The Google Forum

**efru** · 04:12 PM

Good Afternoon

About a week ago I posted a couple articles on my website that were shot to the top of googles search results and I was getting hundreds of click-throughs, diggs, positive feedback etc..

I just took a look at my Analytics account and saw that the numbers today are very, very low, so I investigated the search keywords and I saw that Google has completely dropped two of my popular articles from their index. The only thing I did yesterday was add an RSS feed of my articles section, nothing else..

Can you guys think of any reason why Google would simply drop my high-ranking articles from their index? I mean I can understand dropping rank, but they *completely* dropped them. I read somewhere else that it has something to do with new sites and not being replicated across all their servers, but I'm not sure if this is right or not. I keep getting paranoid that I did something wrong, but I can't honestly think of anything. All the content was written by me, nothing stolen..

If anyone has any insight into this it would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

**Learning Newbie** · 11-02-2007, 02:34 PM

If they don't come back within a week I'd be worried, but I've heard it's normal for this type of anomaly to pop up here and there.

**efru** · 11-02-2007, 02:38 PM

I hope so, thanks for the response!

**Learning Newbie** · 11-02-2007, 02:42 PM

I can't remember the specifics, but I've seen a lot of threads where someone is frantic because a page of theirs vanished for no reason from Google. None of them could figure out why, or what they did. Because they did nothing wrong, and it was simply a data issue.

I took a quick look at your site and I don't see anything objectionable. Heck, if it was ASP.NET instead of PHP I'd probably subscribe. Anyway, that leads me to believe you're not seeing a drop off in search traffic as punishment, you're seeing it because of something like what you suggested, data being replicated across data centers.

You might want to check your RSS feed though. I've heard those can get you into trouble over duplicate content, but I've never experienced this myself, and I've never taken steps to avoid it.

**efru** · 11-02-2007, 03:00 PM

Thanks John

The thing about the RSS feed is that I have all of my articles in the feed, and only a couple of them disappeared, not all...but on the other hand this happened almost immediately after I created the RSS feed..

I need a time machine

**ADAM Web Design** · 11-02-2007, 04:34 PM

You're likely experiencing the "new" effect as well. The RSS feed may be a factor, but I think that it may be partly that Google has a tendency to show some favouritism to fresh content in SERPs for a brief period (1-2 weeks). There are sites that have noticed this phenomenon as well.

**efru** · 11-02-2007, 05:13 PM

I'm just going to wait a few days and keep checking in on it. The part that keeps bothering me is that they only dropped some of the articles

**Learning Newbie** · 11-02-2007, 05:52 PM

Only dropping some pages is consistent with data issues. I'm not trying to brush the issue aside or give you false hope, I just think that's what's going on here.

Possibly the best thing you can do while you wait is to write a new article, do the same promotion for that, and hope it catches on in the meantime. Adam is right about freshness, it may or may not be what's going on in your site, but having more content to draw people in will almost never hurt, and if this is simply a data replication issue, there's nothing you can do about it but wait.

**efru** · 11-02-2007, 06:05 PM

Thanks Gentlemen, much appreciated.

**efru** · 11-02-2007, 11:27 PM

You can all rest easy tonight, my articles suddenly appeared back in the results, at the top still...

Thanks guys, hopefully this thread will help others calm down in the future.

**coolslko** · 11-05-2007, 07:15 AM

Well....I have also experienced that after posting and indexing some my articles by google appeared among the top ranks and also got a lot of hits when i submitted it to Digg, sphinn, etc....but after a few weeks rank of my articles dropped a lot and also one of my article even not show indexed by google which was among top 10 results few weeks earlier. I was also confused a lot that time that what's wrong with my articles and what to do next as like you...............but after few days I found my articles in good ranking for their main keywords .........nat exactly as earlier but among top 10-20 ranking.......so I just advice to have a little patience everthing will be fine.