More insight on URL only

Inexplicable events?

[DerekH]

Hi - I mentioned a couple of my sites had gone essentially URL only. I just wanted to tell you what happened today and see if anyone can come up with a theory about what's happening or why...

This relates to one of the two sites. The other site has been cleared by Google as not banned, and I believe this site is the same.

Here we go...
Indexed pages fell from 200 to 90 to 4 to 2. URL-only pages bring the 2 up to 69 total pages.
The indexed pages were
a) The home page
b) One of the pages directly linked from the home page.

Today, the following changes have occurred.
a) The homepage has been freshly indexed and has a freshdate - the first visit in 2 weeks.
b) The other page isn't indexed, and it isn't URL only - it's gone from the index.
c) A really deep page is now indexed, not accessible directly from the homepage, only from the URL-only pages.

So Google *is* visiting, very rarely (used to be daily for the homepage), but its behaviour is not something I can understand.

Anyone have a theory about what it's doing, and why it isn't doing what it used to do?
Thanks
DerekH

[DerekH]

I'm seeing massive changes to SERPS and backlicks now in the UK too.
That would partly explain the change but the scope of the change is what concerns me!
DerekH

[egomaniac]

Hi DerekH,

Check out what happened with two pages of mine that were URL only... one was a long-standing page in Google's index, there is a new site that has been in the sandbox:

Did The Sandbox Hold My Place In Line While I Took A Break? [webmasterworld.com]

All I have been able to observe so far is that some pages have an indexing schedule more frequent than others (duh).

What's different about this than "the old days" is that now Google is holding even less data about a site in its index than it did before. It used to hold some description a cache of the page. Now it just seems to register the fact the URL exists (and that's all) until it comes around to fully index it.

[Hugene]

For one of my pretty competitive kewyords, the number 1 results is a url only, no cache. I find that really strange; should we understand that the content of the page does not matter, and it is 1st in the SERPS because of links?

That's just insane (and scary), because that site is a huge, dinamically generated mostly-spam site, and they use heavy inter-linking, and many of the pages link to that one single url which appears 1st on the SERPS. Now, that URL is actually a re-direct (on top of it) accordingly to your geographical region.

Conclusion: build tons of garbage pages linking to a single page and here you go! I am disapointed with G on this one

[lost in space]

Ditto ... Same as the first post by DerekH, I have many sites (30+) and they are all experiencing the same phenomenon as he describes. BTW they are not duplicate sites, not hosted on the same IP, nothing to trigger a problem. Can’t figure it out.