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I posted about his on another thread but it got buried and one of the moderators told me to just start a new thread. So don't beat me up for duplicate posts. :)
Yesterday my site disappeared.
Here are the facts:
site:www.mysite.com shows between 95 & 250 pages depending on when I check. Prior to yesterday I had over 450 pages showing.
Note: Only URL's showing no titles or snippets
allinanchor:www.mysite.com Prior to yesterday #6 for my toughest keyword phrase. Today we don't show up at all. (we have over 1600 backlinks)
Note: when checking www.mysite.com the home page shows
and that's where all the links are pointed to. So why the drop in allinanchor?
Can't find my site for any search term which we previously were ranking for.
Googlebot use to come to my site daily until the last week of May. Since then only one visit, on the 15th of June and just to one page, the home page.
That page shows a cache of June 16th but no other dates on any other pages.
When checking my backward links there are none from within my site. They were there prior to yesterday.
I have sent Google a couple of emails and they did respond quickly but did not give a definitive answer.
They did say that this type of thing is not "necessarily indicative of a penalty."
Only two things have changed recently on my site.
1. I added a Vbulletin forum - Which I noticed added about 200 or so pages. These are the "template" pages of the forum and do not have any "unique" content. I have created about 20 threads and a dozen or so posts.
Note: About 95% of the URL's that are showing using the site: command are the forum pages.
The other 250 pages of my site do not show up.
2. My website designer had added a "absolute position for css" to my homepage which placed some text at the end of the page but had it show up first in the source code. I hope I explained that correctly. (I really don't know what it means)
So, was it the absolute position thing that google does not like?
The forum?
Or just a glitch in the cache that has caused most of my page disappear?
Is it time to start laying off employees and storing for a long winter? (trying to keep some humor about all of this)
Any help all of you pro's can give will be greatly appeciated!
Thanks,
Jim
P.S. If it matters the home page still shows a PR6 and the interior pages still show PR as well.
One more update, we found another June 20 fresh tag on one page this morning. This newly refreshed page also ranks well for its fairly competitive topic. More evidence that this is a glitch [webmasterworld.com] rather than a penalty.
Before the update and before the problems already described in an earlier post the interior pages were all 4's & 5's, now they are 2's & 3's.
I am kind of confused as to why the interior pages would have any PR since they have been lost from the index and have no cache. I didn't think at this point google knew they existed. Of course, if things were working properly the interior pages should have risen to 5's & 6's.
Has anyone received any enlightening feedback from Google about this problem?
Jim
went from a PR7 to a PR5 all internal pages show PR0
allinurl is the same, fluxuating between 40-90 or so of the 500+ that we used to have. We added over 50 new pages since this problem started and the new pages are mostly what is showing up.
Our backlinks went from 300 back to the 1,900+ that we had before June. Several new backlinks are showing up and almost no internal backlinks show up, where we used to have over 500.
We don't rank for any keywords except for the niche phrases we are targeting with the new pages. Interesting enough I am seeing urls on more and more sites (including edu and gov) that look like google indexed urls from another search engine instead of the real url.
My guess is that googles quest to index dynamic content has caused them to index paid ads and results from other search engines. Spam is back in the results in full force in my main area, seeing more off topic and pages with very little content, some results with only 10-12 words on the whole page.
The top areas to look at as fasr as why you got banned generally are: duplicate content and suspicious backlinks
How organic are those 2710 links?
What's the results for you guys with this problem after this PR update?
We are seeing some grey bar, PR 0, and PR 2 for pages that are now partially indexed or no longer indexed.
Seeing high PR for pages that are still fully indexed.
Has anyone received any enlightening feedback from Google about this problem?Jim
kiwiwebmaster received this response on 06/15:
"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. "
Sounds canned to me.
What's the results for you guys with this problem after this PR update?
It's now showing over 1,900 backlinks for my index page, but none of my internal pages show any backlinks.
Right around this time last year several newspapers and talk radio shows were running stories about "Google is Broken" and google would only say that they were "making changes."
