of traffic?

Ref:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

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