Pages disappearing

Why have half my pages vanished?

[Essex_boy]

I just cant believe this, I noticed that my traffic had droppped off big time this morning so I checked Google.

Guess what?

Half of my pages are no longer listed. I use no dodgy tactics just plain HTML.

Anybody?

<RANT>
Im getting truly sick of Googles playing around, this is the second time they appear to have ruined a perfectly viable web business of mine.

I thought the purpose of a search engine was to reflect the web and its contents not to decide in an arbitary, almost casual, fashion what is and isnt the flavour of the month. I mean for crying out loud peoples livings depend on this.

Interesting point, all the pages that were dropped are the high converting sales pages - plug for adwords?

</RANT>

[derekwong28]

This has happened to us before when we inadvertantly uploaded a robots.txt onto our site. To get your pages relisted again I suggest you do the following immediately.

1. Submit your all dissappeared pages manually to Google. Do not use automatic submission software.

2. Make sure there is a direct link to your dissappeared pages from the index page of your site.

3. If you have time, submit the other pages manually as well as they may well be slated for dissappearance next round.

Expect this to take 2-6 weeks before your pages appear again. But you may well find that your other pages start dissappearing.

Despite trying almost everything, there was nothing I could do to reduce our dependence on Google.

I have given up optimizing for Adwords altogether; I just reduced the bid amounts altogether. Their expanded broad match was a pure money grabbing exercise at the expense of relevancy.

Some SEOs reported that that the more Adwords bids there are for a particular keyword, the more likely Google is going to downgrade highly optimized pages for that keyword, so as to make surfers click on the ads instead of the SERPS. However, I don't think they will go as far as to remove your pages from their index.

Derek

[Essex_boy]

Thanks, I have already resubmitted my missing pages I the hope they will be returned. Im not in a high click through sector, 40 a day per page, and we dont normally have any competitors adwords ad's running for my terms.

Although I do believe what your saying about Google.

Funny thing I too was considering how I could reduce my dependance on Google. I cant......

[andy_boyd]

Yep, Google has done it again. After Florida one of my sites vanished for a good phrase and I lost a lot of business because of it. Now that site is doing well, but Google have removed another different site of mine. I cannot believe the audacity of their actions. Fair enough they are a free service but they must recognize that they can break people financially with such carefree actions.

To try and reduce my dependency on Google I have bought links on directories such as Galaxy and JoeAnt, both of which have been good buys. I am not and willl not be condoning their actions by using AdWords.

I will also be spending a lot more time on building up a wide range of sites which are inter-connected as well as developing a wide range of articles to bring in traffic via more specific terms. Hopefully this will reduce my dependency on a single site and Google.

[CernyM]

I guess I should feel fortunate that my sites have never ranked well in Google. I get spidered a lot, but Florida hit just as I was getting started, so I never really did get any traction.

I get more free search engine hits from MSN (by far) than from Google.