There are many reasons why a site could suddenly drop in ranking in Google’s index. In the most cases, these changes are due to natural causes - most commonly because the value of the inbound links has dropped, leaving the site without enough value to merit the old indexing and ranking. Sometimes, however, there’s more to it than just that.

This list is a community effort - feel free to add to it in the comments. We’ll move items up into the list as required. Links will be provided to debugging tools and to reference (official or just wild guesses). This list should contain only items that have been known to trigger indexing/ranking issues - the rest is in The unofficial crawling, ranking, indexing speculation post and The confirmed non-issues with websites. Read the rest of this entry »

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Just as there are issues with websites that are known to cause problems (and things that are still unconfirmed), there are also issues that are known to be completely irrelevant. This list is for those items. Feedback via commenting is desired.

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The first step is always speculation, from reading between the lines in forum or blog postings or even in patent applications. What do you see as possible, unconfirmed reasons for problems with crawling, ranking and indexing on Google? Post your ideas in the comments, we’ll move them into the posting as necessary. As we can confirm or deny the items, we’ll move them appropriately to the The unofficial “why did my site tank in Google?” checklist or The confirmed non-issues with websites.

As items become more detailed, they may receive a separate posting.

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The Google Webmaster Tools console can display the known links pointing to your site. In many cases, there will be countless links from “bad” sites like “scrapers” or web-spammers. Can these harm my ranking? Since I have noticed them in my webmaster tools console, my rankings have dropped. What can I do to have those links removed?

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Getting your site hacked is no longer just for the important or high-traffic sites. Whole servers are hacked at once, hacking 1000’s of sites within minutes. Testing 10 consecutive servers of a single hoster, I found one in three to one in four sites were hacked (well over 1000 hacked sites were spotted within minutes). Your site itself does not have to be vulnerable - it’s enough to hack the server.

When Google notices that your site is hacked and when the hacker is using it to trick the user into installing malware, Google will block your site in the search results and include a link to more information.

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It has been suggested many places that all someone (a competitor) needs to do is submit several spam reports on your site and you will be deindexed by Google.

While it seems unlikely that it would be just this easy to harm someone Else’s site, we look to Adam Lasnik as the ulitmate authority on the subject, and the answer is NO.

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Often Web sites disappear from the first SERPs all of a sudden. That can happen to established sites doing well with particular keywords over years. Most webmasters look for recent changes to track down the issues Google might have with the site in question. Hold on for a moment. Think. Recent changes, for example adding an XML sitemap or other minor improvements, are just one possible cause of many. There is no such thing as a concurrently correlation when it comes to downrankings, penalties or even bans. Google might have spotted an issue from the stone age. If you lose a reasonable amount of Google traffic, look at the whole site and its environment, do not concentrate your research on recent changes.

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On 11/29/06 Adam Lasnik confirmed that Reinclussion requests are not just for totally banned sites where he stated:

It’s a trust thing. We don’t accept completely anonymous reinclusion requests; everyone who submits a request does so now through our Webmaster Tools (when they’re logged in). Basically, there’s no harm in filling one out if you feel your site’s presence or ranking in Google has been adjusted due to guideline violations… but, obviously, we probably wouldn’t be terribly amused or apt-to-reinclude if we received such requests with annoying frequency (e.g., daily requests for 174 of your different sites). Common sense applies, and — thankfully — has reigned surpreme in the area of reinclusion requests so far

To file a reinclusion request you will need to log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and open the Tools box by clicking the “+”. You will see a link for submit a reinclusion request open up.

Additional Resource:  Googles Official Blog on Red and Yellow cards (penalties and bans)

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