annej - 10:12 am on Jan 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

1)Sites which do very well but are border line for optimization get the homepage correctly ranked but an arbritrary number of its internal pages discounted, to err ..level the playing field. 2)Google is just losing pages, in a patchy increasing flaky index/algo.

The correct answer iiiiiiissssss #2!

The sites and pages we are talking about here are good sites with rich content. I do not believe Google is trying to get rid of these pages for any reason. These pages are just getting caught in a snare in some way. Is it an algo or other mix up? I don't know.

So what we need here is for people who have had this experience to describe as well as they can what seems to have happened.

I keep coming back to scraper pages that have somehow mislinked to our pages in such a way as to get Google to think they are gone or something.

All scrapers don't do this. It is a glitch of some sort. Anyone with content pages is going to get scraped. In fact the better the page does in the serps the more likely it will be scraped.

I don't know if this is the cause at all. Maybe I'm way off track and we will find another possibility. Lets just focus on those little hunches we have and see if we get anywhere.