So you finally take action. You do your research, purchase your domain, buy your hosting and get your site up. You are feeling great.
A couple days down the road you decide to do a search in Google for one of your long tail keywords. First page! What a great feeling.
Two days later you repeat the search to see if you have moved up any. Hmm…that’s interesting nothing to be found on page one. So you check page two. Nothing. Three and four the same thing. Your site disappeared from Google and immediately you wonder why and if it will ever return.
Don’t worry if your site disappears from Google, you are not alone. Your site has not dropped off of Google’s radar.
This search engine phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “everflux”.
Let me try to clear it up.
In order to discover websites on the web Google sends out “spiders”. These spiders crawl the web looking for content. Once the spiders crawl over the content they update King Google aka the main Google database.
King Google
There is a ton of data about each site stored in this main database such as links to the site, the type of sites linking to it, the last update, etc. All of this info plays an important role in what position your site will rank in Google’s eyes.
There is also another group of spiders. They have acquired a different taste and only like fresh content.
When they come across a page that hasn’t been updated in a while, they just move on.
“Let’s go, nothing to see here folks.”
However, when they find some fresh content, they eat it up! They don’t report it back to the King, but instead they report it to Prince Google.
When a search is done, The King and the Prince get together and compare notes. Their results are posted and contain new content from the Prince along with older content from the King.
In order to make sure some of the newer stuff is seen, the content the Prince knows about is scattered in towards the top of the results. This is the reason your new site might show up towards the top soon after you put it up.
The problem is, as soon as the spiders tell the Prince about newer content than yours, you become old content. The Prince needs room in his database so he moves you off his list and onto the waiting list for the King’s spiders.
This is why your site may appear towards the top for a short time and then disappear.
Although it looks like your website disappeared from Google, have no fear! The King promises to get around to your site soon and once he does you will be entered in the main database and begin to appear higher up in searches once again.
My advice to you is don’t sit around waiting for the King and the Prince to do their work. Build backlinks to your site and continue to optimize your site for the search engines.
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{ 40 comments… read them below or add one }
Super article! When my sites disappear off google, I keep wondering “what have I done now?”
The remedy of creating more backlinks and building up the seo makes perfect sense.
Thanks for explaining it in plain English
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No problem Yvonne! Create quality content, tighten up your seo and keep working on your backlinks. Everything else will begin to fall into place sooner than you think.
Backlink building is an essential part of SEO, but people resort to paid backlinks and such other in the quest to gain significance with search engines like Google, only to find that they have been thrown out of the search engines.
The easiest and long term way of creating backlinks is what you have explained clearly. Create good content and backlinks will automatically be created.
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Thanks for the comment! Good content will always give you your best chance for success in the long run.
Eric,
Great article. I remember the first time I took action built a site, promoted it and got it listed on the 1st page of google. Boom! Just like you described it was gone! Very useful article for people that want to know why this happens.
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Thanks Michael. I hear this question a lot so I wanted to try and help clear it up in an easy to understand way. Hopefully, I did.
Eric, I enjoy reading this post. I like the way you explained about Google spider as King and Queen ’s spiders. Btw, I think strong backlinks is the way that you could get higher ranking. Also, quality content takes the big portion too.
Regards,
Lee
Make Money Online´s last blog ..Make Money Online With Affiliate Program Network
Lee, I’m glad you liked the post!
My goal is to try and make it so even beginning Internet Marketers can understand some of the more difficult concepts I talk about.
Hi, gr8 post thanks for posting. Information is useful!
Thanks Katty, glad you found it useful.
yeh my site listed number 2 in google for “” then boom all is gone, it really scared me, and still is its been a good few days now. But my homepage will never be edited so how do i convince the spiders that it is still good
First off John, sorry I had to edit your site and keywords out. I have nothing against your site just would rather keep the more mature links off of this particular site. Hope you understand.
What I would do if I were you John is to continue working on “offsite” SEO. Create relevant backlinks to your site by commenting in forums, answering questions on Yahoo and writing articles that link back to your site in the resource box. I would also contact some other site owners in your niche and see if any would allow you to post a link back to your site. You’d be surprised how many say yes. Start your email with a compliment of their site then transition in to a polite request for them to link to you. Good luck!
Thanks for the info.
I don’t know if it is the same problem I got. I am sharing my blog articles on facebook, twitter, digg and yahoo buzz at the same time. For 1-2 days I can still see my articles when I search it on Google.
The problem is that after a few days some of my articles (those with a lot of readers) suddenly disappear!
I am not sure if it is due to multiple sharing I have done. Do you think Google would interpret it as spamming?
Thanks again.
How long has it been since you submitted/published your articles? If it was recent, then I would definitely say it is the “Google Dance” and you should see them reappearing soon.
