Help! Site Removed from Google Index

Site with previous good rankings now disappeared from Google index.

[m8ade]

I would be very grateful for some help and advice please.

Our site has been in the Google index for a couple of years and had had good page rankings for a number of keywords/phrases and top position for a particularly good one for our business.

Recently a colleague did some work on our site and we got number one (and number 2) place on results for more great keywords.

Yesterday I took a look on Google and was horrified to find that not only had our site apparently disappeared from the search results but that I couldn't even find it using "site:mydomain.com mydomain.com" or mention of it in "links:otherdomain.com" search where it had been listed as a link to other sites before.

I'm not sure exactly when this happened as it has been perhaps a week or so since I last checked Google. Our PR ranking had been 4 but now the bar is grey.

I've looked at our weblogs and Googlebot/2.1 was all over the site yesterday and in the week before. I think as much as it ever has been.

My big fear is that we have somehow broken Google rules and been manually removed from the Google index. My colleague will be back from holiday next week so we will have more info then on changes that have been made to the site.

My questions at the moment are:
1. If our site has been removed from the Google index would Googlebot still be crawling the site?
2. Are there any other explanations as to why any mention of our site appears to have completely disappeared from Google?
3. Is there any way of knowing for sure if we have been manually removed from the index?
4. How long before we should start to panic? (I'm actually panicking already!)
5. What should our next steps be?
6. Is there any other information that you feel would be of benefit in our situation?

Thank you all in advance for any help and advice you are able to give us.

Regards,
Adrian

[PatrickDeese]

If your colleague placed invisible or hidden text on your pages, in "keyword rich" comment tags, or a myriad of other "naughty" practices you might find that you have been banned.

On the otherhand, Google is in the middle of updating its database, and your site might have benefitted briefly from "Freshbot", and now you are back to normal.

[Tropical Island]

If your toolbar is grey and showing "not ranked" not white and showing a PR0 it is likely that the site was down during the last deep crawl. That happenned to us last year when we changed servers and we were out of the index for a time until the freshbot and deep crawler found us again. We had a greyed out PR.

Put your url in your profile and members will be able to comment further.

[kevinpate]

> Put your url in your profile and members will
> be able to comment further.

Isn't that an exercise in futility with the original
poster having only 2 posts to the nic?

[coconutz]

>>My big fear is that we have somehow broken Google rules and been manually removed from the Google index.

If you seriously think that this is the reason, it might be a good idea to review Google's Information for Webmasters [google.com]:

Webmaster Guidelines [google.com]: principles and guidelines on what to do and not do.

Quality Guidelines [google.com]: basic principles and specific recommendations.

Once you make any necessary corrections, you can send a Reinclusion Request [webmasterworld.com] to [e-mail] with the subject line "reinclusion request" and hopefully your site will be back in the index within a reasonable amount of time.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com].

[heini]

>Put your url in your profile and members will be able to comment further.
Urls don't show for new members, as Kevin points out.
Second we don't do site reviews, and discussions of specific sites.

m8ade, welcome to WebmasterWorld! I think Coco has mades some very good suggestions. If you have read through that and think there are specific areas which are unclear, just ask away!

[vnsampat]

Hi m8ade,
same problem with my site. PR6 till day before and its gone yesterday. still shows 170 odd incoming links but the bar is gray and its disappeared from the index. We donot use any kind of spam or hidden stuff, but the sites disappeared. The bot was all over the site yesterday even though its disappeared from the index, so like you i am hoping its just some temporary thing with google.
Vishal.

[jaski]

I am very confident that it is some sort of glitch on google. To me it seems there is a small part of the index which has got cut off/corrupted/ dog ate it :D .. whatever but the symptoms sure look like that.

1)Some sites have completely vanished. (as some have reported here)
2)Some sites have lost pages added recently. (mine)

I feel it should be back up very soon if its a temporary glitch .. or with next update for sure.

Jaski

[trillianjedi]

Yes, if it makes you feel any better, we had a site drop out of the index (totally) on Saturday. We haven't done anything wrong at all, so await to get back in there shortly (hopefully) or at latest next dance as we were extensively deep-crawled.

I do think that google has been acting very strange for a little while now.

It's a nuisance, but there's nothing you can really do about it.

I don't think that sending in a reinclusion request even if it turns out you've not been banned will do you any harm.

Personally, I think we'll just try and forget about it for a week and see what happens.

TJ