How many MIA sites are there?

Are you #15 when you search for your company name?

[Whoa]

Misery loves company, so I'd love to hear that my site is not the only MIA site. How many others are there?

By MIA, I mean that your site is x.com, x is a unique name, and yet when you search for x, you find all kinds of weird sites above you (sites that link to you or mention you) and your site is way down in the results.

I believe Walkman and Chico Loco are similarly afflicted. Are there others?

If so, perhaps we can figure out what we've done wrong (or what wrong has been done to us). I can't for the life of me think of a single thing that would warrant the mistreatment.

I realize there are multiple threads on Allegra, but I'd love to start one that is exclusively dedicated to those who are still in the index but you can no longer find your site. It used to be #1 and now it's say #15.

Just to be clear, if you've been dropped completely from google, this isn't your thread. If you used to be #1 on "blue widgets" and now you're #50, this is not your thread.

This thread is exclusively for the MIA, the forgotten-souls who have been relegated to the Outer Siberia of the Google Index where even those who know and love you cannot find you.

[mufad2]

count me in.
I had posted else where about the changes I made to my site, it may either have to do with moving to a new host or a site redesign, but after reading how many other sites have gone MIA for nothing, I think its a glitch in google.
Mufad.

[nutsandbolts]

3 sites MIA for me. But I know they will come back in the next 5 years so no need to panic ;)

[edited by: nutsandbolts at 2:07 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2005]

[BillyS]

After sitting at #1 for quite some time, I am now showing well over 100.

[seppyr]

We used to be number 1 for our unique company name, and now we are on position number 194.

[Dayo_UK]

From 1 I went down to 2 in the December update (I was a bit unhappy about that) - I am now in the 80s (or 20s sometimes - and sometimes the 50s) and very very occasionally number 2 again (on a datacentre that I dont think is live.)

I know of lots of other sites that are similarly effected.

One thing I have thought of and Marcia touched on in another thread is that my site has started to get listings in Yahoo and Ask - I am wondering if a psuedo directory that uses Yahoo or Ask results is now inflated my backlink count enourmously and pushed me into a sandbox type situation.

[rehabguy]

I went from #1 over the past 5 years now to #4 on "myuniquecompanyname"

I know it's not a big drop, but right above me at #3 is an affiliate web site with only 3 pages that doesn't have my name or a link anywhere on it!

Google is broken in my opinion.

[twebdonny]

Ours is gone as well. Well it's not in the #1 position anymore, but somehere below #11. It has always prior to Allegra been #1 for compnay name which is unique. We have suffered greatly and soon may have to cease opertaions because of this. We have already suspended Adwords.

[wiseapple]

Count me in.... We do not rank on Google for our business name... Checked Yahoo & MSN - we are #1.

We have been online for over five years.

Nothing like this has happen before.

[WebFusion]

One interesting thing I noticed reflecting a few sites in my sector that had a similar drop is that they had all been involved in the purchasing of a number of single page & run-of-site text links on relatively unrelated sites which I assumed had been an attempt to artificially inflate their PR (which actually appeared to work for a few months).

[iProgram]

Google does not add weight to keyword in domain and URL. Possible? One of my page www.mysite.com/qasdfg/ ranked very high (#2) when searching keyword "qasdfg" before Allegra.

[glitterball]

I have 1 MIA site.
It is a keyword1keyword2.com site and has always underperformed in Google (never figured out why).
Most of the inbound anchor text is either "keyword1keyword2.com" or "keyword1 keyword2", which is probably not too surprising.

A search for keyword1keyword2.com lists my site in position 23 like this:

keyword1keyword2.com/
Similar pages

I recently used google's remove pages tool to get rid of many pages which were banned by my robots.txt (Google had been ignoring my robots.txt). For those that don't know, Google's remove page is just a way of forcing it to use your robots.txt, which it should be using anyway. The pages that I wanted removed were several hundred contact forms which differed only in the id of a querystring.

I have an affiliate skyscraper banner on the right-hand side of some of my pages (for a complementary service to the one that I offer).

Up until this update I was not re-directing from the non-www to the www (I am now).

I have an Adwords campaign promoting this site.

It is not listed in DMOZ, but it is listed in Yahoo!

I recently changed the left navigation using rowspan, so that it appears after the main page content in the source code.