From my personal experience the “duplicate content” issue is something that is over hyped by many Internet Marketers. From what I have seen you are only penalized for duplicate content if the duplicate content is on the same site. For instance if you had an article published on two different pages of your own site only one of those pages would be likely to appear in search engine results.
If you would like to learn more about SEO and duplicate content I highly recommend the book SEO lies by Justin Brooke. You can get the digital download for $1 and it is highly worth it if you want to learn more about duplicate content and getting your content ranked in Google.
My website get disappeared in google.. I got worried a lot but thanks for your article.. i m a bit relaxed now.. So should I need to change the content of my website regularly (my website is a static website)?
I have seen static sites rank just as well as frequently updated blogs in Google. The main thing is to keep building relevant backlinks to your site.
This can be done with article marketing, video marketing, forum posting and directory submissions among others. If you would like to know some of the services I use to help automate these, shoot me an email and I’ll help you out.
I have a question to throw at you all and here goes – i own a site and it went down for a month as in there was no site at all but the domain was safe.Now its back up and running all the backlinks dont exists for some reason they have disapeared.My question is when googles dances will these backlinks reapear
James, when you say your site went down for a month, what happened if I were to go to your domain during that time? Would I get a page not found, or just a blank page?
The Google Dance shouldn’t effect your backlinks, but I would need to know more about your site. Send me an email when you get a chance with the name of your site and what type of backlinks you were creating (i.e. forum posting, yahoo answers, articles, video…etc) and I’ll try to help you figure out what is going on.
Eric i think i found the answer. My site is a chatsite but it had blogs and forums plus a guestbook. since i remade the site there wasnt any of the same content that was there before. All i can think of is that the backlinks are not relevent anymore im trying to get it back how it was hopefully this should work.Also when i said the site went down the server owner quit there service but my domain was still pointing to there nameservers so the message was page not found.
I’m glad you were able to find the issue.
If those old links no longer point to pages that exist on your site, you may want to look at implementing some sort of redirect.
That way even though the page doesn’t exist, that link when clicked will direct your visitors to your homepage or some other relevant page that you have.
Hi Eric, I have been doing some nice article marketing to get traffic to my blog. The google dance just happened to my article too. It was ranked first for the keyword & then it suddenly disappeared & is nowhere to be found even till the 63rd page. The article is about 2 days old. My question is this… when Google’s main crawl visits my article (king), then will it rank in No.1 agian for the keyword? Atleast will it rank in the first 2 pages if I continue to build backlinks. Approximately, how long does it take?
James, keep going with your article marketing. Be sure to bookmark your articles on the sites that allow them as well as build up some backlinks to the articles. This will all help in pushing your main site higher up in the rankings.
Also many articles sites will provide an RSS feed of the articles you have published. Submit that RSS feed to RSS submission sites.
I wish I could give you a time frame for the “Google Dance”, but nobody really knows. For now don’t worry so much about your current position. Continue to consistently build your links and the high rankings will follow.
Good luck James!
Hey Eric,
I just had a question about the site disappearing thing. It happened to my site as well & I was wondering if it meant that when google’s main bot actually crawls your website, it will put you in the same position?
James it’s hard to say the position you will reappear in. I have had sites come back above and some below the spot they originally showed up in.
My advice to you is to keep building relevant backlinks. If you stick with it you should definitely make your way back up to your original position or higher.
Just came back to your blog and noticed you replied about the redirection thanks alot i will keep you posted as to how i get on.
Great article,i have had exactly the same problem as you wrote now i no why.Thanks
You’re welcome Craig. Let me know if I can help you with anything else.
Glad I was able to help Craig.
Remeber i lost my my back links i managed to get them all back by how i said i was going to, I am very happy indeed
Congrats James! Glad everything ended up working out for you.
Great post, this helps clarify a lot of things for me.
Glad you found the post helpful.
Hello,
I have this problem with one of my site, and it’s a little annoying thing
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Ezu, the Google dance is really annoying, but something we have to live with. Just be patient and keep building backlinks to your site.
If you haven’t grabbed it yet, the free SEO book in my post above has some good tips about moving your site back up the rankings in Google.
Aha! It all makes sense now! I’m new to IM, and have been reading about supplemental indexes and fresh indexes – it’s enough to make your head spin! I prefer your King and Prince explanation. I think the Prince has just got bored of me, but hopefully the King will be along soon – better roll out the red carpet to impress him!
Get that red carpet ready Pete! As long as you keep promoting and building back links the King will make his return.
Great news! The King swung by last night while I was sleeping. He’s only taken a look at the home page so far, but he seemed to like what he saw because he’s put me in position #5. I expect this is probably a ‘fresh site’ boost, but hopefully I won’t drop too far, and then I can work on pushing myself back to the top. All good fun!
That is great news Pete!
I enjoy reading your blog . Excellent!!!
Thanks Paul! I’m glad you like it.