Can't find mycompanyname.com in search for mycompanyname

Comments from others experiencing this problem

[bnhall]

Hi - I wanted to make a single thread to discuss the recent issue of mycompanyname not appearing in SERPs for searches on mycompanyname.

In my case mycompanyname is a single word, which I invented. The only references to it online are links to my site. For the last couple years, when I search for mycompanyname, I was always #1, and then all the folks who link to me are refenced below.

Since Allegra, mycompanyname.com is not in the SERPs at all for a search on mycompanyname. I also don't appear in searches on directory.google.com, although you can SEE mycompanyname.com listed in the directory! What on earth!

Some facts:
- My PR recently went from 6 to 3 as of Allegra.
- for the last month I had a 301 redirect on / to route it to /cityname/
- if I search: mycompanyname site:mycompanyname.com I get a couple hundred hits, which is right
- if I search: allinurl:mycompanyname I see something really weird: first SERP is someone that links to me, 2nd SERP is blank (yes, blank - there's a 1 inch space!), then I get a couple more SERPs, then my /cityname page appears

Something is really weird here....

Comments anyone else?

[claus]

Has anybody noticed if their site turn up when using this Tbar feature [toolbar.google.com]?

[robster124]

Nope!

[dertyfern]

One of our sites recently disappeared, but shows up in two positions (no title/description) when searching for the domain name.

The odd thing is a the search result includes the domain with "%20" and "%20-%20" at the end of the listing title, ex: "domain.com%20/"

Anyone else seeing this or know the cause?

[idoc]

%20 is just an empty space equivalent to a spacebar used because URL's cant have true empty spaces in them. Someone could have you linked to that way.

I should say as I have been on G's case here somewhat about this issue that we are back now #1-2 our retail and wholesale sites respectively in the serps for our unique registered name now. I hope this sticks. Also the serps now contain much less results for the term cutting alot of the spammy redirect link junk from that one search.

[BigUns]

dertyfern:

You should also check your own internal links.
Search for strings of the form

href="stuff "
href="stuff /"
href=" /"

etc, all of which have an inadvertant space.

[dickbaker]

GodLikeLotus, thanks for the datacenters. I just checked, and my site shows on them.

Better yet, my site comes up on the first page for just about every one of the 75 or so key phrases I'm targetting.

All fingers and toes crossed.

[Rollo]

GodLikeLotus,

I'm in all the datacenters and the SERPS are fresh. One of my sites shows the title "More Coming Soon" which is the default splash page on my server for a site when it's propagating. I just swtiched IPs last night and my site showed this title for about 12 hours so these are brand new.

I hope this is a sign of what's coming.

[walkman]

Just checked via iurl:www.domain.com and surprise, surprise. Google has indexed another one of those 302 links. The cache is from Nov 2 but I'e never seen it before. This could explain my rankings..lack of them I meant. I removed about 3 a while abck and now another takes their place.

Check you sites with inurl:www.domain.com and see if you've been hijacked.

Great job Google. How long has it been since we first pointed out the 302 issue?

[BillyS]

I used to get worried about this stuff, but I've given up. I just checked, I now rank #195 for my own site name. The page google shows is not even the home page, in fact #195 shows as a supplemental page.

I've written to Google about it, the update problems email address that GoogleGuy posted, but I'm just one small fish in a great big ocean.

That being said, I will forget about this problem (best I can), eventually they will fix it.

And for those that do not believe that there is a sandbox, there is one. Even I didn't beleive it for a long time. I've got a relatively unfamiliar term that I've dedicated a page to. That page is #1 in MSN and #2 in Yahoo. Does not show up in the top 1,000 of Google unless you use quotes, then it shows up at #50. The listings above it really have nothing to do with the subject.

[Kangol]

My site ranks first for his name, witch is normal and good. My site also ranks relatively well for 4 new pages Ive added but for the important terms its still not there. I am seeing improvements but there is still lots of junk around. I think that Google needs to loosen up a bit the filters.
Do you rank as well as you you did preAlegra?

[BillyS]

Prior to the December update, I had been ranking #1 for my website's name since the site was about 5 weeks old - about 7 months.

