Sudden loss of all inbounds and drop in PR

Does Google hate me?

[Quarfelburg]

Hi all,

I just did a check on my link popularity and suddenly all my inbound links for Google have disappeared! They still show up on Altavista and MSN, but on Google only my dmoz listing shows (and of course all the pages with links pointing to me are recently cached by Google). This also resulted in a decline in Page Rank.

Any idea why this would have happened? Does Google hate me now?

[Rugles]

What was the nature of your incoming links?
Linkfarms?
Guestbooks?

Is your website linking to some bad neighborhoods?

[Quarfelburg]

No the site was completely ethical, all inbounds were extremely targetted.

After a bit of site searching I am wondering if it has something to do with my 404's. I had just made my 404 redirect to my main homepage as I had changed the naming scheme of some of my pages.

Could this be the problem? Will I ever get my inbounds back, or should I just accept them as a rather hefty loss?

[Rugles]

Q

I am not sure about your 404's. That is something you might have to figure out because you can see the code and the pages in question.

You do realize that only backlinks with a PR of 4 or higher show up in your backlinks. It could be that your backlinks have lost PR.

[BigDave]

Yes, the redirect is most likely your problem.

Click on the "control panel" link at the top of this webmaster world page.

Then click on "Server Headers" in the coumn on the left.

Enter [yourdomain...] and see make sure that your 404 is returning an actual 404 status. If it is returning a 200, then you have problems.

If google goes to your site and requests the robots.txt file, and gets your home page with a 200 status, and then cannot understand what is in your robots.txt file, they play it sage and assume that you do not want to be spidered.

You are also causing garbage to remain in the search engines, and you will appear to have a lot of duplicate content because all those URLs point to the same page.

[Quarfelburg]

Dave I actually checked this an hour ago when site searching, and it is logged as a 404. Because of this I doubt that is the problem.

I guess I will just have to wait and see what happens. I emailed Google - perhaps they will provide some insightful information.

Has this happened to anyone else recently? Could it just be a Google error?

[mrguy]

The more important question is what has happened to your SERPs.

Did you fall out of grace when this occured?

[Splosh]

are you redirecting your 404 page to your index page because some of your inbound links now point to pages that are no longer there?

If this is the case, I wonder if G knows they are pointing to missing pages and has removed those links from your Backlinks, after all, they go nowhere.

You would be better using a 301 redirect to the new pages, this means the page has been "Perminantly Moved". That would be better than a 404.

If you do a site search for "301 redirect" you will find many threads on this subject.

[Quarfelburg]

Google emailed me back and told me that I have not been penalized. Unfortunately my SERPS have still vanished in thin air.

As to the 404s - All my inbounds were pointing to my index, and my 404 redirects to my index. I will change the 404s to manual 301s just in case.

If I have not been penalized should my SERPS not show up when the inbounds are crawled?

If I email Google with a list of my larger inbounds do you think they would check it out?

Thanks,
Hayden

(P.S. Sorry about the tardy response, it was Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada!)