I used to manage a fairly popular web site. About 30,000 unique visitors a day. Harmless content about a particular profession. Informative. Updated almost daily. Ranked #1 for dozens of terms for years and years.
Then one day Google decided it didn’t like the site and it disappeared from the results. You could do a site: search and the pages would come up, so they were indexed. But they just didn’t rank anymore. Webmaster Tools was zero help. Showed everything was normal. No errors. No oddities.
The obvious notion is that it got hacked or there was content spam or something like that, but there wasn’t. No commenting system to game. Pages were all static HTML with no ads. Not even JavaScript to screw with.
The regulars kept coming, but with no Google referrals, traffic dwindled. I eventually took it offline since it wasn’t fun anymore.
Then one day Google decided it didn’t like the site and it disappeared from the results. You could do a site: search and the pages would come up, so they were indexed. But they just didn’t rank anymore. Webmaster Tools was zero help. Showed everything was normal. No errors. No oddities.
The obvious notion is that it got hacked or there was content spam or something like that, but there wasn’t. No commenting system to game. Pages were all static HTML with no ads. Not even JavaScript to screw with.
The regulars kept coming, but with no Google referrals, traffic dwindled. I eventually took it offline since it wasn’t fun anymore.
The Google giveth, and the Google taketh away.