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Ultimately, what I had to to was go into GWT and request that the URL in question be added to the index. It reappeared today, three days after my request and three weeks after disappearing.

Hi Kate,

Looking at the URL string there I see both Pressflow and Pantheon variables being passed. It looks like the platform is in the way. I would suggest sending an email to the folks at Pantheon and/or Pressflow to get some help. I'm not sure what your technical expertise is, but Pressflow is a flavor of Drupal and Pantheon is a hosting service for Drupal. They appear to be adding variables to the URL, which probably isn't necessary.

Just my guess.

John

I hope you're right...it's been about a week. Thanks for the encouragement!

I checked this. This page is a popular tutorial on a technical topic that was kicking ass in the rankings and has utterly disappeared. I did the backlinks check and honestly, Opensite Explorer is not very useful most of the time. Outdated and very incomplete. I checked GWT and Bing Webmaster Tools for backlinks and it came up with with relevant links I was really happy to have. Hundreds of good ones, nothing obviously spammy. I'm at a loss with this...very difficult to understand and hurting my site a lot.

They're good. I'm wondering if Google has a penalty in place, but can find no evidence of it. But other pages with similar content are ranking. It's good content, in fact one of my most popular pages. Weird.

Everything is exactly the same. I was very careful and since it took the hit, I've triple checked. It's the same. Very curious.

Hi all,

The question I have concerns a high ranking page on my site that has disappeared from Google. It was in the top 5 for the target keyword and it currently ranks 3 on Bing.

I recently migrated my domain (one month ago), but it seems to have gone very well. No other pages have taken a hit like this. The 301 redirect is in place and working well. I've used the Moz Tools to see if anything is weird, but it all looks fine.

Oh, and yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools - no messages and other related pages on my site are ranking on the second and third pages for the terms. Also, the site is consulting services - nothing dodgy.

Any ideas? Why just this one page? What are my options?

Thanks for any advice you may have.

John

Thanks, Cyrus. This answers my question perfectly.

Thanks for the reply. Maybe I didn't ask the question properly. I'm aware of Panda and its implications. I don't build link wheels. I'm trying to understand the rationale. So, I read a couple (recent) articles where folks were swearing by Web 2.0 sites for link building. So my question is really about the whole premise of using a site like HubPages as a source for backlinks.

If a subdomain that you just created on a site like that has PR0, what is the point? Why do so many people use those sites for backlinks, whether they are building a link wheel or not?

Hopefully that is more clear. I'm wondering if I'm missing something because I do not see the big advantage to doing that.

Just want to check my thinking on something. So, Google says subdomains stand on their own right? They don't get juice from the root domain. If this is true, the subdomains on a site like HubPages or WordPress.com are essentially a PR0 domain, right? Something like, mysub.hubpages.com.

But if you posted an article on Squidoo, a site that doesn't use subdomains, you should get some juice from the root domain passed to your post, right?

I usually go the guest blogging route, but I recently read a couple of posts on Web 2.0 link wheels swearing they are awesome, but most of the time the recommendation is to build it using what I perceive to be PR0 sites - Wordpress.com, Tumblr, HubPages subdomains. You would have to develop those sites so they have PR in order to pass juice.

Am I off base here or does building a link wheel in this way seem like a waste of time?

Marisa, I'm not sure this is really what you're looking for, but I recently wrote a blog post that targeted this type of client:

http://redpointhq.com/blog/2012/calculating-the-value-of-seo/

It doesn't break it down the way you specified (great idea for another post, actually), but maybe if you combine it with other stuff you find, perhaps something that breaks down the SEO process, it could help.

Thanks, Andrew! I had done this for handfuls of pages at a time, but not an entire site and it had me concerned. I appreciate the advice!

OK, thanks for your advice.

Thanks Highland. Are you saying you think keeping the 'wordpress' in the path is the way to go or would you get rid of it? Not sure what you mean when you say 'original URLs'.

Thanks, Andrew. Actually the entire site is in the wordpress folder and they don't use the blogging functionality. So if you visit the site with javascript disabled you get a blank page. The home page is actually http://domain.com/wordpress but the root domain (without the 'wordpress' attached) returns a 200 response code. It essentially just contains a javascript redirect. What a mess.

So, I was going to do exactly as you suggest but wanted to make sure it would be worth the hit in the search results and I wasn't just responding emotionally to the poor technical and aesthetic aspects of the set up.

I'm considering doing some pro bono work for a local non-profit and upon initial review they have a number of serious issues but there is one in particular I'd like to check my thinking on.

The developer who set up the site some years ago implemented a javascript redirect on their root domain so that it redirects to:

http://domain.com/wordpress

This is wrong for all kinds of reasons and I want to recommend eliminating this redirect and getting rid of the 'wordpress' part of the path altogether. However, the site is quite established with good PR and they would take a hit by changing the path.

I'd do 301 redirects to the new URLs that would not have 'wordpress' in the path in addition to other remediation.

My question - is my thinking here good? It's worth it, right? The other option is just get rid of the weird redirect and keep 'wordpress' in the path but this seems unacceptable to me.

Any opinions?

Thanks for your reply, Alan. I also considered a screen scraper removing the canonical tag, but to me screen scraping seemed lazy in the first place and so maybe they wouldn't bother in most cases. I guess that a best practice with canonicals is really situation dependent.

Thanks, Robert. Your rational for using relative links make sense. I appreciate you helping me sort through the noise on this issue.

John

So a little question here. I was looking into a module to help implement canonical URLs on a certain CMS and I came a cross a snarky comment about relative vs. absolute URLs being used. This person was insistent that relative URLs are fine and absolute URLs are only for people who don't know what they are doing.

My question is, if using relative URLs, doesn't it make it easier to have your content scraped? After all, if you do get your content scraped at least it would point back to your site if using absolute URLs, right? Am I missing something or is my thinking OK on this?

Any feedback is much appreciated!