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I emailed google, and they really were not very helpful... They just said check the guidelines and thats really it.
I dont spoof or do funky seo... Im still just learning the SEO side of the house.
Nothing has really changed for about a year, aside from minor changes (Updating our store locations and minor tweaks).
The only thing that I can think of is that we have two domains pointing to the same site content. The first domain is our company name. The second domain is our company name with dashes. Its been like this since 1995 and we never had a problem... So I am not sure thats what it is now.
I thought that another company in our industry might have exploited the removal bug, since we had top or near top placement on many many keywords. But that is just a thought... since this happend the same time that Microsoft and Adobe dropped from the index.
Im at a loss... anyone have any ideas?
The only thing that I can think of is that we have two domains pointing to the same site content. The first domain is our company name. The second domain is our company name with dashes.
This shouldn't cause problems. Normally, Google either merges these sites/pages (adding PR and incoming anchor text) or removes one of the domains from the SERPs (duplicate content). In the latter case some PR and anchor text is wasted, but the other site is unaffected.
As suggested by Google, I would look for violations of the guidelines, i.e. hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages, ...
We had the same problem, already in discussion at [webmasterworld.com...]
About a week ago we dropped completely from Googles index.
I believe this could be considered a standard Google feature at this point. I read these complaints over and over again, as well as the 'I am no longer listed in Google results for my keywords' complaint. The people who have not been nuked by either of these two issues yet will always infer that the people who have these problems such as yourself are spammers. There are other people such as myself that think Google has just gone nuts.
Google can always hide behind the 'your a spammer' reason because spam is very subjective. It gives Google an out for incompetence. It's like me saying your car is ugly. Can you prove your car is not ugly? You post a photo of your car and the Google cheerleaders will always 100% agree that your car is most definitely ugly. The people who think Google has gone nuts will say, your car looks fine, it is not ugly. How do you prove either wrong? You can't. My recommendation is to go with your instinct. What do you think? Is your site ugly (spam) or has Google gone nuts?
You have said the thing which every other (WHITE HAT) SEO/Webmaster has expoerienced.
Months back GG posted a Thread which compared Google with God, now we can say if Google (God) says your Car is ugly, we cant even spit on it and go our way!
We've also dorpped by about 350 places down in the serps...despite having done NO changes to our site structure/format, and increasing incoming (relevant-one way) links by over 100 (including 4 PR8 pages deep linking directly to relevant pages).
At this point...it just doesn;t pay to ride the roller coaster. You win, google...I'll use adwrods, and let the spammers have their way with you.
