My website disapeared from google rankings, please help?

[gregdotcom]

Our website url is http://www.phoria.com

Around January 16th we disappeared from google for the keyword 'kratom'

We were on page 3 for the longest time. We have no critical messages in webmaster tools however I did notice most of our links seem to be website directory links.We still rank for a couple terms like buy kratom on page 6.I think a google update occurred around this time so I've read however if we had a variety of links that went against google guidelines wouldn't we have received a message stating so in Webmaster Tools?This month has been very confusing to say the least. Any help would be appreciated.

[TomRayner]

Worth double checking it hasn't been manually de-indexed.  Type the URL into the Google search bar to check - if the page does pop up, then everything's OK that end.

And yeah, it's a bit of a bummer but I'd also look at it another way.  Sounds like you were able to get pretty good rankings with the majority of your links only being directories - which haven't been that useful for quite some time.  In theory, you should be able to get those rankings back with the more higher quality links you'll be producing and then probably more.  Might take more time, but should be well worth the effort.

[gregdotcom]

Thanks for the quick reply Tom. That is very good reasoning and makes the most sense to me as well. I will seek more authoritative links from this point forward and see if we can at least get ranked at all for the keyword.

The real downer is it doesn't show up anywhere in the results now for our main keyword now however if we can get it listed at all I'll know we're making progress. Again, thank you for the reply.

[TomRayner]

The 16th would coincide with the "update that wasn't an update" - Google says no update was released (a Panda refresh was released a few days later, unrelated), but many SERPs and webmasters reported some dramatic movements.

My somewhat educated guess, thanks to SEO communities and blog posts such as this one, lead me to believe that the update was part of Google's ongoing link-devaluation.  Certainly from what you've told mentioned here I think this could be the case.

The keywords that dropped - were they all for the same landing page?  And the links that were in place before, they're all directory links?  It would not surprise me, if this de-valuation theory is correct, that Google had gone through your site, looked at the directory backlinks and/or others and went "you know what, those are low quality backlinks. I'm going to devalue their strength."  If those links were the primary reason why the keywords were ranking, then that might explain the drop.  Similarly, as directories usually point to homepages and, I'm presuming, it was your homepage that was ranking for the keywords, again it might explain the drop.  In theory, Google is now looking at your site and thinking "This site has not got a lot of good links going to this page (because I've devalued them), so I'm not going to rank it highly for this term".

So how can you recover?  To put it simply, you need to replace those links that have been lost and in addition build further ones.  These new links need to be better quality.  If there's one consolation to be had from this, it's that Google hasn't penalised your website completely through a Panda/Penguin/Unnatural links warning.  You would have received a message if this was the case.  What's happened is that Google has removed any strength from your low quality links, which is sort of fair, so your rankings have fallen as a result.  Google's not asking you to remove those links, as it has already devalued them.  But to rank where you were before, you're gonna need some good ones.

In short: Google devalued your directory links, rankings fell as a result.  If you can build high quality/authority links to replace those lost, you should be able to recover.

As mentioned, this is just a theory but one I'm reasonably confident on.  If you have any other questions, please let me know!