googlebot

lost ranking

[briandangbob]

I am a digital artist with average skills in the code world. my company web page lost its ranking completely. no matter what i use for a key word my page does not list. i used to be able to see my page ranked at least somewhere depending on what search word was used. i have noticed my site has not been crawled by google in over a month. does anybody no what happened. when i updated my site globally with some aesthetic changes that is when i noticed my page fell off of the world. this has never happened to me. can google not crawl a page for specific reasons? how often should a page be crawled? maybe someone can direct my to a place of do's and dont's.

Thanks

[hutcheson]

Possibilities:

-The page has a META tag with NOINDEX.
-The site has a robots.txt file that forbids spidering. (if you have access to site logs, and googlebot asks for robots.txt file but nothing else, this may be the problem.)-Your aesthetic changes have caused some text to be hidden. (Turn off image loading, and make sure every dot or tiddle in your HTML file can be viewed on the screen.)
-Your aesthetic changes consisted of replacing HTML text with graphic text in images, flash files, etc., which google doesn't read. (Repent and restore the text which you had stolen fourfold.)
-Your changes resulted in somehow-badly-formatted HTML. (Run the main page through an HTML validator. Fix everything--an experienced HTML hacker will be able to pick out the important errors, but if you don't know HTML well, you can't tell which are trivial.)
-Links: you have no inbound links, or only links from pages that Google has already recognized are worthless ("bad neighborhoods", "FFA link farms", "mutual-admiration-link-cycles", etc.)
-Banned for cause: read Google's list of things not to do. Do them not, even knowing that they WOULD have improved your pagerank if Google hadn't detected them. (If you find some of them on the page, remove them and write requesting reinstatement. Do not expect your pagerank to remain as inflated as it was while your SE-spamming was working.)
I should also mention Googleglitch, for which the only known cure is patience. In a month or three, this problem will probably go away on its own.

[antoshka]

i might be wrong, but most of the times the reason is - you're banned. google bans mercilessly.

anyone knows if there's a way to get your PR back?

[edited by: engine at 7:48 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2003]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[briandangbob]

hutcheson-
are you basing your remarks after viewing my website or just simply stating the possibilities.
i use dreamweaver. dreamweaver codes for me. all i do is add java script when necessary and or specific html. i hope i am not banned. it doesn't make sense. go to my user profile and link to my website. than explain. understand the site is in development and it does have some usability issues at the moment. my site is pretty straight forward as i am selling design not web development. but i do want to show up in google like before.

[fscanf]

When you say google bans mercilessly, what excatly do you mean by that?

[bether2]

antoshka,

You might want to remove the URL from your post. See #13 of the TOS [webmasterworld.com].

Beth

[g1smd]

>> Possibilities: <<

was what Hutcheson said.

[JayC]

i might be wrong, but most of the times the reason is - you're banned. google bans mercilessly.

I wouldn't agree with that -- either part of it. Since it's usually the case that no one outside of Google knows whether or not a site's been banned, it's impossible to say with credibility that "most of the time" such a situation is because of a ban. On the other hand, there is good evidence that "much of the time" when someone thinks they've been banned or penalized they really haven't.

I'd take the other side: it's very rarely the case under the circumstances described that the reason is that the site's been banned.

Google bans mercilessly? I think you could find plenty of people, judging by the number of complaints in this forum about other people "spamming," who'd say that Google doesn't take action often at all.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Google bans mercilessly? I think you could find plenty of people, judging by the number of complaints in this forum about other people "spamming," who'd say that Google doesn't take action often at all.

I agree. And when they do, it is usually for something really bad, like the obvious and intentional use of hidden keyword packed text and links.