It is pretty common and ask a lot “why has my site disappeared from google serch results?” the answer is I don’t Know but if I did I’d be cleverer than everyone else out there! The reason for me even writing about this now is that a site of mine called cops and robbers has just vanished and it’s doing my head in.

There is nothing worse for a webmaster than to check their stats and see low or zero visitors, checking the terms you ranked for in the serps shows you have vanished completely, quick as a flash you think you have either been hacked or has google penalized your site?

The answer could be neither of those two and depending on a number of factors there could be a reasonable explanation for it, this has happened to me a few times now and to be honest I’m still none the wiser despite doing as much research as possible, finding a definitive answer is impossible.

Lets take a look at why it could have happened:

Have you had a google penalty?

The best way to answer this is to ask yourself have you done anything wrong? Have you been buying links or spamming everywhere with your url for example, you need to go to google webmaster central and see if your breaking any of the golden rules before you do anything else.

There you will see hundreds if not thousands of others asking for support in the form with the exact same issues as yourself, I’ve even posted there before and while i did get some help some of the top contributors seem to have a bit of an attitude problem imo.

The fact is if you have done nothing untoward then a penalty is highly unlikely, google is pretty clever and doesn’t seem to impose penalties very often even to those who are on the borderline of black hat.

Why is my site not ranking then?

As i said already I DON’T KNOW – I do however have some theories of my own which I can share.

The Age of Your Site – This appears to be a big factor in serps results, new sites often rank highly for their terms as if google is testing them to see if they get natural links, this to me seems to last anywhere from 3 to 8 Months then suddenly you’re gone!

You won’t be gone forever and sometimes you may have just moved to page 30 of the results, the honeymoon period is over and it’s time to put more work in to your site, add content that’s truly great and build links in a white hat way and you should see it reappear.

Your Inbound Links – I’ve also found that if you have built links too quickly you can vanish from the serps, I suppose it could be seen as bad if your site especially if it’s new gets tons of links from strange places.

A major factor and again this is my opinion is that linking to yourself from your other sites on the same hosting can have a negative effect, I don’t know why this is or if it’s at all true but it seems like it to me! If you have a lot of sites all linking together it can look odd I suppose, my argument would be that if there on topic or related in some way then why not link to one another?

My advice here would be to remove links you have from your own sites and see what happens, remember though it doesn’t happen overnight so be patient.

Have you been hacked? – This happened to me and i didn’t even see it at first, go to google webmaster tools and fetch your site as google bot, have a look and see if anything looks odd. My own site had hundreds of links hidden to sex sites and that’s what caused it to disappear. Somehow they added code to the htaccess file and that’s what added the bad links.

I removed the links and requested a resubmission and within a few days it was back in the serps.

Don’t give up!

Most important is not to give up, keep adding high quality, unique and compelling content to your site. This will not only show google your site is serious but also add value for visitors, at the end of the day google is supposed to give searchers the best results based on what they are looking for, if you have an exact match name that may or may not help but content is where the battle is won or lost.

Best Resources:

Without a shadow of doubt the best information about the subject is a forum discussion where JohnMu and RedCardinal gave free advice and help to a struggling webmaster who was very frustrated. You can see the thread here and make sure to read it all as it is pure gold.