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I am a web designer, and we host the site in question. Site was completed in June this year and was listed in DMOZ very quickly (less than a week) and also appeared in Google, ranking quite well for fairly competitive keywords. Site owner wanted to add a new range of products - this was done and front page altered considerably to reflect the additional range and inner pages altered also - at the beginning of November. Site owner has also been busy doing link exchanges - some of which we advised were unsuitable (totally irrelevant and not from quality sites) and these links were not put onto the site on our advice.
Just a few days after the revamped site was live it disappeared from Google. The url is companyname.com - if a search is done for 'company name' then 89 results are shown and link:domain shows 76 links. But a search for the url gives 'no information for this url'.
The google toolbar is grey, but the cached snapshot is now showing the new front page (prior to this update was showing old front page). The toolbar is now also showing the 76 backward links - again just a few days ago was giving no information for backward links. I don't know what the PR was prior to updating the site - I didn't have the toolbar installed!
So, has this site been dropped, penalised or what? Or is this just a Google glitsch?
Any light you can throw on this would be most helpful!
The gray toolbar doesn't sound good. However, try this:
Type in the domain name in the address bar of your browser, using www. and look at the toolbar. Sometimes you have to refresh the toolbar because it sometimes shows grayed out results when following links or accessing a url through a bookmark.
Type that into your browser Address window.
Refreshing the Google toolbar probably isn't what's going on, but it sometimes is.
Sorry if I didn't make myself clear.
Are there any incidences when the new deepcrawl starts?
Have you or your client checked your rankings with Web Position Gold?
To stay completely on the 'safe side', after reading many posts here about WPG, I have removed Google from the list of SEs checked for all the sites that we monitor. BTW none of our other sites has been dropped/penalised - all are showing good SERPS and reasonable PR.
The only thing I can think that could be the problem is a very 'strange encounter' with automatedlinks.com. But I have read here that you can't be penalised for someone linking to you....
Just over a week ago our client received an email from a disgruntled guy who, apparently, had signed up with automatedlinks.com (then thought better of it when he saw the code he was supposed to put on his index page) and he was writing to everyone whose url appeared in the code to warn them that using this programme resulted in a ban from Google, and that automatedlinks refused to answer his emails or take any responsibility.
(In fact in the 'propoganda' on the automatedlinks site, they openly mention achieving a higher ranking in Google! They also say that they have a different network of sites for Adult Material and that an Adult-related website will not be linked to or be linking to "mainstream" sites. However the code that was sent to our client by above disgruntled guy contained the urls and descriptions of some very dubious sites!)
Now the crux of this is - my client never signed up for this service (or at least denies vehemently that he did) and he certainly never asked us to insert any code and if he had, we would have pointed out the error of his ways and refused to insert the code!
So - how did our client's url get into the automatedlinks code? Is it possible a competitor signed him up to get him banned from Google? He is in quite a cut-throat market.
AND more to the point - what to do now? All input/comments from you wonderful guys gratefully received and thanks for your input so far.
GoogleGuy has also mentioned that a penalty can take several months before becoming evident. So that it's possible to be using something like WPG for awhile, then quit, but not have the penalty show up until months later when the site is totally clean.
GoogleGuy has also stated that they have measures in place to prevent a competitor from sabotaging your web site by using WPG. How does Google filter this? I cannot conceive it. I have my doubts.
If the site is banned/penalised, would googlebot still crawl?
I still don't understand what happened, just delighted to be back in after nearly 8 weeks out in the cold!
Is this site likely to be subject to everflux until the Dec/Jan update finished?
