Last Thursday our site saw a lot of top keywords drop in the serps, on the friday I noticed WMT was showing no link data for the site, when it returned Saturday, two of the main pages were missing, now this moring 5 pages are missing including the homepage. Total number of links has also fallen considerably

Has anyone any idea what is going on? Is it a bug with G and they think we have no backlinks or is it something else. How can a homepage go from having 30,000+ links to none.

Rankings and traffic have been affected

You shouldn't rely on forum signature links for your promotional efforts, they can be discounted at any time, especially when guests do not see links in signatures.

AND

Search engine crawlers are "guests"

Hi Chris

Sig links are only a very small part of our backlink profile, the problem we have is missing link data in WMT has coincided with a ranking drop. Perhaps it is just a coincidence but the pages that are missing are the pages affected. G has confirmed there was a lag in reporting data friday, I am hoping when they are back our rankings will return with them.

Missing link data? I take it that as well as "rank checking" you also spend your time link counting?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...www.google.com

No I dont spend time counting links but when our traffic falls you do some investigating, then realise rankings have dropped and there is missing data from WMT, then you put 2 and 2 together

Now by WMT, you mean Webmaster-Talk yes/no? If so, WMT no longer exists per say (it's on a different domain extension now).

And also guests aren't able to view signature links here anymore, and search engines are grouped as guests so search engines can't see signature links anymore either.

Just to clarify, Im not saying links from this forum are not showing, Im saying my pages have no data at all. They are not even listed

So by WMT you are actually meaning the Google Webmaster Tools, rather than the forum formerly known as WMT?

Yes Webmaster Tools, I see the confusion now with "webmaster talk"

Originally Posted by jim25

Yes Webmaster Tools, I see the confusion now with "webmaster talk"

Now it's clear to me why you ignored my 'hello'


I was thinking when you said WMT it's the former name of this forum

And the rest of us thought you had simply lost your marbles

Yeah sorry about that guys,

@shey - Hello and thankyou for the welcome

The basic answer to you question is. ...


.... Who knows?


Could be a change of datacentre(s).
Could be your page's "rankings" are being re-evaluated.
or dozens of other possibles.

However when the "home" page goes "missing", it is usually an indicator that your promotional efforts are only been for that one page and you have lost a significant proportion of the links.

Promotional efforts are spread over several pages, I guess I will have to sit tight and wait and see what happens as of yet still no return of data for 5-6 pages. And no return in rankings...

Ok so link data has returned unfortunateley rankings have not.

Now inner pages have dissapered for top keywords and homepage has taken their place but in lower position(1-2 pages deeper). Had a browse around for similar cases and read it may be a penalty. Very strange how ineer optimized pages have been replaced with homepage.

Hi Jim, you have returned!

Welcome back to Tycoon Talk

Happy to see you around!

It is not a "penalty" just different server cluster or datacentre.

I hope you are right chris