I did notice that there is now a keyword1keyword2.NET website that I had not seen before.

Can't think of anything else, still up-to-date cached version and pagerank of 4.

[walkman]

A LOT of sites, we're not alone. Many have taken to the SEO forums (this and other ones) to talk about it. Many are just waiting or don't know why.

as far as sitewides: I have one site that disproves that and second thee's no way G would do that. It's plain stupid, unless it's done manually, and even then you can't be sure. Suppose I have a blog and forum about foot fetish (I don't. Really ;)). I also link sitewide to your political website, because I like it. It's just yourwebsite.com and it's listed along with the other dozen or so of my favorite sites, totally unrelated to foot fetish. Will Google penalize them for "having sitewide links" on 20,000 pages? How many of these scenarios exist? Way too many to start essentially banning sites based on that.

[idoc]

Right now the identical scenario from #1 to #3 searching for the unique non-word company name. Earlier in the update we were on page 8 of the serps so it has improved. Still, why a scraped search listing site that just links to us via redirect can take the #1 serps spot is laughable. It has adwords of course as do most of the other 17,000 other sites in the serps listed for the unique registered name.

To add insult to injury... Adwords is now selling clicks on the term now to competitors and the top placed ad has our unique company name solely as the title which redirects to an affiliate tracking site for a major competitor.

[Kangol]

Idoc,
I think that you have a legal case there,
I do not rank anymore in the first positions for my site name, my site testimonials or any part of my site content. I was penalized by a dupe filter because like 200 lamers copied my site content, this is the second time when I am rewriting my site.
I have an ODP listing that is showed in the good DCs. I’ve stopped doing adWords any more because without the free traffic from Google it does not worth it.

Also I have several sited that dropped several places after Alegra but its normal and I can deal with that. However I got no explication for this actual mess.

[walkman]

"Idoc,
I think that you have a legal case there"

sure he does. Just ask Geico and SearchKing

[boxerman]

I have about four sites MIA. They are still indexed but are nowhere to be found when searching by unique company name.

When comparing the sites MIA to our other sites that show up properly, I have found one main difference.

When searching mycompanyname.com the result displays just the URL, no title or description. When searching for www.mycompanyname.com the result shows the title and description of the site.

With the sites still showing up with a search for the unique company name, G returns the title and description for both Up until this update I was not re-directing from the non-www to the www.mycompanyname.com.

Upon further review of our sites, I notied the sites not showing up does not have one inbound link pointing to mycompanyname.com, they all point to www.mycompanyname.com. The other sites that show up properly has a mixture of inbound links to both the non-www and www domain.

Could anyone else check their sites that are MIA and let me know if all of the inbound links are pointing to www. I doubt much would come from it but it is the only thing i can narrow our sites specifically down to.

PS We do not have a redirect from non-www to www, nor do I know how to do this. Is this something most people do?

[WebFusion]

Will Google penalize them for "having sitewide links" on 20,000 pages? How many of these scenarios exist? Way too many to start essentially banning sites based on that.

Sorry about that, I should have been more clear. I'm not suggesting Google would ban a site for using those kinds of paid (i.e. run of site) links.

What I'm suggesting is that google simply stopped passing whatever benefit the sites on the receivning end of those links might have been getting (i.e. stopped the PR from passing, etc.)

It does look as if that might have been the case, as several of thse that were "artificial" Pr6's & PR7's have dropped to PR5 or less (while we maintained our "real" PR6).

I’ve stopped doing adWords any more because without the free traffic from Google it does not worth it.

What on earth does a paid advertising campaign being "worth it" have to do with free traffic? If a paid campaign isn't profitable, no amount of free traffic is going to make it so.

[glitterball]

When searching mycompanyname.com the result displays just the URL, no title or description. When searching for www.mycompanyname.com the result shows the title and description of the site.

I hadn't checked that before (I had to click on the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" to see my site in the results), but this looks like an effect rather than a cause.
It seems to point towards a penalty being applied to my domain name (with the WWW) rather than any of the other theories.

[march83]

One of my sites has this problem. It shows up about #23, and then it isn't the home page but a random picture page from the gallery. The site doesnt rank for key words that are so un-competitive that pages that link to me using them rank nearly top for having that link. Google replied to my complaint saying they dont penalise sites, sounds like rubbish to me.

