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After investigation I found this.
- PR is still on the pages (PR 6)
- the backlinks still are showing up in google searches.
- when typing out the url into google, only the url (such as www.widgets-widgets.com) comes up, without a title/descriptionthe same happens when you type the url into google.
Has anyone seen this problem before, or was I just temporarily delisted?
Thank you for your time,
- Jason
This looks like exactly the same as what has happened to my site! I await eagerly for it's return in a week or two then!?
- Jason
In Yahoo, it's even stranger. A search for my URL gives me just the URL, no title, and clicking on "more from this site" gives me several pages, just URL, no title. However, searching for a highly specific keyword from any of those pages gives me a normal listing, and if I click on "more from this site" on that listing, it lists my whole site, except the index.
This site has not changed at all in over a year. It has ranked well the whole time. Now suddenly there is this weirdness.
I've been penalized by Yahoo before. This is not how they do it. I've never been penalized by Google, but I've never seen this before. Something weird is going on. What's up?
I've sent an email to google and will let you know the response if and when I receive one from them.
Kiwi, your site still shows up for allinurl: on G, and has no problem in Y. Yet a search for your exact title, in quotes, yields no documents, and a search for your exact title without quotes gives just the url, no title. Very strange.
Why, if it is the same problem, is it different between our two sites. And this is what's really bugging me: why both G and Y, for my site? (you can find the site in question, it's the "sponsor" of the site in my profile). That's weird. Because they don't use the same algo any more, right? So that would imply that the problem is on my end. But if so, why are you seeing the same thing in G? This is odd....
Interestingly, we are still getting occassional visits from googlebot, but nothing like usual. The only other thing to note is that it is on server with several other related sites, non of which have been affected (although this was our money earner, so it's hit us very hard indeed).
Just be patient. Don't change anything and don't send annoying emails to google :)
There isn't something like a penalty, there's only the algo.
Suddenly all of our pages have dissapeared to url only and we don't appear for any search terms at all.
Me 2. It's not the server or IP as we have other sites doing fine on the same ip.
It's very odd as I have seen my share of penalized sites and this just doesn't fit the bill. We are talking a site with thousands of solid links to interior pages and 100% unique content. Not a big site, or the best, but certainly not a site that would get penalized. When i type in the domain name with out the extension, one or 2 interior pages show up but nothing else...
If you're still ranking well then consider yourself fortunate and most likely all will return to normal. It's those that are not ranking at all like they normally do that have most likely incurred a true penalty.
Sucks. Good luck though.
"In regard to your listings that don't have detailed titles and descriptions, the Google index contains two types of pages: fully indexed and partially indexed pages. Your pages are currently partially indexed. This means that although your pages are included in the Google index, our robots have not completely reviewed the content of your site in past crawls. Partial indexing does not adversely affect your PageRank or your inclusion in the Google index. However, it does mean that our crawlers do not have enough information about your site to provide detailed titles and descriptions. As a result, your pages are listed by their URLs in the Google index.
We understand the frustration this situation may cause you. We are working to change the way that partially indexed pages appear in our search results, and we hope that you will find the descriptions and titles of these pages more satisfactory in the future. Additionally, we will continue working to increase the number of fully indexed pages in our index. "
Still, I am not sure how a page could be partially indexed and still show up in the SERPs. Seems to me there are steps a SE needs to do with a page, which I would think follow roughly this order:
Well, who knows about the last two -- it could be that in some cases summaries are being deleted and regenerated. In our case, it looks like the entire page (index and summary) got canned, although PR is still sticking. Go figure!
For the posters who keep saying that they are still ranking well but without description, this is a different animal and has been going on for some time now. Your pages will regain their title. The newer phenomena deals with sites that lost all their ranikings as well.
Then later this morning, a different googlebot came calling and crawled the robots.txt file + one other html file.
Mediapartners-Google/2.1+(+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Ever heard of a Mediapartners-Google/2.1+ robot?
Down to 70 pages today (from 130 yesterday).
I've always been curious as to the effect the removal of Google from the equation might have - now I get to find out first hand!
At this stage, it looks like a 50% hit but will keep you posted.
No new links for a while, no changes to the site?
Similar sites that began on similar subjects still on page 1 and 2?
Hmmm. will watch this one with interest.
Nope, not yet as it is new to me.
To be clear, there are sites that lose the title and description and continue to rank and there are sites that do not rank at all, I am speaking of the latter. If you are still ranking, you will get the title back.
* no T/D from site: but still in SERPs = no worries
* no T/D from site: and not in SERPs = yes worries
Sadly I think we fall into the second bucket, and while others have found reason for optimism, mine is waning fast.
The only thing that gives me hope is that nearly our entire site has been re-crawled by GoogleBot. Gone, but not forgotten, I guess :)
"Mediapartners-Google/2.1" is the bot that Google AdSense sends to analyze a page that is running AdSense. I noticed the same bot this morning on a site of mine that has *never* run AdSense.
I too am in the same boat and based on this I have a far-out theory that perhaps something is broken with Google's normal googlebot and they've had to recruit the Mediapartners bot to pick up the slack. It could explain the Google response you received:
"...crawlers do not have enough information about your site to provide detailed titles and descriptions".
Nice response but it doesn't at all address the issue. Pages do not score high for a year and than suddenly become "partially indexed" without either a bug or a penalty.
Actually, I think they most definitely do.
Two whole areas of one of my websites reverted to partially indexed, and I'd changed no content on them at all. They're areas that are quite a way down, but one has now been revisited and reindexed, and the other hasn't.
But though I had changed no *content* on them at all, I most certainly had changed the navigation element that Dreamweaver includes for me as a library item.
As far as I can see, Google came back, found the page, looked at it and realised its index wasn't up to date, and left a note to return later to index the section. One section has been reindexed, the other hasn't yet. I'm most certainly not worried at all.
DerekH
That reply is one of about 8 "canned" responses the CS reps get to choose from and was around way before this problem existed...
