Penalty or what?

[jp_css]

I don't know if this has happened to anyone else, but I suddenly received a sharp decrease in traffic coming from Google (5000 uniques/day to 1000). When I inspected further, I found that most of my larger pages only had a link in the SERPs (no title, no snippet). It seems that pages larger than 30k or so only show a link. Is this a penalty, or will my pages be restored when I get crawled again? Should I be reducing my page size in light of the revelation?

[kaled]

This can happen if your site is down when Googlebot visits. I wrote to Google on this subject several months ago and actually got a personal reply (or a carefully chosen stock reply).

You need to check that there is not a creeping problem (ie. more and more pages going missing).

There are several recent (ish) threads on the subject so I should hunt them down. Penalties are one possibility, another is your host banning Googlebot, but there are several more explanations.

Kaled.

PS
If the site was down and the missing pages are static html, upload them again (or touch them to adjust file dates). There may be a problem with Googlebot's handling of if-modified-since requests.