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This site gets basically all its traffic from search engines, links from other sites, and things like my Usenet .sig. It is a non-commercial informational site, and doesn't really have any regular users. Although, it used to have over 100 unique users a day before the Google disaster. Checking the logs, over half the inbound traffic was from Google. As such, unless I thought that Google would ever find it again, it would make sense just to abandon it quick, move it to another domain where it might have a chance to get into Google. I do have already a couple of suitable, unused domains in my collection already that could be used.
However, while I could quickly move the site to another domain, and just put up a "site moved, the new URL is: www.newdomain.org", this obviously creates a slew of problems with those directory listings, and also trying to get other sites to change links. Moving to get back into Google would be rather trivial if all I was worried about was being in Google. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple.
Thus, my question for those old hands who would know the answer. In other cases like this, statistically what are the odds of getting back to the status quo ante on the next update? If very high, then obviously doing nothing and praying for the next month would make sense. If not, bailing out as soon as possible and starting from scratch again makes sense.
And, given all these inbound links, I'd consider the longer that Googlebot shuns my site, the more likely that it is a goner. How much longer without a visit from Googlebot is it reasonable to consider the old domain a dead duck?
When this update finally stabilizes, determine what the Toolbar PR is. If you're actually missing from Google, it should be gray. If it's white showing no PR, that could well be bad news. As you know, there are occasional hiccups on the web, maybe your site got caught up in one of those and it got dropped. Submit your site to Google again, and sit tight for another month. Rebuilding the site at this point could well be premature.
There is no particular justifiable reason why Google would give my site some sort of death penalty. No link farming [I only have 2 active domains ;)], no hidden keyword stuffing, or any of the other shenanigans people try. The most probable explanation is some sort of hiccup. However, I'd think more some sort of Google bug than the web, given that with all my inbound links, including the DMOZ/Google directory (my site is still in the Google directory), they ought to keep checking up on my site if they thought it was dead.
I've submitted the site again. However, with all the links it has, including the DMOZ and Yahoo directory, Googlebot should have no trouble finding it if it wants to. The thought of what it would take to rebuild the site at this point definitely does not appeal to me. Merde. I just got an e-mail as I was writing this. My site just got into the zenzibar.com directory. Dunno how much traffic that would ever bring, but the directory page has a PR4, and moving my site would mean having yet another link with decent PR elsewhere to try and change. I'm tending to lean toward sitting tight for another month at this moment. Although I sure wish I knew exactly what happened?
After every update, there are a certain number of sites that get dropped. It just happens.
The best thing to do is to monitor your logs to observe this month's crawling. If you see normal behavior, you'll probably be back next month. If you see a bunch of robots.txt and index requests, but no deep crawling, you might have a problem.
Those pages show that your domain hasn't been dropped as it is still in the index.
Googlebot hasn't been around for 2 weeks even for a robots.txt request, which is very odd. I'd agree if Googlebot comes back and crawls the whole site, that would be an encouraging sign.
