Google delisted 5 of my sites.

google delisted form index

[batterysaver]

I manage many websites for clients. Recently, 5 of my managed websites became no longer indexed in google. Suspiciously, these sites also appear as reference clients links on my "clients" page (for people to see samples of our work). Has anyone any idea why they might delist my linked sites?

***QUESTION: Is it possible for one of my competitors to get my sites delisted to make us look bad? This is what I'm thinking happened.

Thanks

[gilli]

Not sure what you mean by delisted? They aren't appearing where they were in the SERPs? Or they don't appear at all with allinurl:thedomain.com? Hae you checked their PR with the google toolbar?

***QUESTION: Is it possible for one of my competitors to get my sites delisted to make us look bad? This is what I'm thinking happened.

Have you broken any of the terms of service? If not then I wouldn't be worried about this aspect of it.

[John_Creed]

Have you read any of the recent threads on this forum? Google is currently having problems.

The sites that dropped out of Google. Are they new sites?

[batterysaver]

"Delisted" meaning the url's are not found anywhere within google using "allinurl:thedomain.com" or any other search method. Also, service has never been interupted.

[batterysaver]

The sites were listed for about (1) year. One of them had a 5 PR for our keywords. HUUMMMMMM!

[gilli]

If you are concerned about possibly being the victim of a malicious spam report, post a spam report yourself and mention webmasterworld, your nic and address it to googleguy. Probably also want to mention the domains in question and some details on what you have seen happening.

[percentages]

>url's are not found anywhere within google using "allinurl:thedomain.com"

Nahhhhh, not possible unless you're clocking and have been manually reported. Which for 5 domains at one time, within one month will give you the trophy.

Sticky me a URL or two, and lets see what feat managed to achieve this remarkable achievement!

[trillianjedi]

Sounds to me like you've been caught in one of the more recent google "bad boy" detector filters.

What have you done on all 5 of the sites that would warrant being penalised?

Likely to be hidden text or links in my view.

TJ

[rfgdxm1]

You never answered the question whether you had been a naughty boy or not. Were all these sites squeaky clean? No hidden anything, not all crosslinked, etc.?

[batterysaver]

We did nothing out of the ordinary to the sites. They were listed and then nothing. Truth: we are doing nothing other than solid SEO. Good titles, description, keyords, nothing hidden, etc... That's why I'm listing this problem here. It is very much out of the ordinay.

[percentages]

batterysaver,

I checked 2 of them, one seems to have been registered in Feb 2003, the other in March 2003...please confirm.

If so, you are part of the Google current issues. Unless you showed up in the main index of DEC/Jan 2003 then there is no guarantee you will be here today!

Is this issue aggrevatiting.....yup you bet it is, but Google owns the SE world so it feels it can do as it pleases......famous last words!

[John_Creed]

Are these sites now PR 0 or a grey bar, or do they still retain their PR?

[batterysaver]

Percentage,
The registration dates on the url's I sent you are correct. I have some that are older (Sep-2000) with the same problem.
Mybe I'll give it time.
The problem is my clients are killing me.

***But, do you think there is a way a competitor could be messing with us by somehow spaming google, which may inturn be getting us delisted?****

PR=0

[gilli]

The problem is my clients are killing me.

Do you think your clients have unrealistic expectations? If so why?

***But, do you think there is a way a competitor could be messing with us by somehow spaming google, which may inturn be getting us delisted?****

If there was then I think we would have seen some of the SEOs on these boards screaming blue murder and/or Google rapidly becoming useless.

[trillianjedi]

***But, do you think there is a way a competitor could be messing with us by somehow spaming google, which may inturn be getting us delisted?****

No. BUT they could have reported you for spamming if there is any hint of it on your sites.

Percentages - did you check them out?

TJ

[percentages]

batterysaver,

The problem seems to be a lack of indexed inbound links.

Google will drop sites if it thinks there are no inbound links. I found some inbound links using other search engines, but those pages have also been dropped from Google. Because Google has dropped the pages that link to you, it has dropped some of your sites as well.

I didn't see any real reason why Google has dropped any of these pages. They all look "clean" now, and I doubt they were ever anything but clean. My guess is that you are suffering because Google's index is currently missing a large number of pages, including those that link to some of your sites.

My suggestion would be to get links from sites Google doesn't drop very often, like dmoz and Yahoo! Then a few good business directories and other local sites who may have users that appreciate your content.

One scary thing about your example is that it indicated to me that you are not alone. There must be a large number of sites that are now MIA from the Google index.

Losing some of your inbound links (due to Google not indexing them) when you have a few hundred links might only drop you down a few SERPs, but I wonder how many sites have now been removed altogether because they lost the only 2 or 3 inbound links they had? The roll-on effect could be huge.

Pity Google doesn't keep that "Searching 3,083,324,652 web pages" on their home page up-to-date, so we can see how many pages it really has indexed. I don't understand how they can't know how many pages are in their index?

On the plus side I did find a number of pages that Google still does have indexed which will eventually lead back to the ones it has dropped.

I guess when Google deep crawls again, and updates, you will be back where you were before....if it gets it right this time!

[Alphawolf]

Google is banning sites that do not specify a background color.

AW

[Marval]

Alphawolf...what proof can you show of that?

[TheDave]

I dont think Alphawolf can possibly be serious. :/

[GoogleGuy]

AW, that's not true.

[Alphawolf]

AW, that's not true.

Geez. Sorry folks. Was going to put a little "joke" in there, but thought it was obvious.

It's just a huge pet peeve of mine. I just checked another site in a thread and it lacks a BG color too. Some people set their window color to something other than white.

I know folks who use different shades of grey (like me) and have even come across someone who uses a light rose color.

Sites that intended to be seen with a white BG, but never specify it (why?) look very silly.

Sorry for the rant.

AW

[kevinpate]

And the winner of the June 3
"Wanna See Some Cardiac Patterns Spike" Award
goes to ...(opens envelope) .... AW
(music plays, the audience claps with gusto)

[JudgeJeffries]

Whilst using WPG last month I noticed a box indicating that my site had text and background color the same. I searched and couldnt see it.
My designer searched and couldnt pin it down and definitely didnt do it on purpose. We decided to abandon the design which we had purchased as a template and use another which we did PDQ.
My point is that these things may not be easy to spot and and an inadvertant ban can be had very easily.

[Stefan]

Thanks, JudgeJeffries, I knew there was a reason for having those crude wordpad .htm files on my site... I would have noticed having the same bgcolor as text in the tags when I was figuring it out. Don't you ever dig into the code?

[JudgeJeffries]

Sorry Stephan but we dont all live and die in the black hole of html code, some of us have a life.
There's plenty of amateurs like me who use this board who no doubt get inadvertantly tripped up, but interestingly enough even my pro web designer had difficulty identifying the problem. I'm sure I'm not unique. Perhaps Google have effectively reduced any penalty to one month because they reallise that the problem does not only arise as a result of deliberate spamming. Suppose you have heard what they say about sarcasm?

[Stefan]

To tell you the truth, JudgeJeffries, I wasn't being sarcastic. My site has an amateurish quality because I build the pages in Wordpad, but it prevents accidents such as yours; I would be very aware of hidden text or the like. My apologies.