combination of google problems!

[kosar]

I have read the already posted threads containing sites losing descriptions, pr, and the index page. Our site still has PR and the sub pages are indexed yet, we have no title or description and have suffered a major loss in ranking across the board. Any info would help.

[kosar]

I really just want to know if this is a google penalty, error, etc. or something we did wrong. i have never seen this before.

[kaled]

I began a thread some time ago on the subject of an apparent Googlebug. To cut a long story short, there may be a problem whereby if Googlebot is unable to read a page, it may effectively vanish from the index until the page issues a response code of 200 (instead of 304 I think) to an if-modified-since request.

For plain html, the solution is to touch the files (change the file date) or upload them again.

I don't use php, etc., but I guess there is a simple solution for dynamic pages.

This may not be the cause of the problem in your case, but try it and see.

Kaled.

[kosar]

thanks kaled, do you know where i can find a dynamic solution?

[Chico_Loco]

I've seen GoogleBot getting a few 304's, but what it usually does is follows that request with another for the very same page and it then receives a 200 - even though the material on the page would not have changed at all, and usually those follow-up requests come within seconds of the first. So I guess Google is sending an if-modified-since header in the 1st request, then not sending it with the second?

I've never seen this to be the cause of any problems though, I have PR7 with about 1k pages indexed, and it deep crawls me almost everyday (it's been averaging about 350 pages per day for the past week).

I'm not the top of the rankings, but my site is where it deserves to be given it's relatively new (5 months), on the 2nd page for my target term.

Now, a few of pages do not have a title or description if I do a site: search, but that doesn't bother me all that much because most of the ones without those are unimportant pages which are very deep in the site. I guess in a perfect world they would get crawled - but Google seems to know which pages are important enough to merit a crawling, and those that aren't.

You say you still have your PR, but what is it? I think if you're only a 4 or 5 then Google doesn't see your site as being popular enough to merit a very deep crawl.

Does your index page still have it's title & description, and if so, what % of the total number of indexed pages do or do not have their title's and desc's?

[kaled]

If Googlebot is requesting the same page twice within a few seconds, it's definitely not healthy. But I agree, there is no certainty that the 304 issue is the cause of the problems in this case. But with static pages, it's easy to eliminate.

Kaled.

[Chico_Loco]

It doesn't do it for every page, and I've only seen this 2 or 3 times before, and I think they were PDF files or something. I'd know if it was doing this more because I'm a fanatic and I grep my logs daily!

[kosar]

i just looked at some of my logs and realized i went from 900 hits from google bot in five days to 14 hits in five days. i didnt change anything on the site during this time so i have to believe this is a penalty.

[kosar]

also i looked up my cached pages on google and the no title and description is happening on all of them. What is going on?