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The problem doesn't seem to be related to a specific data centre (i.e. it can occur at all of them). The problem also arises for a search of allinanchor, allintitle and allintext of keyword1. However, it seems that other keywords or combination of keywords are not affected.
Anybody else seeing a similar behaviour?
Drewls.
Hope so, or they could just be scratching their heads (er beards possibly - do they wear white coats, have large glasses and a fondness for English real ales?). ;O)
Seek.
It's not even funny anymore. GoogleGuy, any progress in understanding what is happening? Did you witness the phenomenon with any of the sites that people have sent you?
Scott
PS
Well aware of referral codes coming up in the index, but replacing a homepage?
Although google still has 5000+ of my pages indexed, index page has disappeared on all datacenters for primary keyphrase, although site still comes up when searching for the company name directly. All other pages seem to be unaffected (still plenty of adsense clicks ;-), and site still has PR6 rating showing on front page.
This seems to be happening every Sunday/Monday. The same thing occurred to a long-time competitor. His frontpage disappeared from the index for a week, and reappeared the following weekend.
In addition, SERPS quality seems to have taken a nosedive, with pages 2-on filled with amazon/epinions/microsoft knowledgbase links.
It appears (at least on my end) that google perfoms some kind of recaculation/reorganization of links every weekend, and quickly distributes the results to all datacenters.
Frankly, I'm surprised they continue to allow the SERPS to decline in quality as they have over the past couple of months, but am confident once they find the problem, they will return to relevancy....I just hope my site get's returned in the process ;-)
Main page still shows PR6, and other pages of site still receive a good deal of traffic. Luckily, I've seen the writing on the wall and have diversified beyond this site, as well as gaining decent ranking on other engines (cmon Yahoo...swith to your own results ;-)!
I'm hoping this is just a temporary glitch...but I'm certainly not counting on it. While I've heard for months the "don't depend on google for your income" crowd, and have several #1 positions on teoma/altavista/inktomi, when an engine has positioned itself to drive 75%+ of all search traffic, what alternative is there? (other than expensive PPC campaigns).
Ah well...luckily, our affiliate program is coming along, and will be fully implemented by October 1st. From then on, I am going to focus the majority of our marketing efforts on our affiliates, and stop worrying about dropping off the radar every other week ;-)
On most datacenters searching for my company name, which is unique, brings up two internal pages as #2 and #3, #1 is a profile of my company on another site. Index gone except on refresh when it is #1.
Hope it gets corrected soon :(
P.S.
Does not yet have any links, and obviously not yet in ODP.
If you guys keep putting every little other problem you have into this thread, the chances of us getting to the bottom of our little refresh problem are lessened.
Not trying to be a jerk here, I know your problems are important too, but it really is better not to cloud the issue.
"You might also note that GoogleGuy has not posted on this issue at all (either here or elsewhere)."
Did someone call me? Hi, everybody. :) Let me give you a bit of background from my perspective. During the Esmeralda update, I tried my utmost to investigate complaints about missing index pages. I left my stickmail on. I wrote directly to people and asked for examples, etc. After trying my best to bird-dog down the complaints, I received a total of three reports where someone thought that their index page wasn't showing up where it should.I'm totally happy to check out individual examples if people think there are problems, but I need data. :) If you fill out a spam report, let's use the keyword "indexpage"--I have the ability to scan for specific keywords in the spam reports, and then it's easy for me to debug or work with other Googlers to see if there's anything going on. Given what I know about the crawl/index at this instant, I'm just a smidge skeptical, but again--I'm happy to check out specifics to be on the safe side.
Hope that helps,
GoogleGuy
GG, it has been some time now that since some people have sent you reports.
Do you have any comment?
I'm totally happy to check out individual examples if people think there are problems, but I need data... <SNIP> .. it's easy for me to debug or work with other Googlers to see if there's anything going on. Given what I know about the crawl/index at this instant, I'm just a smidge skeptical, but again--I'm happy to check out specifics to be on the safe side.
Googleguy made this comment a while ago, but I just put in perspective with all the recent posts (especially those on the thread "More eBay, Amazon, Dealtime, Epinions, etc. in Results").
Now... Googleguy's comments sound downright naive, or spin-doctored, or both.
I don't mean to bash GoogleGuy personally. I just think a more honest dialogue is imperative, considering the strong feelings that are surfacing here (after all, people's traffic and livelihood are at stake!)
"I have one site that I manage for an instrument builder. The index page does not show up at all in the serps. When I do a search for the url it says that Google has no information. The other pages of this site rank well. Now get this though. The index page has page rank. When you do a backward link search it shows the links and get this... When I am on the index page and use the toolbar to show me a "cached example" it shows the index page with recent changes I made. But do the url search and google says "no information"."
Could somebody explain what is going on?
Thanks
I was asked to change my handle due to confusion with the old one... Been monitoring and had maybe 10 posts in last 6 months.
I'm managing 250 URL's and have 10,000+ backlinks, good content, minimal edgy stuff on 'test' basis (heh, there ARE a bundle of engines out there).
6/28- deep freshie starts
7/7- phrases start to pop to top
7/21- Life is good
8/1- Life is better
8/9- Life is grand
8/11- 50% of indexes dissappear; still on index, however.
*Boing* *boing* *boing*
I noticed the opposite of you, my index page seemed to have stopped disappearing for the last few days but today it's started doing it again. Damn!
I've started to wonder if it has anything to do with the fresh tags, I lost mine for a few days and that's when it seemed to be working correctly, now it's fresh tagged again it's started misbehaving. Even though it had lost the fresh tag for those few days the cached version was still being updated every day.
Simon.
I type a particular keyword phrase and hit search - my sites omes up number 9 - if I refresh the page I am number 2.
This happens from the tool bar or from the the Google page. I noticed this 2 days ago.
I hope this is just glitch -
Shawn
And still not word one from GoogleGuy on the matter. That says to me that they just don't care about this.
Still wish he'd at least say so though.
My Index page dissapeared again. Was listed on 2nd page for 2 days and now gone. I think there is some kind of a relationship between these Phenoms.
Scott
You may be right. There is no fresh tag for my site right now...
I'll check whether the page starts disappearing again from the SERPs once it regains a fresh tag and will report here whether the correlation holds.
Gained over 100 backlinks in the "new" update (as of this morning).
Home (index) page still MIA for main keyword/phrase (was in top 5). Site still comes up when company name is searched for. In addition, google has over 7000 pages from site listed in their index (via marketleap), including the index page.
Multiple googlebot crawlers have been hoovering site for the last couple of days, but not one has hit the index page (deeper pages only), including freshbot. Site still maintains PR6.
My only possible explanation? The site was down for several hours last sunday due to a server hard-drive failure. Since Google appears to be re-configuring serps about once per week (at least for my genre), I think it may be possible that my site will return to the index in a week or so (I hope).
In addition, I've noticed this same phenom occurring to several of my competitors, a few of which disppeared a couple of weeks ago for about 5-6 days, then returning to index (about the same time my site's main page went AWOL). Further, I've noticed a general degradation of relevancy in my genre, with all pages beyond the first page returning relatively poor results.
drewls, did you recently changed the content of those (disappearing) pages?
Probably the following observation isn't related to the problem, but at least it is showing that strange things are happening. When I search for a search term at yahoo.de I got the right sponsered links but the results for a completly different serach term. Moreover, I searched for german sites and I got french. Refreshing the page solved the problem. (GoogleGuy, I saved the result just for the case that this phenomenon was related to the original problem and you are interested in details.)
