Grey bar false alarm

[vincevincevince]

No hidden text that I know of, it's just part of my site, that used to be hit by fresh. Now it's grey bar. It's an old site (1yr plus, I forget)...

I've never done SEO on it at all... what can I do?

[will sticky you if you want]

[vincevincevince]

it's not all of my site, and the affected bits have left the cache

but it includes the main parts

if i search for www.widgets.com then it says it has no info about it, do i want to search for pages which contain that text, which when i do, brings up some other pages on that domain

[SEO practioner]

Vince, relax, the update isn't over yet..

You know it takes a few days for things to sort out... I have a few of the sites I take care of do similar erratic things too. Then the next day their ok!

It's part of the never-ending dancing contest...

:-) relax

[vincevincevince]

I really really really hope so... I just checked some other servers and it's not their either:

Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.widgets.com

Find web pages that contain the term "www.medicalengineer.co.uk"

I'm going to cry... I swear it was fine a few days ago... and I've had no (0) downtime :S

<added>I'd not mind if the PR was mixed up... but I'm not there AT ALL... searches don't pick me up for my keywords... surely that's not an `update bug`?</added>

[SEO practioner]

Vince- how many pages are negatively affected?

[rfgdxm1]

>I'm going to cry... I swear it was fine a few days ago... and I've had no (0) downtime :S

Your site however may have been unreachable by Google though. Since you say your site isn't dirty, odds are you'll be out of the index for just this month. There is still hope this is Google Dance flakiness, but expect the worst.

[vincevincevince]

It's most of my pages, especially including one which is a dynamic page, comprising must be over 50 pages through a single argument (job advertisments).

The content is not duplicated in the same dynamic page, nor are the pages available elsewhere.

Some have PR (allegedly), but have no cache or info in the index, despite having had it before for a long time.

<added>
The pages that have PR seem to be some kind of generated PR, not real PR.
</added>
<added2>
i'm in dmoz, and have a number of other good PR links, normally rating highly on those terms i chosen
</added2>

[SEO practioner]

But vince, have you done anything to those dynamic pages? If they were all ok before and not now, surely there must have been something that has changed

[vincevincevince]

Nothing has changed apart from the addition of new submissions (new jobs/CVs), and I removed two old advertisments.

[pixel_juice]

>>no information is available for the URL www.widgets.com

Sites that are banned/penalised usually show up in a url search, but not for anything else. I don't think that the content of your site is responsible for your site being out of the index. My best guess is that for some reason Google were not able to index your site (as rfgdxm1 said).

[hitchhiker]

gray bars / white bars EVERYWHERE! relax, don't panic

[SEO practioner]

Vince, if I were you, I'd just wait a few more days...

[Stefan]

What hitchhiker said.

I've had several pages inexplicably disappear in this "update", showing grey bar, with nothing dodgy about them. For some reason Google just didn't find them, or lost them, or who knows what, (they're still in 5 of the 9 datacentres).

Things might get sorted out next update. It might take until then, Vince, but they should come back eventually.

[vincevincevince]

Thanks to all :-)

It was a false alarm... I'm back in the SERPS where I expected to be. Still no PR, but I can live with that :-)

Love you all!