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Help please
suggestions?
Yep - this is happening to one of our sites. Crawled pretty well every day, PR 7 on index page, PR 6 on sub-pages (except for a PR Update(!) to 7 on one page the other day)
But,
Nothing but the index page indexed by Google. Most pages were previously indexed as not-www - on the basis of a single link the Googlesnipped decided to follow one day.
Reason:
301 re-direct, a simple one to solve a not-www to www issue.
2nd reason: snipped
Consequences: Severe
Sympathy: No thanks: 'Worse things happen at sea' etc. And why should anyone give a snipped if I have to sell my house, put my wife on the streets etc. etc.
Mental state: Poor, but due to my New Year's resolution I now swear less.
p.s. The page that received the PR update from 6 to 7 isn't in the index. snipped Now figure that one out.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 4:48 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed inappropriate language [/edit]
We searched and destroyed all the not-www links, and at the same time made the 301 redirect to www.
Result has been that the not-www pages have been dropping like flies from Google (except the index page which has always been listed as www). Crawls every day or so; PR still shows on sub-pages (they're even updated!), logs show the 301 is in operation.
It's a slow death due to a 301.
I have a simple thesis - snipped - but I defer to those who have developed more sophisticated arguments.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 4:49 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed inappropriate language [/edit]
I never used 301 on my Domain.
However, few of my pages which are using java applet are returning 301 anyhow.
I removed them too
2 of other sites, never used any 301 anytime on any page!
They also suffered the same slow death.
Still wondering when I'll hear from Horse's mouth.
super_seo,
any change in situation?
Yeah, I've heard this from you for some time now.
Fact is, that Google needs at least a couple of weeks to sort a 301 out.
In the meantime, chances are that you will see both sites die. But not for long. After Googlebot has sorted it out, everything will be okay.
Does google know about it?
With so many people writing about it. I am sure they know.
Are they doing anything to correct it?
Anybody's guess is as good as mine.
But what do we all do? I guess share as much information as we can and wait.
What webdev highlights
I have done a test and managed to get the missing title and description by doing the following.
Set up a permanent redirect to another one of our sites, after 2 weeks I now have the symptoms you are all describing...
I can say that in my case there was a redirect in place...using a javascript to redirect users to differing pages built around 2 sets of frame resolutions.
So if the redirects has a bearing to the missing titles/descriptions then I'm not surprised.
Do I have this right? You got hammered because of a backlink with no www, you've corrected things, even done a 301, and you haven't seen the www.site.com pages in the serps yet except for the /index.htm, (that was always there)?
The 301 isn't even necessary as long as the bad backlinks are gone and there are lots of good backlinks. Google should get it sorted out, but it might take a couple of months. (Be glad we're in the era of rolling updates... it will happen faster than it would have a year ago). How long ago did you got rid of the site.com backlinks and do the 301?
How often do you check your logs? You have to watch for how people are linking to you... it's not just a <a href="http://site.com"></a> that will do it... there are others.
Good luck, patience.
Thanks for the encouraging words. The perm. redirect (and not-www link destruction) was done over a month ago. We figured it would cause some hiccups - but to have a slow death at this time of year is financially a genuine slow death.
The 301 had to be done - because a single not-www link out there could cause a similar problem in future.
Why Google chose to list our site as not-www, when the ratio of www to not-www incomings links is 100-1, and our DMOZ and Yahoo listings are also www is anyone's guess. So we had to bite the bullet at some point and set up the 301.
And yes Dirkz - I have stated it before - perhaps too often and in too florid language. I think Google is bust.
Why Google chose to list our site as not-www, when the ratio of www to not-www incomings links is 100-1
If that offending link, from an offending webmaster who should have known better, had the highest PR, that might have been enough.
Our site went through the same thing last May. All it took was one bad incoming link to remove our index page. Fortunately, we got it changed before Google had a chance to crawl all the inner pages as site.org/everything_else.htm.
It will sort out eventually, man. Blo*dy poor timing though...
I have to say... it is stated by Google that incoming links can do you no harm. This is not true, they certainly can.
2) Another site undergoing slow death when searched site:domain.com ,
shows my index page listing with a Title "my Hosting provider's name". AND when I see the cache version, it opens my original index.
Its surely a glitch with redirect.
They changed their guidelines:
> There is *almost* nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.
I can see this is going to get much worse. You can now wipe out rival sites by setting up re-directs to their sites. Anyone know of any sites they would personally like to see vanish from Google's Index? Maybe your main competitors.
This is Crazy. Has Googleguy not made any references to this?
His comments simply provide cause for more speculation.
There's no substance and no content in what he says beyond what is already in the public domain.
It's merely a fantastic PR exercise by a company that has already sold out.
You have to watch for how people are linking to you... it's not just a <a href="http://site.com"></a> that will do it... there are others.
Hi,
Are you saying that if I link to a site using [site.com...] rather than [site.com...] I can condem that site to a slow death?
Has anyone done this experimentally to see if it works.
Best wishes
Sid
Avoidable by a 301. But there are some other issues left ...
Care to expand?
Are you saying that if I link to a site using [site.com...] rather than [site.com...] I can condem that site to a slow death?
Afaik, in theory, (with no 301), if the PR of the link is high enough, Google will list site.com as the URL in the serps rather than www.site.com and it doesn't make much difference, you're still there, but in practice this isn't necessarily the case. I don't know if some dupe content penalty kicks in or what, but when it happened to us, it knocked our index.htm out completely until we got it taken care of and their site had been re-crawled with the right link.
