Thread: Why did my sites disappear from the SERPs?

Hello all. I have been following a simple strategy so far. I built basic squeeze pages in two niches and I was building forum and web 2.0 backlinks to rank them high in the SERPs. The first website can be viewed here:

http://overcoming-anxiety-attacks.com/

I was optimizing that website for the keyword "overcoming anxiety attacks". After hours of building backlinks, this site ranked number 3 on the first page of the google results, however I got no sales. I realized that this was because my keyword has low competition, but not enough searches. So I built another squeeze page:

http://learn-how-to-hypnotize-someone.com/

This keyword "how to hypnotize someone" has much higher searches, and still pretty low competition I believe. However after I got this website to rank position 27 for the keyword, it has disappeared from the SERPS. The anxiety website above has also disappeared and I have no idea why. According to my Google Webmaster tools, the "avg. position" of the anxiety site is still 3.1, yet in all the google serp checkers they say it has disappeared. I have no idea why, I built these backlinks manually so it would have longevity in the serps. Did they drop off because I stopped building backlinks? It has been a while since I touched either of the squeeze pages, is that why they dropped off? If I build more forum backlinks will they move back up the serps?


And for some reason, the anxiety site is still first page ranked on the bing search engine. And the hypnosis site is ranked on page 11.

Hi Showtime,

You may have heard of it before, but what you're experiencing is known as the "Google dance". This is where Google will give you an artificially high short term ranking for having a new website, after which time your rankings may go down either temporarily or long term. In short, when ranking a new site under a competitive term (which "how to hypnotize someone" is), you will notice a lot of fluctuation in the short term, particularly if you're building backlinks aggressively. This is actually a good thing, it means that Google is considering pushing your site high up in the SERPs. It just takes a while before Google makes up its mind where it should place your site.

Even once your rankings stabilize, fluctuation in rankings will occur again after you build new backlinks. I've had sites which had stable rankings at let's say 200, and I've conducted an aggressive link building campaign only to see my rankings drop off the chart, and then suddenly bump up into the top 20, all in the space of a month.

Basically, there's nothing to be alarmed about. I've checked both of your websites and neither of them have been deindexed or appear to be penalized in any way, so my advice is to keep on building those backlinks to them, and in time they will gain ranking again.