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What could be the problem?
saturation? what does it mean?
could my competition have done something?
where can i write google to get this solved?
<Snip>
So, whats the problem?
Grey bar, cant find a site by my URL, not a single hit (when i used to get 6000 visitors a day)
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 5:39 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed Email Quote [/edit]
although the chances are realy rare that my solution will be applicable in many other cases here goes.
Google hadn't visited any of my sites since a recent move to a new block of IP ARIN had assigned me... I dropped off every SE 'cept msn <snip>. Unable to locate why I had a problem I had chalked it up to to either evil-competition 86ing my IPs or sites, or an obscure ns latency problem.
until 30 minutes ago, my site wasn't accessable from my friend's work ... a little research found my server couldn't communicate to a small but solid group of IP addresses. Got ahold of the BGP department and automagically my sites are accessable to and from IPs that were previously not working...
I am hopeful that whatever happened will alleiviate my google issues... I'll keep you up to date . but hopefully it helps out, even a little.
[edited by: lawman at 4:00 am (utc) on Nov. 19, 2004]
There are more reasons out there, I just gave mine.
2) Look at your server logs, do you see visitors? Do you see strange error codes? Do you see Googlebot in there? VERY important to see what has been requested from your server (did the requests include session ids).
3) Test your DNS -- would recommend dnsstuff dot com
4) Look for problems with your robots.txt
5) Track back and try and figure out what changes have been made... apache, php, server upgrades, any of these could trigger changes not known to you. (I had a bad experience with a global php setting turning on session ids.)
I don't recommend trying to contact people who handle your routes under any condition unless you have covered all of your server's bases and already understand what routes you are going to complain about.
[edited by: lawman at 4:01 am (utc) on Nov. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] spelling [/edit]
I had PHP and MySQL stuff set up about 3 days before I started having problems with Google (the infamous Sept 23 drop).
It could be just a fluke, but I'm looking into everything.
My site had lost 90% of it's traffic Sept 23rd (I notice that thread is deleted now?!), and in the past few days, it seems the other 10% has been wiped out too.
I still show PR, still show up when I do a site: command, and oddly, I'm still on page 2 or page 4 on a couple of search terms, but for most I'm waaaaaay down there (as far as page 20).
I'm confused, does this sound like a penalty?
There seem to be a lot of people with sites a few years old suddenly sinking like stones.
Should I write to ask googlebot@google and see if I've run afoul of something?
site:www.mysite.com
Got 200 results of my pages (most of them have PR5)
But if i search for www.mysite.com (without the site: command) i get nothing.
www.mysite.com got no PR (grey bar)
what the hell is going on?
can they remove just 1 page (my index.shtml)?
When I type in www.mydomain.com , I still come up though, and I still have PR for my index page.
My site too just disappeared. It was a PR6 yesterday and has been for at least a year and half. Now all of a sudden I checked this morning and it has no PR - White bar with nothing and I am getting absolutely NO google traffic.
White Bar normaly means a penalty/banning.
Use the Site" command to see if your site still appears in the index.
Also check every site you link to and see if any of them have a white bar was well.
If you're doing anything else that against the TOS, clean your site up and hope that google will let you back in (but don't hold your breath)
In my case, the only thing I could think of that G might frown upon on my site is having images on my information pages linking to a page of related products on an affiliate program site.
Maybe this is considered misleading the surfer, I'm not sure, it's useful for many of them too. Lots of other sites do the same thing, but either way, I'm changing this today.
why does my index page has grey bar and is not included in google, but other pages still have PageRank and are included?
You said that all your other pages still have PR and are still in the index, but that you are now getting No traffic from Google. Does this mean that all your traffic arrived via your homepage?
I'm no expert but I think a Grey Bar is bad news.
I do know the feeling, a site I have lost all the Google traffic in March, however, we kept our PR on all pages, just got pushed right down in the results.
One of my friends has experienced the same thing. His website was on the first page for a couple of important keywords and now his site is nowhere to be found. The page rank still exists but his site isn’t on the first 100 pages.
When doing a site:www.domain.com many of the pages are gone and the few that do show up are only urls. After looking closely at possible reasons why this has happened, I have come up with 2 possible reasons and I hope I can get some opinions on it.
1) Just recently he put up another website that serves as a catalog type website. Both his sites are cross linking with each other on every single page. This could possibly appear to Google like manipulating page rank.
2) His store is a yahoo store, so he has the yahoo url (store.yahoo.com/domain/) and he also has the domain url (www.domain.com). I don’t know why, but I noticed for some reason some of his external links point to his yahoo store url and some of them point to the domain url. This means that both these urls are indexed into Google and both have the exact same content. Could he have been penalized for duplicate content?
I obviously recommended fixing both these problems, I was just curious as to which is percieved as more of a priority.
It's funny how most of these major algo changes happen during the Christmas season :)
Thanks for reading. Any thoughts are appreciated.
As far as I can see, the site is clean as a whistle, and validates as XHTML 1.0 and CSS
If I hadn't seen it spiral down the plughole for myself, I'm not sure I'd believe that a static site could suddenly disappear up the vacuum cleaner of eternity...
DerekH
PS all the rest of my sites, touch wood, are totally and utterly unchanged in Google at all.
Perhaps Google doesn't like #*$!x$%! @£$%^^& (I'll let you pop your two choicest words into that sentence) <smile>
they blamed it on a usual index fluctuations.
:/
Give it 6-8 weeks before you start panicing.
