Weird Disappearing Act

Page Indexed no More

[Harry]

I have an original article about a widget people used to care about a decade ago. When the page was posted back in 2002, I knew nothing about SEO. The page ranked high on the second spot at Google on its own merit. I never optimized it.

This old widget is not available on the market, yet it's popular with collectors. There is one Web site dedicated to this widget. Up to this week, it has always been # 1 and my page # 2.

My page has disappeared. At best, I can see other articles from the site referring to the widget's page, but no links are available on Google. Pagerank hasn't changed.

I couldn't find a duplicate of the article anywhere - so I wasn't hit with by a copycat by mistake.

1-Is there a new filter from Google?
2-Could an annoyed competitor complain to Google about the relevancy of my page?
3-Can I find out if someone complained about my page? The # 2 spot is a coveted place after all.
4-Why remove a 450 words original page without SEO or any objectible material?
5-How can a page that was indexed for years fall through the cracks? It seems to be the only page from the site to have vanished.
6-Could it be the lack of external links? If so, why not remove the thousands of pages on my site that don't have external links from the index?

[Stefan]

It's hard to say what happened, although I seriously doubt that it was a complaint from a jealous webmaster.

Try this:

Add some new content to the page, or at least do a bit of re-writing so that it has changed somewhat.

Tweak the title.

Add a few new internal links from some of your higher PR pages, preferably ones that are crawled often and regularly show freshtags.

Cross your fingers...

[AjiNIMC]

Something like this happened to me, we had a page about blue widgets , it wasnt optimized and the code was also very bad, so I changed the code and to make it look good added h1 and h2 tags also.

I waited for two weeks to be crawled but it didnt happened , so asked my friend to put a link and then today I am seeing that the page is not in SERP.

any reason for that, is it some filter or something.

[dirkz]

Maybe competition just has grown stronger, and suddenly you need backlinks to be in the Top 10.

[Harry]

The page is nowhere to be found in Google's archives. Not even pasting a sentence from the page works. I can understand the competition gaining momentum, but I don,t understand a normal non spammed, no SEOed page not doing well.

[Stefan]

Sometimes Google just plain loses pages. It might be beneficial if you give it new links from frequently botted pages, in case G has simply lost track of it.

[AjiNIMC]

even our pages is not found with site: search, google might have lost it, lets give some time to it.

[yowza]

Have you made sure that the page is only accessible by either the www. version or the www.-less version? There may not be a duplicate penalty from another website, but there may be one from your own.

Is it the home page that is having the problem?

I've found a large number of websites lately with a wierd problem. These websites have high PR on their internal pages, but a white bar on the home page. I'm not sure that it is related to your problem, but it's an interesting phenomenon nonetheless.

[AjiNIMC]

Our pages are accessable with www and www less , I am not sure of the penalty , I guess its something like lossing the page for the time being.

I am waiting as I have no option left.

Thanks for the replies.
Aji

[FreakyIndian]

My site which came up at about #12 consistently for a particular phrase, just sudden;y DISAPPEARED from Google some time ago. It still has PageRank, and the rest of the pages in the site are still indexed (and most have maintained their positions), but the main homepage URL is gone.

Could it be because perhaps the site was down when Google came around? Or some other reason. I know it's not banned because it still has Pagerank.

Any ideas?

[Chris_D]

If your page does not appear at all, here are some other possible explanations.

Your site may not have been reachable when we tried to crawl it because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, we retry multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be listed in our current index. If it was a transient problem, your site will likely show up in the next index, which will be completed in a few weeks.

A technical glitch on our side may have caused us to 'miss' your site. In crawling more than 4 billion pages, our system experiences hiccups from time to time. Again, this is a transient problem, and your site will likely show up in the next index.....

These and more reasons at:

[google.com...]

[Harry]

All my pages are back to their original spots - great!

[wanna_learn]

Freaky
it could be a signal that your whole site going to disappear soon...as they are common symptom of sudden failure.

PR will not have any sudden impact until update...dont go over that green fluid.

Just check that weather the site was down consistently for more then a week, single attempt failure by Google does not take you to disappearing if its a well established site.

Keep fingures crossed