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The pages haven't been totally removed, instead it seems that the pages exist in the Google SERPS but they have no title and no snippet and therefore no longer appear for any searches.
At first I thought this was some sort of penalty / filter to remove some of the controversial search sites from its index, but it seems this applies to other large sites, e.g. dmoz. I would estimate that dmoz has had around 200,000 pages "nuked".
Has anyone noticed this phenomenon on any other sites?
But, and I hate to repeat myself again, you could have built a new site and got 2 links by now.....
;-)
Where are you Google? This hurts :o(
I wonder if this will improve things?!
Almost all pages are indexed and about 50% are showing titles and descriptions.
I changed one of the sites around significantly, but these changes have not been picked up.
Still no links and no pagerank.
If it were a penalty, would the pages still be in the index?
I just noticed (almost noon here in the UK) that Googlebot paid my site a quick visit about eight hours ago. It had a look at my robots text file and three apparently random pages then left. The pages it looked at are still not showing any titles or cache and it did not look at my home page.
Is there any significance in this? Why would it come along and just look at three pages? Also, does anyone know if the fact that it visited my site but never added any cache info or titles is significant?
Nope, not seen or seeing a grey bar on the sites that are having problems.
Balloch
If Googlebot visited this morning it is to early to tell if this has done any good. If it is freshbot have a look late tonight or early tomorrow, if it was a deeper crawl bot then in my experience of current (last 3 to 4 months) crawl to index wait 3-7 days.
Good luck!
Anyway, it's Friday and almost 5pm. I am going to pull the plug because I am going on the beer tonite (Local Real Ale Festival!) Google can go and Google him/herself for now.
P.S. I am thinking of starting a Scottish Search Engine called Shoogle!
Both freshbot and deepbot have the same range of IP Addresses now, AFAIK.
Real Ale :) - Look out for a pint of Wherry if they are there - top stuff ;)
Incidentally I checked my logs again today and noted that the bot had visited and picked up my robots text and one other page. I have just checked my site with a site:www.domain.com and I see that I now have four pages from a total of 80+ with titles, descriptions and cache. The cache is out of date but at least it is there. Should I be encouraged by this?
I tried doing a search for a five word phrase that was on one of these pages. My site was not in the top 100 results. I put quotes round the phrase and there I was at the top. I would have thought that I should have been at the top anyway since my site was the only one with the exact phrase. Can anyone tell me if there is any significance in all of this?
site:www.myurl.com brings up all my indexed pages, 75% of my pages have title and snippets, the rest don't. For a few of the pages WITHOUT snippets I can type in my target keywords for that page, and it shows up in SERPs, WITH snippet and title.
Other searches for affected pages without snippets can't find them, even though they should rank somewhere in the first 2 pages.
Going over the pages I have that are affected, it's hard to see any pattern. When I compare them to my pages that do have snippets, there's no difference that I can see, and all my stuff checks out with the W3 validator.
so better to just ignore us, get it fixed and many people will never of noticed it happened.
i think its completely misleading to go round advertising an index of X when 10%-20% is url only listings that is no good to anybody....
doing site:XXX.com.au (my site) and i get a total of 866
i then do site:****.com.au "term on every page" and get a total of 774
try site:hp.com = 398000
then site:hp.com Hewlett-Packard 313000
Hewlett-Packard appears at the bottom of all their pages... and some without listings have a pr of 8!
if i wasnt supposed to use that url then tell me off...
I am afraid that this knocks another few points of Google's own PR (as in Public Relations!)
I launched this new site about a few weeks ago.
Google picked up the links from the home page and "DEEP" crawled with static pages(about 100 pages).
When the googlebot came to this site first, the site was db driven .asp site with 2-4 parameters.
Googlebot didn't crawl further than a few dynamic links and the dynamic pages on google.com through site:mysite.com command showed no title and description for those crawled pages.
Now with converted static pages, googlwbot crawled all of the pages within one week and now shows all the titles and descriptions without any exception. All the 100 pages.
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I have much bigger site which used same template and still dynamic pages with parameters have still 70% of pages with no title and description.
Obviously the traffic to the second site dropped significantly.
So, my guess is that somehow googlebot dropped the crawling speed a lot for those dynamic pages with parameters and gave no title and description.
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Another scenario is that google might have "crawler" and "indexer" mismatch. I know Google has only one bot but what if there is main functinality on different googlebots (depending on IPs)?
i mean if one googlebot only crawls a site to find valid links (or no spider traps) and another googlebot comes along and follow the links her friend has found and send the indexing data to google?