[moofdaddy]

I am not exactly sure what is going on with my site.  We launched it in early January as a spin off from another site we were working on.  Things were going fine, slowly google started to pick us up and we had a couple of entries in the index. Now almost 2 months after launch our site has all but disappeared from the index.

I know that there are a lot of posts of a similar nature but I feel like my problem is slightly different.  I am not complaining about a drop in page rank or position, rather we seem to be totaly gone from the index now.  When I search for my domain the only things i can find are the original links off the parent site to the sister site and generic www.myurl.com/ link with no caption, description, anything to go along with it.  The few pages that were there seem to be gone now.

We still get traffic (yahoo recently gave us a directory listing) but nothing from google anymore, yet googebot has been visiting us every day since mid january and continues to do so.  I don't understand, we didn't break any rules, we didn't pull any tricks, yet we seem to have been deleted from the index even though we have been adding a lot of content and picking up in traffic from other places (blog links, etc).

Any idea what might be going on or how worried we should be?

[walkman]

***update. Now I see mydomain.com too. it wasn't there 2 minutes ago. Something moving on those DCs but I still don't ranks for other keywords there****

I just did this test and in five DCs I see this:
Allinanchor:mydomain.com (no where to be found...>100)
Allinanchor:my-domain (no where to be found...>100)
Allinanchor:tough-keyword #2
Allinanchor:very-tough-keyword #5
64.233.171.104 5
64.233.171.105 5
64.233.171.107 5
64.233.171.147 5
64.233.171.99 5
64.233.179.104 5
64.233.179.106 5
64.233.179.107 5
64.233.179.99 5

and I'm no where in the serps. I know that "mydomain.com" anchor has least 10 times more links.

[idoc]

Well, it lasted a day... now I see 4700 sites returned when searching for our unique name and we are again buried. Deep down, I have to say I half expected this. Google gives me nothing but disappointment these days. I am thinking to disallow their bot from all but the root level site directory and be done with it.

[BillyS]

By the way, for those of you that really want to know the depths of the sand, I will share my experience. My website only gets referals from Google if the user put the search in quotes. It has been like that since before December - only quotes.

Even at that, I once was sitting behind a page that was under construction. My site is a financial site and the page under construction that beat me out was cloaking and the words just happened to appear in the random text. This particular website was also an affiliate site selling drugs.

My site now has around 600 pages in the Google index - each representing an article of around 500 - 1,100 words. This month I averaged around 1.5 referals each day from Google.

I get fresh tags daily and Googlebot was also the most active spider on the site this month, taking in around 2,400 pages.

To me, this seems like at least 12 feet worth of sand. (No one would bother digging that deep.)

Still, I remain a fan of Google - they will eventually figure it out. Until then, I will hold onto my day job.

[drdsl2000]

Does this have to do with buying a lot of links? I have a client who did a big buy recently, then got buried so deep in the Google search results that they get almost zero referrers from G.

DR

[BillyS]

I've never purchased a link before, but I did run PPC advertisements about 3 months after launch through adsense and GoClick. I still see some of those "links" showing up as supplemental results if I searched on www.website.com.

[fatpeter]

For the first time since 6 feb my site popped back in to results for a search from toolbar. First time since then and first google referal since then too! datacentre for the cache was 64.233.187.104

then it dissapeared again :( Can't work out if this is a good sign or not! but it has given me hope.

[MissusC]

fatpeter,

I am seeing the same thing as you. I am getting about 25 Google referrals out of every 100 referrals now. And since this last update, that is a miracle.

[fatpeter]

on my laptop the toolbar is searching 64.233.187.104 and i am in. On my desktop it is on 64.233.187.104 and I'm relegated.

[walkman]

holy cow. I'm in too (on a few DCs) for domain & domain.com searches. Not ranking for much else though. How do you guys rank for other keywords compared to pre-prozac serps?

[fatpeter]

I am ranking pretty close on some keywords. Lost a few positions a little and gained a few on other words. If it stays like that for me it is like a normal update. No great moves in any direction. Can't help but feel it won't stay like that cos the results are a much lower number on the database with my site in.

