alienresident - 10:31 am on Dec 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

Our uk based .com site has also suffered from this mysterious dropping from google uk in that our homepage no longer seems to appear in the uk only results.

Site: url on google.co.uk for 'web' brings up our main url at number 1 as I'd expect, change it to 'UK only' and it has vanished.

First noticed a problem with keyword search result in mid October when a search on primary keywords would sometimes bring us up on the first page (where we'd been for quite a while, then the next day we would not appear in the top 100.
Then we'd be back, then we'd be gone etc etc. This happened for a couple of weeks.

Then at the beginning of November our main url and index.htm seemed to vanish from results altogether.

Over in google groups on the webmaster help forum under indexing & crawling there have been a number of posts with people seeing this going on since July at least.

As one person said: "...this is not about ranking it's about inclusion."

The reply on November 10th 2006 from the 'Search Evangelist for Google' was brief: "We're looking into this."
But sadly, not a peep on the subject since then.

This has hit our business hard - for the previous 4 months we'd seen
sales at double 2005 levels; from the beginning of November 06, we've
dropped back to '05 levels.
Given that we'd based our stock requirements for Christmas on the previous quarter, this bug, issue or whatever could not have raised it's head for us at a worse time.
:-(

I don't know about our overall traffic levels and people not choosing 'UK only', but unless there are other factors we are not aware of, the disappearance of our main url coinciding with a significant drop in sales seems like a very ugly coincidence to me.