rainborick - 3:30 pm on Sep 16, 2004 (gmt 0)

I had a client whose site fell into SI hell. It was a wild ride.

He has a very small site, less than 40 pages. At first, most of the pages were just Supplimental Results cached many months ago, and then the pages started to fall into Partially Indexed status where all you could find in the index were the page's URLs. His main page fell out of the index entirely.

I "solved" the problem by cleaning up the Dreamweaver bloat on the main page and a dozen internals, adding a handful of high quality links to the site, and periodically pestering help@google.com with polite pleas for assistance.

It took about 6 weeks, but the site gradually came back to fully indexed and well-ranked. So, he's happy as a clam and thinks I'm a genius, and I'm almost completely certain that Google resolved this situation automagically and completely oblivious to my efforts.

So many people are reporting that their site is partially indexed, that I think its something that is going to become a part of life as Google's index grows. I'm not a believer in the "Google is max'ed out and fundamentally broken" theories, but I would not be surprised that their current system of rolling updates does allow smallish sites and obscure pages in larger sites to fall into this state without cause or warning, and that its only due to Google's irregular reconciliation processes that you recover.