SEO Question
So, if there are any SEO “experts” out there willing to answer a question for me, I’m seeing some really odd Google behavior from one of my sites.
The site in question is www.childabusesurvivor.net.
The problem is this. Once upon a time my site was in the top three hits on Google for “child abuse survivor”, which would make sense, since that is actually the title and URL of the site. Here in the last few months, that has changed. My site doesn’t appear at all for that search. (It is still number 2 on Yahoo and Bing). That made me think that perhaps I was doing something that was hurting my Google rank, so I started to look more into it. First, I checked to see if the site was listed in Google at all. Searching for “site:childabusesurvivor.net” on Google shows me the site, so I know Google sees it. I can look at Webmaster tools and see where it’s getting some clicks and appearances in search, but none of those appear to be the home page. They are searches for various terms that point directly to a single post. There aren’t any search result appearances for the front page.
So it’s being indexed, but Google has apparently decided to push the home page of the site aside in the search results.
In fact, if I go to Google and search for the URL, “childabusesurvivor.net”, that site doesn’t appear in the results.
I’ve checked for messages on my Google Webmaster account, to see if it had been flagged as a hacked site, or removed from Google’s index for some reason, nothing. There’s no indication that it can’t access the site, it is using the sitemap I generated from that site, crawling pages successfully and even displaying specific posts in search results for the keywords used in those posts, and everything appears to be normal. (Although the content keywords seem to be somewhat skewed, child, abuse and survivor seem to be a bit low, but they are below words like December, and November, which would also appear quite often on the site, with the archive list being on the page as well, so nothing really suspicious) But if you just want to find the home page of my site, using a typical search, it’s not there.
Has anyone ever had a site that you couldn’t even find using the URL in Google, but could with other search engines? Any idea what Google has done, or why? More importantly, how do I get it fixed?
It’s possible that Google has de-valued or penalized your site. Whether rightly or wrongly, automated layers to their algorithm (like the Panda updated) may have decided that CAS.net isn’t “high-quality” content. You can read more about it from Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-panda-update
Thanks Ethan, I’ll check it out. Though it seems from what I’ve read elsewhere if Google were doing that, the whole site would be impacted, and there would be some sort of notification in Webmaster tools, so I don’t really know!