Page appearing and disappearing

alternates daily between showing up and a bare link, ranked zero

[Dave_Hill]

My site keeps showing up in google and then a day or two later reverts to a bare link. My server doesn't have problems, the site always loads for me and this seems like very consistent behavior for google, it's happened half a dozen times in the last couple weeks. Also the google ranking for this page is zero, but I've not done anything that might have offended google, no ranking tools or automated anything, just a regular old site. I only checked the google ranking after having problems, I didn't run the toolbar before that, so I don't know if the site was ever ranked above zero. I know google has a half dozen or so links to my page in guest books (they are in googles caches) but it won't admit any reverse links. I keep submitting pages and then they show up in a day or two and then they are gone again, and ranking is always zero.

Any idea why I keep getting stripped to a bare link with no paragraph or cache info and then going back to a regular link? Any idea why I rank zero?

[edited by: Marcia at 12:01 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2002]
[edit reason] no URLs, please [/edit]

[Marcia]

Dave, guest book links aren't the best to have, they might have worked at one time but you can't count on them for anything at this point in time. Links from pages under PR4 don't show as backlinks and I've seen some PR4 pages that aren't showing either.

My best guess is that you just don't have the Page Rank to appear for searches, even though Googlebot keeps trying. It doesn't sound like a penalty, it sounds more like you just need to get some quality links that will confer enough of a PR vote to your page to get in.

[jdMorgan]

Dave_Hill,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

How long has this site been up - Less than two months or longer?

Jim

<edit> Forgot my manners </edit>

[bird]

This kind of minimal entry is for pages that are "known" because Google has found links to them, but weren't actually crawled. If your pages only have a dozen or so incoming links from already low rated pages, then it may be just by chance that you get spidered in one cycle, but not in the next. You'll have to work on getting quality inbound links, or your site will continue to be considered low priority for Googlebot.

[Dave_Hill]

Marcia, sorry, I didn't see any rules in the post guidelines against posting a url.

Site's been up for a few months now. It's been spidered a half dozen times by google 'cause I've changed the content that many times and seen the google listings and caches change in a day or two to reflect new content but then just show the bare link a day later. When it's included in the database I can search on "alpha sigma phi" and get about 50th position out of 5000 though it's been dropping, looks farther down the 100 page listing than before. I know I'm being indexed and included in searches.

WOW! I just checked again and I'm at the top of the second page of 20 results per page on that term, make it about 22'nd position! Page is still ranked zero... immagine what it would be with non-zero ranking!

Darnit, they did it again, I'm down to a bare link again in just the time it took to write this post!

I'm tempted to post the google search link so you can see the bare link in google results (I hadn't seen one before) but the results will just change by the time someone else searches for it. It's ok to link to google, right?

The site's about ten pages setup in a star pattern, the main page links to all pages and all pages reciprocate the link back, this was the best configuration to boost the main page in the ranks.

This is a site that is bound to make some people angry, is there anything they could be doing to my site to make google punish it and push it out of the rankings? Probably the only way to know that would be if GoogleGuy got interested.

Thanks for the amazingly fast feedback!

[Marcia]

>It's ok to link to google, right?
Not to specific searches. From the forum charter:

Please No site review requests or site review questions for Google techs.

It works out much better for everyone if we stay with principles instead of getting into specifics; then we all know what to look for and how.

Dave, what's the Page Rank of the pages currently linking to you?

[Dave_Hill]

I see seven listings, all guestbooks, they are ranked grey/5/4/2/5/4/4. Two of the seven results display as html and so are not real links. None of them ever showed up in the reverse search. The two fives are good links, and a couple good solid 4's in there too. Also I mentioned the internal structure of the site all links to boost the point page.

Still looks to me like someone is causing google to dump the site, otherwise I'd rank at least a couple points...

Thanks for the great help!

[Marcia]

Dave, what's showing is a guestbook link on a PR5 page to a /directory/ in your site that's PR0. Guestbook links are not hacking it - the page in the directory has no page rank, so there's nothing to confer on the index page. Googlebot is trying, but just has nothing to work with there.

Get some substantial content on the site - particularly the index.htm page at root level and get some links to that. Then there will be something to distribute to the rest of the site.

[Dave_Hill]

the index page in the directory is the top page for the site, everything drives toward that, the top level is just there for looks, not to drive traffic to. Does google give preference to top pages rather than one directory down?

So you are suggesting I develop some good content pages and get good external links into them and then link those pages to the ones I want to drive up? The one I want to drive is always going to be second best unless I get a lot of good content pages on my site linking to it.

Any good strategies for getting into DMOZ and Yahoo!? Does volunteering to edit for DMOZ help? Or is setting up good original content and requesting links a better approach?