My websites dropped from Google Search?

I've had my two websites show up fine in google search for months, and then just in the last couple of days, they both no longer show when I search for my name. Completely ripped from google search.

I haven't done anything other than add some similar content for my ABOUT sections for each site. One is my personal name as the URL and the other is my gallery page which is on a different URL. I would think that having some similar content on each of the websites I own would not be a problem, as this should be a common thing for people to do, right? Only a small portion is the same. Would google rip them both out because of this? Do I have to make sure my about pages are completely different in giving info about myself? That would be stupid, but I could do it. I have removed the content from one site already just to make sure.

Would someone be able to have my website removed from Google if they had some malicious intent on doing so? Could someone who sees me as competition showing up in the search do some trickery to get my websites banned?

Thanks for any suggestions you might have.

Also, I only have one link going from my personal page to the gallery URL, but no links going back to my personal URL.

What is your site?

Check for a robots.txt file in your web root directory. Maybe you mistakenly disallowed all agents from crawling your site?

And no, I don't think anyone other than google can get your site removed. _Unless_ your site was doing something unsavory (purposefully or not) like bad SEO practices or distributing malware cause your site got hacked.

aIpha wrote in post #15591119
What is your site?

Check for a robots.txt file in your web root directory. Maybe you mistakenly disallowed all agents from crawling your site?

And no, I don't think anyone other than google can get your site removed. _Unless_ your site was doing something unsavory (purposefully or not) like bad SEO practices or distributing malware cause your site got hacked.

They are both smugmug sites. So I don't know much about the lower level aspects of what is there.

I have not changed any SEO options for either one in months.

I would like to avoid posting my URL here because POTN pages go right to the top of google search in hours.

I sent a PM with info.

Canon_Lover wrote in post #15591137
I would like to avoid posting my URL here because POTN pages go right to the top of google search in hours.

If you are happy with how your site is designed and you want to promote it, I'd post it everywhere especially POTN. SEO 101 is the more links you have going to your site, the better your site will rank.

Looked up the pagerank for your site, it's 0 which is one of the reasons why other sites are outranking you and being listed first. You also need to have more text for your site that use the relevant keywords that you want people to search for. Your main site is just a flash-based slideshow. I think this can actually hurt your SEO.

aIpha wrote in post #15591209
If you are happy with how your site is designed and you want to promote it, I'd post it everywhere especially POTN. SEO 101 is the more links you have going to your site, the better your site will rank.

Looked up the pagerank for your site, it's 0 which is one of the reasons why other sites are outranking you and being listed first. You also need to have more text for your site that use the relevant keywords that you want people to search for. Your main site is just a flash-based slideshow. I think this can actually hurt your SEO.

Thanks for the info. My websites were very highly ranked just a couple of days ago. And nothing has changed with my home page content, just the ABOUT pages.

This seems to coincide with when I copied my HTML code from one ABOUT page to make another ABOUT page on my other site. I did that just several days ago. Maybe google's systems freaked out over this?

My URL was not even showing in google's search until I signed up for webmaster tools over an hour ago, and now they seem to be back. Both are now verified under the same account.

I'll give it some days to see if Google gets my ranking back into the system. I had a similar thing happen when I took down a website last year and then put it back up after a few months. After a week or so, I was back into the spot I had for google search ranking.

Man, I sometimes hate automated computer system stuff. Any human could have easily seen that my two websites were legitimate and not spamming or trying to be tricky.

Google removes rank at time due to what they consider unfair. Metatags, white ink etc etc.

My ABOUT pages are the only thing modified in the last couple of weeks, and were directly copied HTML and exact same images with same image names. One has been completely removed from the site, so before I start making other changes, I'll give that time to see if google gets me back into the ranking. I've been dropped from ranking before, as mentioned with pulling my website for rework several months. After putting the site back up last fall, the ranking eventually got back to where it was after a while.

If I search, yahoo for my name, the results come up exactly how they did in Google before being removed.

Sounds like you got hit by Google Penguin. My mom's web design business was drastically affected by it. Check out: https://www.google.com …official&client​=firefox-a

...

chrismallet wrote in post #15595462
maybe the problem is not you going down the list, but other people coming up. I stopped putting emphasis on SEO for a little while and in that time other people put more effort in then passed me. Since then I have redone my SEO and passed them again.

Google changes its algorithms and the rankings fluctuate all the time, just work on your site, put some good content on it, get some back links and all will be good in the world. I would recommend not sticking with Smugmug though as it's a pretty limited platform.

All I care about is having searches for my name show my website. You don't need really much ranking for that to happen. I am the only person in the world with my name at this time.

I could care less if someone searches for "Landscape Photographer" or "Seattle Nature Photographer" and have my site show at the top. That matters more for Wedding Photographers.

My issue is that Google removed my URLs completely from the search engine. I was not even in their system for several days. Once I signed up for webmaster tools and verified both websites under the same account, they showed back in the system again instantly.

It usually takes Google days to get ranking back into the search engine when a website has been taken down and put back up. If I don't see my sites back in the search for my name in the next week, then I have other issues to deal with.


When searching for reasons on this, it appears google doesn't like it when webmasters copy full-page HTML content from one site to another. Google's systems likely saw my duplicates as some sort of spam or something, I don't know. Since I had not set up a webmaster account with them prior, it likely just felt like nuking both sites as being invalid.

...

chrismallet wrote in post #15595600
lol really?

Yup. The last person with my name was my ancestor who died in 1920.

Obscure German name FTMFW!

...

chrismallet wrote in post #15595732
I find that rather hard to believe as there are 7.1 billion people on this planet, but that's just me.

Regardless, google is more meant to find new things, if the people searching for you already know they want to find you then why wouldn't they just type it into the url bar? Why so much emphasis on google? My clients looking for my website don't google me to find my site, they already know it and therefore just go to it.

Because when people see my name printed in magazines or articles or photos on walls, I want them to be able to find my website easily.

There are people with my first name and last name, but not the two put together. I have only met one other person with my first name in my entire life.

The spelling was also changed when my family moved here from Germany, which adds some more exclusivity. There are not many of those 7 billion with strange and improperly spelled German names.

...