I don't want to start a big deal on this, but it's best to watch out for how people link to you and make sure it's with a consistent URL form. I never bothered with a 301, so I don't know if that can be a source of problems, (it's not supposed to be), but since our little adventure, I look at the logs very, very closely. I don't want anything slipping through and repeating that mess.
When the results are displayed for any given search term only the www.mysite.com pages appear. The others are there but do not come up. It took at least 3 months for this to work itself out.
Did all I could to insure that links I control only go to www.mysite.com.
One would think that this would cause a duplicate issue with a penalty, but as of now it's not happening. I believe they are afraid to issue a site wide penalty for this, simply because it's their screw-up in the first place.
They have a big problem with this issue AND THEY DAMN WELL KNOW IT. GG guy has never to my understanding, taken a definative position on this issue in any sort of manner.
Put a 301 on one set of pages? Well, you can, but buyer beware, slow death is around the corner. It has happened to lots of people out there.
Frankly, there are so many sites with this issue that if they removed one of the situations but left the other, their database would probably shrink by a third. Then the big question would be, which set to keep? Talk about a hot potato!
I believe part of what caused this "massive screw-up" is when they began their experiments using the whois, and whois services, and the indexing parked domains. To me they all seem tied together.
The notion that www.mysite.com and mysite.com are two different entities in a way is a complete misnomer.
My belief is that less than 5% of the sites out there truly are different. Therefore:
If it walk like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.
If page size A=B and Title is a match, it for sure is a duck.
In reality, that's seems to be the what is occurring in my case.
No penalty, just 270 pages for my site, 135 being duplicate content.
So no redirect at all - 302 or 301.
not-www simply doesn't exist anymore.
(shame)
Also urls from whom all inbound links were removed by me more than 6 months ago are showing now. Could this be an indication, that they are trying to compare old content and new content and use it the ranking process
<added>aka stripping the old content from the new content and rank the site higher for only the "added" content? (and screwed up)</added>
[edited by: ikbenhet1 at 2:14 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2004]
We went from 25,000 odd pages to 1300 pages in 3 months, with a decrease every week.
Result: Google is crawling the top level pages as we speak. Lets see if it goes deep and indexes the pages. I for one cannot figure out what caused the slow death on this directory.
I am so confused about this "slow death syndrome" the reasons for it happening seem to be changing by the day.
My own problems started in November with our host being down on several occasions, then we added a robots.txt in December which worked fine until our host did something and made the robots.txt return a "403 Forbidden", and now I find myself looking a re-directs. We have several domains pointing to the mother site, these use 200's which from what I have read are fine, however, something I did over a year ago was to make one of the other URL's go to a page that did a refresh after 1 second and then go to the index page, this was just for tracking purposes.
So now I find myself trying to figure out why we have lost all but 20 pages (these only showing the URL)is it all of the above or just 1 of the problems that causes this.
I have removed all the redirects to the site now, got the robots.txt working properly, and hopefully our host is now sorted and we will have no further downtime, we have not had any downtime now for 3 weeks.
I am being tempted to just launch the site under a different URL and starting again. I find just waiting for something that may infact take days, weeks or month just a little bit much.
BUT the internal pages for www.site.com are PR 5 too, and in case of [site.com...] ... its 0
my 99% incoming Links are pointing www.site.com , and rest 1% is not at all important...its superfluous.
- 32k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages
What the heck is a supplemental result? Anybody else see this sometimes?
my 99% incoming Links are pointing www.site.com , and rest 1% is not at all important...its superfluous.
- Starting October 4th or so googlebot activity for my site began to almost stop then around the 10th it stopped completely from averaging 600 hits a day to 0
- Around the 21st of October I noticed thousands of pages missing from the index and the pages that were there had no title or description. I spent the next week trying to solve the riddle, at the end of the week i began this thread in desperation that i might find people with similar problems that could band together and make some noise. As I had already sent 100s of emails and took every action i could think of.
- just some of the actions were;
my lawyers threatened legal action
i wrote 100s of emails to google
i stickied google guy
i took out any redirects
i scanned out all bad incoming links
i removed any pages that google might have seen as duplicate
i submitted and wrote letters to dmoz
i changed the IP my site was on
i changed the server i hosted my site on
i republished a new directory structure
I have begged for help to the entire SEO world
i set up site maps all over the place
i added redirects i took them out and then re-added have always used 301s with no problem in the past
i removed shared borders
and another hundred other things on over 30,000 pages of content its been a nightmare
Well the reason why i have posted here is just to let you know there is hope. The reason why i haven’t posted recently is because while it appears that im coming back its not a definite and even if i get back I have no factual reason why, I did so many bl**dy things that it could have been anyone of them.
Google began spidering me hard for the first time on dec 31st. 450 visits
1st 400 visits
2nd 541 visits
3rd 100 visits
4th 611 visits
5th 350 visits so far
on the 2 14 pages apppeared on -kr
on the 2nd 3100 pages
on the 3rd 6500 pages
on the 4th 9500 pages
so this seems all good at least the bl**dy spiders are back
the listings though are somewhat reminisent of pre-slow death. Google only shows 400 of the supposed 9,500 in the index, and 10% of these have no descr or title.
So I guess we'll have to see what happens, but without a doubt its a problem that needs to be address and isnt.
Google is it that serious that your afraid to let it out of the plex?
