Shortly after hitting a high result of hit #10 for sirens, the Sirens website plummeted: first to hit #155, then to #376, and now out of the first 800 results. I’m at a loss to explain this: all of the pages on the site are still in the index (including some I specifically told Googlebot not to spider, but that’s another story) but Google refuses to show them in its search results. Could it be that the first rule of Google rankings is: you do not talk about Google rankings
? A little research says no, but that leaves me with no cause for the broken search and nothing I can do about it.
This isn’t the only search I’ve seen behave similarly, but it’s the one closest to my heart. Fortunately, I’ve come across a tool that uses Google’s own algorithms to show that it’s an error on their side. Search Sinker returns Google searches to all their former Googly goodness. It seems that repeating words in a search string emphasizes them, so Sinker fills up the string with a term you deem most important: instead of sirens, it will look for sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens sirens. Using this technique, sirens3.com appears in a (rightful?) place of hit #12… not bad considering the last thirty pages updated on the site haven’t even been crawled. It doesn’t solve the problem that the general public will never find the Sirens’ site, but at least now I know it’s not because of anything I’ve done.
The so-called brandyupdate has put the Sirens back in a more reasonable place, at (appropriately for the date) #14.