[bsand715]

" you find all kinds of weird sites above you (sites that link to you or mention you) and your site is way down in the results."

Yep! thats me. When I type www.URL.co---- It comes up #51. Other than that its gone.

You dont think google has added Brett's How to rank for search engines to the bad neighbor list do you?

:)Joking Brett

Site is close to 6 years old, It never came back to former top rankings from Flordia, but for most part pages showed up low first to third page results.

Now "poof the magic algo" has sent it into the abyss.

Weird its up in MSN.

Wish I knew what to do.

Other sites built the same way doing fine #1 to #3 on most pages.

The only explaination I can come up with is this site plays in a BIG Adword money area, 10 mil+ page returns, where the others are in more of a niche field.

Special algo for certain keywords?

Yes I know more competition makes it harder to compete, but to dissapear?

Build more niche sites.

[Pink Panther]

OK, this is my first post - finally decided it was worth parting with the membership dosh.

All our sites are MIA (does this stand for "Missing in Action") in the sense that they used to rank #1 for company name (PR7's) but are now buried way deep.

My theory is a duplicate content filter (we were guilty) and I put this to Google by email. We actually got a quick reply which was a nice surprise but they assure me that we are not penalised in anyway. I am not convinced...

I have checked the home pages on those members profiles quoting them in this thread and need to let you know that you do have a duplicate content problem.

It seems to me that Google has gone OTT on duplicates and decided to shoot the whole site rather than the pages affected.

Places you might unknowingly have a dup problem:

1. News feeds / Syndication feeds
2. Bought in glossaries / other content
3. Accidently have a page appear under two URL's - this is easy to do if you move a page and dont 410 the old page.
4. Places where members can write - they often post there copy to more than one site!

If we all update our profiles to show our home pages we can all check this theory further.

[walkman]

"My theory is a duplicate content filter (we were guilty) and I put this to Google by email. We actually got a quick reply which was a nice surprise but they assure me that we are not penalized in anyway. I am not convinced..."

from what Ii can tell: They'll you that ONLY if they didn't manually penalize or ban you. So, you're not "banned" but the algo ranks sites and we can't do anything.

On dupe issue: I have none of that dupe stuff, but how could G drop a site for posting for example a AP story, Reuters or a syndicated column story? Of if you have a forum and post the entire article (many still) or even a few paragraphs

[diddlydazz]

count 4 of ours in

<-- Google is broken in my opinion. --> (rehabguy)

agreed but for how long.

<-- But I know they will come back in the next 5 years so no need to panic ;) --> (nutsandbolts)

lol

Anyone find an example of a big/popular/famous site being hit?

dazz

[Pink Panther]

"how could G drop a site for posting for example a AP story, Reuters or a syndicated column story? Of if you have a forum and post the entire article (many still) or even a few paragraphs "

exactly - it's not reasonable but Google do tend to over react.

For instance, what about cross linking penalties - why can't I link my sites together as it is a logical thing to do. If I were to design my sites without the search engines in mind I would heavily cross link them all. Tesco are allowed to put their car insurance leaflets by the checkout so why can't we do the same thing on the web without being penalised. The correct action would be to ignore links between sites of the same owner when calculating PR, not penalise the sites involved.

[phantombookman]

1:Ranked #1 for my overall company name for over 5 years, now #3 behind a site that mentions my company name.

2:A site I control has disappeared completely for company name, was #1 for about 3 years. White hat absolutely clean

3:Strange one this, a site I have, niche deicated to one author, homepage has completely disappeared for search on authors name, was top 5 before, however internal pages have 100's of #1 matches for authors name plus any other relevant word!

Any ideas on this? point 2, when using the site: command the homepage is still there but is now listed as a supplemental?

[KrisVal]

My site no longer ranks for my brand so I have been checking others who got hit. A few of them came back late yesterday afternoon. They were on page 9, now they are back to #1 on all data centers. I am hopeful this is a glitch and will be rectified across the board.

[idoc]

<removed out of futility>

[edited by: idoc at 7:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2005]

[rocco]

same for me with a dozen of sites.

one even has a wrong link: instead of [domain.com...] google links to [domain...] - google is broken imo.

[skippy]

This stuff is just getting crazy. I am going through my logs and people are trying to use a four term keyword plus my domain name and I am still 9th. There was only 43 frickn results.