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My site has been at the top of the Google rankings for a LONG time. Suddenly (and shortly after I dumped the old hosting service in February - after their "customer-support" went belly-up) my site started to plunge in Google's rankings. I would like to note that it took a long time for my site to fully propogate to the new host (well over a week) - I've been told by my ISP and my host, that this could have been caused by something that my old host was sending out. (My DNS settings were correct - this was also confirmed by my registry).
After doing a fair amount of research when hits to my site started to plunged (I had a very steady increase for several years), I discovered that my site is no longer listed when you check for it using link:www.mysite.com in Googles search. When one checks for the same site using just the URL, (i.e., "www.mysite.com") more than 200 sites are found that link to mine! I wrote to Google about this problem and the person that responded couldn't figure out was happening either.
At that point, I discovered that ALL my sites that are now with my new host also fail to appear when entering link:www.mysite.com into Google's search. I've since written to my host and they're not sure what's happening either so I thought I'd write here.
Is there anything that the old host could be doing to prevent my sites from appearing on Google? My new host suggested that it might have something to do with the httpd.conf file. Is that possible? What else could account for this sudden disappearance?
Thanks for you help.
[edited by: heini at 5:49 pm (utc) on April 27, 2003]
[edit reason] removed specifics / thanks! [/edit]
As far as the new sites, it can take 3 or 4 month for a new site to show up on a permanent basis in the index. It is important to get some good inbound links to the new sites or it might take longer.
As far as I know, my site is free of Google's TOS - while it is a harsh one that exposes corruption in public institutions (and is quite unique), it has picked up a lot of good inbound links from related sites.
Everything except for the hosting service (and, obviously, the DNS settings) are the same as before.
Thanks for your help.
We are a web hosting company and have seen customers have success in changing hosts to us, with no adverse affects on their Google rankings.
Our suggestion is that any host changes be allowed to propagate over a period of at least one month (or full cycle in Google) before terminating your old hosting plan and web site, if at all possible. Otherwise Google may indeed go looking in the wrong place per chance and find nothing, which couldn't be good for optimization efforts we would not think.
Check you logs to see if Googlebot has been crawling your site again.
It may take a few updates for it to get back in.
Typically when people switch host companies, as long as they let the old host run until the DNS has properly propagated and you see the Googlebot crawling the new IP, there usually isn't a problem. It's when people switch and kill the host before it has completly propated that you will see problems arise.
Can you sticky me the URL? You peaked my interest with the description of it!