Indexing bots will be much busier than crawling bots due to the complexity. So, there is speed mismatch for indexing. So, google knows that there are valid pages on a site but do not have any data to show on SERP (such as title, description, and cache).
Any thought on this?
Incidentally I checked my logs again today and noted that the bot had visited and picked up my robots text and one other page. I have just checked my site with a site:www.domain.com and I see that I now have four pages from a total of 80+ with titles, descriptions and cache. The cache is out of date but at least it is there. Should I be encouraged by this?
March 29
The latest on my particular problem is that Google now has my five pages, (including my home page), indexed with an up to date version in the cache and title included. My previous PR5 has not returned and Google is still reporting no links. My site is still nowhere to be seen in the SERPS and the only way it can be found is to search for a text string from one of the pages (and only when in quotes).
Can anyone forecast what is likely to happen next? Are the signs good for an eventual return to its previous position?
I assume the site in question is the one in your profile. This has been happening to you for three months now and this post has gone on for over 140 messages, but did it ever occur to you that running a webring (aka, link farm) may at some stage be harmful to your site's ranking?
Search google for your site in quotation marks and you will see out of the 9 sites on the web that link to your URL, 4 of them are part of a link farm that you are also part of.
My recommendation - get out
You in DMOZ? If not, welcome to the bottom with many of the rest of us.
How could Google possibly know the differnce beteen a webmaster who purposely joined a link farm and a webmaster whose link has been snagged by a link farm to help their results?
I can do a link test on any of my web sites and see links from sites that are questionable that I have never asked to link to me. If Google penalizes for those links then we are all in trouble.
... did it ever occur to you that running a webring (aka, link farm) may at some stage be harmful to your site's ranking?
Some of those webrings look quite legitimate to me. They're relevant to the site, so I can't see why a site would be penalised for that. In any case I thought a webring isn't the same as a link farm. And can it really be the case that Google would penalise a site for the sites that link to it, or are you saying it's the sites he links to that may be the cause of a penalty?
I assume the site in question is the one in your profile. This has been happening to you for three months now and this post has gone on for over 140 messages, but did it ever occur to you that running a webring (aka, link farm) may at some stage be harmful to your site's ranking?Search google for your site in quotation marks and you will see out of the 9 sites on the web that link to your URL, 4 of them are part of a link farm that you are also part of.
My recommendation - get out
Pimpernel, I am no longer part if this. I am out because it has already been put to me that this could have caused the problem. I was a member of a webring of about ten associated sites, all related, legitimate, engineering businesses. I took down my links to this a couple of months ago but this has not helped. I was angry that I was forced to do so because we generated mutual business through our association and I have results to prove this.
Anyway, I think you are wrong in this because the same thing is happening to many sites. You are correct however, it has been going on for more than two months and Google won't respond helpfully to any of my emails. I have spent many hours unsuccessfully trying to counteract this.
Google could help immediately by making a a statement on this problem but they have refused despite repeated pleas for them to do so. If they just come out and tell us what is happening we can react accordingly instead of all this speculation, guessing and wasting more valuable time. I hate to have to say this again but I am only a self employed engineer (a poor one at that!) I don't have time for all of this. Anyway, last post for a few hours I have to out this morning to do my real job!
I am sorry, I take back everything I said. You actually have 95 links in to your site, not 9 and the large majority are nothing to do with the web ring, they are perfectly legitimate sites. Now I am at a loss because you should be doing great. What is very strange is that on top of the "snippets" problem you have also lost your PageRank - very bizarre.
Did you do anything wrong when you were a child that Google has found out about?
Frankly, I think it is appalling that Google has not responded to your queries after so long a period.
What we are seeing is that you can actually be harmed by who links to you. May be able to explain more later
So I'm not convinced you have any sort of penalty, and no-one from Google is going to tell you how to design your site. Maybe your pages simply aren't to the taste of the current Google algo, so you need to work to make alterations here and there and not simply assume there's a bad spell been put on your site. If I were you I would dump all that code and make your pages more efficient in terms of the markup to content ratio, and focus on the density of some more distinctive key phrases that are less competitive, and see where that takes you.
Your pages may not be getting the traffic they used to, but they're still there to be found. I really don't think Google is going to come to your rescue here, as if some awful mistake has been made. Things are how they are, and I think it's up to you to alter your site to suit the circumstances.
