Didn't get banned after all!

banned? website reappears as mysteriously as it disappeared

[StuartWilks]

After several days panicking about what I'd done to upset Google, and reading many words of doom about spamming and dubious SEO techniques, my site has reappeared on Google, ust as quickly as it disappeared.

There didn't seem to be any real logic to it - one day it was there (and had been for over two years). The next day it had disappeared, no back links or anything and a PR0 grey bar. Now it's back again, and we come out top on a keyword search! No logic or real rhyme or reason.

So - occasionally Googlebot does trip up, and it seems it just missed us on the last run. Does anyone else have experience of this kind of anomalie, or is it just me!

[lazerzubb]

The biggest chance i would say is that they had a problem indexing your site in the last update, and they have given you the Fresh [webmasterworld.com] Tag and that's why you are going in and out, and hopefullly you will be stable again in the next update.

Did your site have any down time?

[johnser]

I've had the exact same experience.

A small network of my interlinked sites went from hero to 0 during November. They were in the index but weren't in the 1000 results shown.

I thought it was because I had them interlinked was the reason they got hit but they're all right back at the top of the SERPs for their phrases.

Interesting to note, they appeared nowhere during the dance, but approx last Wed they all showed up. These 6 sites are all heavily xlinked - So much for Xlinking penalties....
J

[twebdonny]

Well, Our site just disappeared in toto from google last evening at about 7 pm for no apparent reason. It obviously had nothing to do with the dance as that was well over a week ago, so all I can hope for is that we return as mysteriously and soon.

[snowfishin]

twebdonny

Same here I'm not sure what time it was last night but damn
I am hoping for the best we were down for a day about two weeks ago but back up for the deep crawl. Its sounds like its not just me with this problem today

[johnser]

Yep - same here. Sites dropped - Not good....
They were all up. G rankings seem to be changing in a big way at times of the month other than DanceTime.

Is it possible that the Dance and Everflux are merging?
J

[gujgifts]

Almost a similar problem with me..

My site was listed for more than 15 months and had a PR 5 and a listing # 9

After the last google dance, it still had a PR 5, but a) the google cache was removed b) the original listing was removed and the listing that shows for my keyword is the DMOZ listing and description, that too at position # 130! and no cache link!

I had not fiddled with my homepage, neither have my competitors done anything amazing...

I am hoping that this is just a temperory glitch and my site will appear in the next crawl..

Could it be that googlebot missed my site in the last crawl...? Because I have not seen any listing on Google without the "cache link"

[johnser]

Have you checked your logs for about the end of Nov gujgifts?

[gujgifts]

Thanks

What exactly should I check for?

I downloaded the logs till Nov 26 and it shows that Googlebot visited once on Nov25 and thrice on Nov 26

What exactly should I be looking out for?

[johnser]

Did Gbot request a lot of pages or just the robots.txt/index files? That will say if a deep crawl happened or not or whether you were missed. Sites don't normally get missed though if they've decent linkpop.

(I kinda had a similar thing with just my dmoz entry showing. Not good as you say)

You'll probably find the Gbot was crawling till about the 3/4 Dec. Whatever it picked up on its travels then should appear end of Dec.
J

PS - Just spotted that my network of sites (mentioned above) are back at the top of the SERPs today. They were gone yest.....1 day in, 1 day out?

[gujgifts]

Hi

I downloaded my logs till dec 12 and google bot kept coming back till then, but on running a search in the txt file for "Googlebot", the only message I got was either of the two:

64.68.82.66 - - [25/Nov/2002:12:36:07 +0530] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 403 - "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

216.239.46.166 - - [06/Dec/2002:05:41:33 +0530] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 403 - "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

(Hope this posting is OK...it contains no specifics about my site)

I even ran a search on the "64.68.82" but all i got was the first line with only robots.txt

What does this mean...?

btw, congrats on going back in the SERPs....

[johnser]

I'm no expert on this but I think that Google just skimmed your site. You want to see it mentioned several times in the logs requesting different filenames. Then you know you've been deep-crawled.

Do a site-search here on how to encourage Gbot to dig deeper
J

[gujgifts]

I searched for both "Googlebot" as well as part of the ip of google, but it only asked for robots.txt..

btw, the code after that is a 403....ofcourse i don't have a robots.txt file, but 403 means forbidden..... why isn't it showing the code 404?

any ideas there?

[johnser]

Don't know I'm afraid. Place an empty robots.txt file on your root. Its recommended by Googlguy

[gujgifts]

thanks

I just put up a robots.txt with the text

User-agent: *
Disallow: /somedir/

where somedir is an insignificant directory...could have left Disallow blank, but on searching came across the fact that a blank disallow may be interpreted by some bots as disallow all...

[johnser]

Thats interesting - Wasn't aware of that. Best of luck next Dance :)