Site Not On Google, SEOmoz shows as 43

[dlcohen]

The site I'm helping with was at one time a page 1, even #1 on page 1. Lots of changes, problems when someone else did something and dropped to page 4 for keyword. After some recent tweaking I did, it no longer shows on rankings. No penalty on Google Webmaster, in Webmaster tools it shows the sitemap processed with no errors. SEOmoz still shows it at #43 in Rankings. Why does SEOmoz see it, but I don't? Site is www.plussizeplum.com (sorry, plus size women's lingerie) and keywords are "plus size lingerie".

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Dave,

Thanks for following up. I can't really give any SEO advice, since the Help Team is really here more for product support and I don't actually do any SEO. This is more of a question for the broader SEOmoz community. You may consider posting it as a separate question to get more of a response, since the actual product part of your question has been marked as answered.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn

[dlcohen]

I guess this is the point where I whine...I've used SEOMoz a bit, made some changes, canonicalized pages to get rid of dupes, etc. Went thru Dover's Search Engine Optimization Secrets book. Site - with 34 PA and 44 DA, no great but not not bad for the search - is completely gone from Google and Bing. I'm stumped as to what happened. Again, someone did major change with lots of page name changes, mismatched with sitemap, had W3 checker errors, and then I came thru and cleaned all this up. At one time, this site was regular on Page #1 for Google, but never fell below 2 or 3 till recently. It's now gone. Any suggestions or ideas? It's not been penalized as far as I can tell. I have no clue as to what's up. We should be at least page 2 or 3 for "plus size lingerie", at www.plussizeplum.com.

Thanks for any help or suggestions. The owner is ready to go out of business because of these events.

I'm wondering if we should just drop the opening page, which has a slideshow (not something I recommended) and jump right to storefront.

[dlcohen]

Thanks - I still can't get it to pop up. What happened was someone else redesigned the site, changing the page names to have "_new.php" at end. However, they didn't change the sitemap.xml. Then, they did rename them back to the original. I think google just stumbled on this mass change - plus the fact that the pages didn't verify for W3. I've fixed all that, am hoping that things right themselves. Home Page has decent PA and DA, better than most above it. And, it is at #14 for Bing.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Dave,

Thanks for writing in.

There are a few reasons why you may be seeing slightly different results than what we are showing in the web app. Since the search engines all maintain multiple indices that run across multiple datacenters, you can get somewhat different ranking results from different queries for the same keyword. Other elements, such as personalization, geography and search history (even if you're logged out of your Google/search engine account) can also influence ranking positions. There can definitely be a lot of variation in what different people, searching from different computers/locations might see in the rankings. We try to provide ranking information for what most users searching in your specified search engine would see.

I actually ran the keyword "plus size lingerie" through Google in an incognito window and I am seeing www.plussizeplum.com on the 5th page of search results in position 46 (http://screencast.com/t/vp6laUxQO).

It is also important to note that, when looking at that far down, the results can be unstable and experience a lot of fluctuation.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

[dlcohen]

Thanks - I did the site: search to be sure it was indexed.

The SEOmoz tanking date showed as 1/8, so I was surprised it showed a ranking.

I've also done the impersonalisation stuff.

Still stumped as to why the site is gone, and no penalty from Google webmaster. Maybe it'll pop up again soon -- it is #14 on Bing.

[activitysuper]

Bit off subject Tom, but Rampworx looks like a cool place, do you do any sport yourself? Also noticed Rampworx has a pretty large FB following, do you get involved in in that side of the company?

[TomRayner]

Couple of things just to rule something out:

If you put in the Google search bar: www.plussizeplum.com - is the first result your website?  If not, it's been deindexed. (My search brought the website up, so this doesn't look to be the case)

Second of all, SEOMoz ranking updates only take place once a week, usually on a Friday (I think).  This may also account for the discrepancy.

Finally, try searching for the site with all personalisation removed.  If you go to Impersonal.me and set up your regional settings, it will search for your keyword without any personalisation.  You'll have to manually check your site in the rankings, but it would be accurate.

There's ranking software out there that updates daily and Rankerizer is a free program that will check your rankings whenever you run the report.