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My site is 6 months old with fresh content weekly. Original content. I worked up to a PR of 6, which I still have. I went on vacation last week and came back to anemic hit numbers.
I have looked at my logs and am confused. Up until 7/25/02 I was receiving a good 1000 hits a day to my site from Google. My site has over 600 pages of content. Real content.
On 7/26/02 Google came by and did a complete spider. The hits stopped after this. I went to ten hits at most each day from Google on words that are obscure.
On 7/31/02 Google came by and did another complete spider. No bump in in hits since then. In fact, yesterday I received five hits from Google Images and only two hits from Google itself that were my own domain name.
Using the Link Popularity script by Widexl I am now down to 10 pages indexed in Google.
It's obvious that my pages aren't indexed now in Google, but what happened? I still have a PR of 6, good inbound links, but I am mysteriously out of the index.
Any ideas?
Just some general comments (assuming away things like human-induced penalty or triggering some spam filter):
1.Don't panick ;)
2. The disappearence just one day after the recent spidering is just a coincidence.
3. The cause of your problems is probably hidden somewhere in late the late May - early June spidering cycle. If you have access to the logs from that period, check them very thoroughly. What did you serve Googlebot then? Things like downtime of your servers, robots.txt changes, IP changes, hosting changes, badly executed cloaking - all this could lead to 404s served to Googlebot.
4. If not, and you are 100% sure Googlebot spidered all the pages correctly in its June cycle, then the only thing to do is to sit and wait until the next update. It may be just a temporary thing, Google acknowledges these things happen.
5. If the problem stays after the next update, start reading all the threads about penalties and possible reasons behind...
In fact, the site was down for three days the last week in May.
So what you are saying is that the current index is based on last month's spider? If so, chances are Google came a knockin and my site was not there. The hosting company I used went down and there was a two day lapse when I moved to a new hosting company.
I feel better now. I didn't know there was a 30 day digestion break on the index :-)
