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The original 1st page would be the full shiny widget guide and the 2nd page is a page listing the best shiny widgets.
Around the end of December and beginning of January my serp position for "shiny widgets" was #4 and the 2nd page(recommended shiny widgets) wasn't introduced until mid January. During the last google update my first page dropped completely.. I can't find it using allinurl: or site:
This particular term I noticed is outdoiing all other relevant terms by like 5-6x and I can't figure out why the page would be dropped. If my first page returned and to its previous spot it would literally double my traffic :P
No tricks, no cloaking, no javascript, just a basic html table based design with mostly text content about what makes up a good shiny widget.
I'm pretty sure it can't be reported as spam as it clearly isn't, it would be one of those pages google is supposed to like(non commercial, informative, specific)
Has anyone ever had a similar experience? I just find it strange as I have pages that were completed last week showing up when using allinurl: or the site: command.
Quite a few thousand webmasters I guess :)
Search for "Florida".
[mydomain.com...]
[mydomain.com...]
or similar?
I had a terrible hosting company until two months ago and found that my servers were down for some time nearly every day due to poor quality products at their end. Google never removed me during the 6 weeks this was happening.
Maybe a Google Technician could confirm whether Google stills removes web site from its index if the server is down for a small length of time.
I agree this would be good to know. A lot of posters still use the "downed server" as a reason for a drop. I always assumed it was true.
Alot of posters use alot of reasons for alot of things. The amount of advice I read in these forums that is just so blatantly wrong. I think most new webmasters don't understand that this is a terrible cut throat business and that sometimes the person giving them advice is their competitor who is intentionally giving them bad advice. I can't say that I've ever done that, but I have not bothered to correct someone who I know is in the same commercial area as me.
www.widgets.com/shiny-widgets.html
The rest of the site is fine and some pages are doing pretty good, it's just this one page that fell out of the google index that has been there for a couple months. Are single pages penalized or is it usually whole domains?
My host did have some down time issues for a few days and one of those days it was down for 7 hours... but still.. a single page? Not to mention google has been by practically every day for the last week or more scanning the site for changes and new pages or something.
Both of these crawl the web as much as Google so you should have been hit by these just as much.
>I had a terrible hosting company until two months ago and found that my servers were down for some time nearly every day due to poor quality products at their end. Google never removed me during the 6 weeks this was happening.
But what if Googleblot came around multiple times in those 6 weeks, and luck had it every time the site was down? If it is just a one time, small outage than it makes sense Googlebot should come back and try again. However, if it keeps finding the site down...
I was referring to webmasters who would, such as in this case where the server was down for 7 hours, immediately jump to the 'server down' cliche.
Google is an internet company. They have alot of servers (which I might add are down on many occasions) so they will understand this problem. You won't get kicked out for not appearing 4 or 5 times. The cut off point is probably quite a high number of non-appearances due to Googlebots frequency. So I discount the theory of 'server down' as being an answer to MOST removals.
But yes, in the unlikely event that Google crawled my site at the exact instance my server was down every day for 6 weeks, I'm sure my site would be removed. There, you were right, clever you.
I checked my logs and they don't seem to come around as often as google. My site was launched fairly recently though.. around the beginning of October.
The page missing from google still retains its PR but I read the PR value shown on the toolbar is slow to reflect actual PR. I also checked using "cached snapshot of page" through the toolbar and apparently the page is no longer cached either.
When my site was launched the page in question was one of the first to show up in the serps.
Although the page renders just fine in all browsers I test with I found a closing tag I forgot to remove while revamping the site code. The timing of page being dropped and site revamp seem to coincide as well.
According to some error checkers it gave errors where it looked like the body AND html tag didn't have closing tags even though they were there but AFTER the problem tag in question (DOH!).
Checked all other pages and it was just this page I forgot to remove the redundant tag on. If it was this that caused the page to be dropped I will have to kick myself.. that page drove 50% of my traffic per day :P If the sub-page of that page didn't get first page serps as well then my traffic would've taken a huge dive... rather than a semi-large dive.
Would googlebot notice this type of code error more than a browser? I didn't catch it because the page looked fine in all current browsers. My doctype is 4.01 transitional so perhaps the more modern browsers ignored it?
>But yes, in the unlikely event that Google crawled my site at the exact instance my server was down every day for 6 weeks, I'm sure my site would be removed. There, you were right, clever you.
I wouldn't be surprised at all being down 5 times in a row when Googlebot came around could get some sites removed. Particularly low PR sites that Googlebot doesn't check on that often.
Unlikely I would say. I guess a lot of pages are not valid, and a bot has to cope with that.
I'm curious about the end of the story, whether your page will be indexed again after your changes.
