Ask HN: My blog has disappeared from Google for no reason, can anyone help? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My blog has disappeared from Google for no reason, can anyone help?

9 pointsStavrosK12 comments

Hello,

I recently reskinned my blog (http://www.korokithakis.net/) and moved to another CMS, getting rid of tags, categories and a few other frills.

My Python tutorial, for example (http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python/), used to be listed second or third for "learn python", now it's not even in the top 100. The URLs haven't changed and I've set up redirects for the ones that have, my robots.txt is blank, Google Webmaster Tools reports no problem but none of my pages/tutorials appear anywhere in the first few pages of Google (most of them used to be in the top three).

Does anyone have an explanation or a conjecture of what might have gone wrong? As you can imagine, going from second to nowhere is rather disconcerting :/

Thanks.

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Just a conjecture: I have noticed that some sites nearly vanished from the Google search results after a layout relaunch, even if the actual content is still there and the URLs did not change. After some time the sites were visible again - this could be weeks or even some months. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by changes of the entire site or large parts of it. Maybe there is some kind of global re-evaluation of the site going on at Google... but only some Google engineer could tell us about the details.

I would expect that your blog will soon be visible again. Maybe it helps to be a little bit more active than usual, like writing more articles, getting some attention from the web, and finding some alternative ways to get visitors to your site.

But as I wrote, this is just a conjecture. Solid explanations regarding search engines and their secret ranking algorithms are nearly impossible most of the time - too many variables are involved and the web is just so very big...

Hmm, you're right, thanks. I am planning to be more active, this is actually why I migrated the blog to new software. I'll wait some more, but it's already been a week or two. It's just odd, it's not just that the pages have dropped a few spots, they're all entirely gone.

One thing you did by getting rid of tags, categories, and possibly 'a few other frills' is you demolished a huge internal linking structure that existed on your page.

Just like every external link pointing to your site gives you 'link juice' (I hate that term, but can't think of anything better right now), each internal link on your site passes that juice around.

If you had a nav bar or widget pointing to your categories pages that then pointed to the posts in that category, that gives you tons of internal links.

Also, having a large number of internal links shows the search engines that the site is well maintained. Getting rid of the majority of your internal links could certainly have this effect in the search engines.

Ah :/ I had no idea that internal links were that useful, thank you... I'll try to add tags again...

Hi Stavro, how long has it been since you made the changes?

I've seen a couple of times similar behavior where a site disappeared from google's results for a couple of days, after some content and theme changes but everything was back to normal after that. In any case καλή τύχη.

Hey Spyro,

I made the change on the 16th, so it's been nearly two weeks now... Hopefully it will return, it was very nice to be able to say "I'm ranked just after python.org for 'learn python'" :/

Thanks for your help!

Hmm that's quite longer from my past experience, but not unheard of. What troubles me is that your pages haven't disappeared completely from Google's index, e.g. if you enter "site:korokithakis.net" there are 302 results returned.

Perhaps Google has reevaluated your ranking for these keywords, as there are a lot of PR6-7 sites but yours is a PR4 (at least according to the SEO Site Tools extension).

Your best bet is to follow infinity's advice and start blogging more frequently, while targeting specific keywords for your posts.

Ah, that's too bad then. All the tutorials used to be on the top of the results, so wouldn't they at least slip a few places down? I don't think they'd get removed completely if that were the case...

Not necessarily, for example your "Learn python in 10 minutes" post appears as a PR0 page, thus it won't outrank your competitors. Keep in mind that this could be just a temporal glitch and might get fixed automatically if/after your page is assigned a higher PR.

You mentioned that you've set up redirects from the old site to the new one, are you sure that your content doesn't appear twice, using different url's? (ks.net/node/1 and ks.net/tutorials/First) This will be penalized by Google.

Also your /tutorials url redirects back to the main domain, is this by accident?

Oh wow, that'd be why they don't appear, then. It used to be PR 5 or 6, now it's 0? All the old URLs (/node/<something>) are now redirected to the canonical ones, which is as it should be...

/tutorials/ points to / because I removed the page that was there and linked to them in the sidebar. I have no idea why Google would take the site from 6 PR to 0, wow...

There is absolutely no correlation between having a high Page Rank and outranking competitors. Go search for "hacker news" in google and you'll see that www.thehackernews.com (a PR 0 url) outranks twitter.com/hackernews (a PR 6).

The reason your site dipped out of the rankings is because when Google crawls a site and there have been significant changes to the structure (new theme, new internal linking structure, missing pages, etc), they yank you out of the index in order to reevaluate your proper position before moving forward. This can take a day, a week, a month, or half a year to recover; there is no way to predict how long it will take.

Try and replicate as much of your old site's structure as soon as possible, and just give it time.

I will do that, thank you. The old site structure was quite messy, with ugly URLs and links going back and forth to pages. I think this new scheme is much cleaner, now, as it's just a few links to pages. I'll try to add some categories or tags, though, and see how it goes.

Thanks again!

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