Googleguy posted quite a bit back then and basically told everyone to wait it out and that things would be better.
This year it is not so simple, there are tracking urls for ads we have taken out being indexed in place of the real urls and also what looks like dynamic urls from another search engine.
Since there are so many and no way to guess what new dynamic urls they will find on the web (not on our site) it does not seem practical to try to find every possible url to write a redirect. It just seems like for some reason, google removed or "partially indexed" hundreds of thousands of pages and temporarily can't tell that all of the url lead to the same page.
The more I search, the more MAJOR websites I am finding with partially indexed pages.
What's the results for you guys with this problem after this PR update?
PR0
nyet, I uploaded all the ODP data to my site and used a script to include all the data onto my site as a mirror.
Also possible that the "script" you used has a sneaky backlink inserted into it being sold by a text link "advertiser"/spammer.
I'm seeing PR0's and completely nuked sites all over the place for that kind of activity.
TJ
What's everyone's plan of action?
Needless to say now not ranked at all with just one search term exception.
What's everyone's plan of action?
I'm not involved in the PR0-ing kind of activity, but from what I've read before I believe the answer is to ditch the domain and start again.
If you feel it's not a manual ban, perhaps "dubious" linking tripping a auto-penalty, then fix it and wait.
TJ
Neither was I. Watch out, it can happen to you, too. No matter how "good" you are.
Err...I think you may have missed the point of this entire thread.
James
Err...I think you may have missed the point of this entire thread.
Have I?
oh, I missunderstood. I thought you meant you were listed twice IN the ODP.
I have a site that was listed twice in ODP.
After redesigning a site I wrote ODP a couple months ago and requested they update the URL to the sites new domain and they wrote back the same day and "fixed" it.
However, I just noticed yesterday that they left the old site in --same name just different URLs. The old site has nothing but a refresh code and message on it to link to the new site (old ISP doesn't have 301 redirect capability) so it's not duplicate content, but I wrote them again and requested they remove the old site.
Lorel
Does any one who had this issue have any updates? What are the current theories for the case?
It comes and goes. Last week, one query had come back in the SERPs, but with no summary (url only) -- gone now. Still getting the occasional page reincluded in the index and SERPs. They seem to be coming in order of least popular first :-( No other other indication of change: no unusual googlebot activity thought still a little, no change in "site:mysite.com" results, still no backlinks to our homepage, still PR0.
Generally www1 looks different than the other two. I am using googledance tool to see these results.
A glimmer of hope?
but none of my internal pages show any backlinks.
I have noticed a similar thing on some of the 19 sites that I manage-- internal links dissappeared from backlinks for some clients. But on some other sites they still have internal links. And there is no pattern to indicate what is going on, i.e., some new sites and sites 4 years old have kept their internal backlinks and yet some other new sites lost their internal backlinks with this new update.
I added a Vbulletin forum - Which I noticed added about 200 or so pages. These are the "template" pages of the forum and do not have any "unique" content. I have created about 20 threads and a dozen or so posts.
Vbulletin certainly creates lots of pages with duplicate content. This reduces the PR available per page and other issues. Search on Google for "search engine optimize vbulletin" for the method I have used to make sure there is only one url per thread, plus other seo/vbulletin issues. I now have very high serps for each thread on my forum.
Site has almost all pages indexed (they show when typing "inurl:www..."), but most of them with no tittle and no description, and we have disappeared from searchs.
It is a rich-content php & mysql pollitical site, that uses the mod_rewrite Apache module to show static URLs. No SEO techniques, no tricks, no suspicious links (in fact, we have very few incoming links because we doesn't ask for them, except the usual ones as Yahoo! or ODP).
Hope is a transitional situation, I can't imagine a reasonable cause to be penalized.
It'll be very useful to know what happens with other sites. Doesn't know yet if those "two weeks" needed to fix this trouble is being verified or if it is an isolated experience.
Patricio