[BillyS]

I've seen these type of results on 64.233.187.104 in the past. Very clean for my website. Secifically in Google.com they show 840 results for site:www.widgetblahblah.com, but Google only shows around 440 real pages.

This index on 64.233.187.104 shows 750 pages, pretty much the actual number of page on the website and this index shows all 750 pages, no message like click here to see omitted results.

My experience is that this index never sticks.

[fatpeter]

might never stick but it is the first time the toolbar has ever pulled it that i have seen and also the first time i have had a refferal from it.

[walkman]

yeah, I got a feeling they wont stick either. We've been through this DC things before and all got replaced so...

[Rollo]

I'm back in all these DCs as well, but I was during the Allegra update, then disappeared. I'm not holding my breath anymore. March 23rd will mark 6 months in the sandbox for my main site.

[idoc]

Well I am back now for the company name at #1 in the serps again. I am fairly certain that the changes I made early on adding a few internal links that point to index using the name in inbound link text on just a half dozen or so internal pages was what did it. All pages in the entire site linked to index anyway, but by a graphic link. I left those alone.

Also, on a side note I am seeing massive subdomain abuse on this search with a site domains such as:
i25.junkyspam.com/spammy_name/more_spam.htm
i34.junkyspam.com/spammy_name/more_spam.htm

They are all massive scraped link sites with links to 75 more spammy pages across the bottoms of all the pages and alot of my text scraped with our name in it. They have inserted <b> tags on everything they think is a keyword. The sad part is they rank not so far behind the real site with hundreds of listings just on our name search alone. Google must be 3/4 full of this trash.

[BigUns]

I've seen more progress in the SERPS in the last two days than in the previous ~ 3 weeks. Before, every step forward was followed by a step or two back. Now Serps are definitely showing more www.MySite.com that were previously lost and it seems to be spreading and holding. Still a lot of inconsistencies between DCs and internal inconsistencies for number of results returned compared with pre-Allegra. One 3 word query I use still shows ~ 15-20% LESS results, whereas other queries show varying numbers of larger results than pre-Allegra. One www.FraudSite.org with at least 20,000 pages plus (each of which was pretending to be a separate www.RealSite.com) which was causing some serious problems seems to be gradually getting whacked by Google. Still have major inconsistencies in what Google operators show, for example, allintitle. Those who are still lost should keep the faith. This Allegra thing is still a 'work in progress' :)

[Whoa]

I've seen some progress on search for x where my domain is x.com and x is unique. Right after Feb 3, we were #15 on our own unique domain name. Lately, we are #2 or #1 more often than not.

But, to answer your question above, Walkman, we are still gone for all practical purposes (e.g. #99 where we used to be #4) on most searches.

It seems like Google used to use the title tag to find a page on a topic and would discern the true desire of your search - but they don't now post Feb 3. If you searched for Baby Boomer Real Estate Trends, for example, they'd treat it as if you entered "Baby Boomer Real Estate Trends" for example and find a page with that title that talked about that specific subject. Now, instead, you see pages on "real estate" "real estate trends" and "baby boomers" and then way down in the rankings you'll find information on Baby Boomer Real Estate Trends. It doesn't seem like they are giving the end users good search results any more. I don't get it.

But this only happens in a few themes as far as I can tell. I really don't get it and guess I never will. Must have been an experiment in wordsense disambiguation, latent semantic indexing, or something. Or just an ongoing anti-scumscraper, content-copying initiative that had many innocent civilian casualties. Just for the sake of intellectually curiosity, I'd love to know what happened.

By the way, what's the projection of you smart guys as to when Google might fix this problem?

a) never
b) one month (by April 1)
c) three months (by June 1)
d) six months (by September 1)

It has a" six months" feeling to me. I told the person who owns the site we work on to expect to be a no-show in Google (for search phrases that she used to do very well on) until September 1. Hope I'm wrong.

[dickbaker]

Unlike some others, I'm encouraged by what's happening in the datacenters.

I had a similar experience with a couple of sites back in 2003. Once the sites reappeared in a few of the datacenters, it was a couple of months before the sites all of the DC's had the same results.

The best part was that the sites came back with first-page rankings, and they're still holding those rankings today.