Site Missing, Google Now Shows "Untitled"

[seaboy]

I don't just want to add to the plethora of 'my site has vanished' posts that seem to be popping up, but I thought this was interesting, and wondered if anyone had any ideas.
A site that I host has lost virtually all traffic from Google, so I did a search for the domain name to make sure that it was still included in the index.
Searching for www.example.com shows the following:

Tip: Try Google Answers for help from expert researchers

Untitled
UP

Google can show you the following information for this URL:

* Find web pages that are similar to www.example.com
* Find web pages that link to www.example.com
* Find web pages that contain the term "www.example.com"

So...I'm not sure why the page title is showing 'Untitled', as there has *always* been a title on this page. Clicking on that link *does* take you to the site, but without the 'www.'.
The description just says 'UP' (all CAPS), which appears nowhere on the page, or in the HTML code, and there is no cache of the page either.
Does anyone have any ideas?

[edited by: ciml at 5:14 pm (utc) on Mar. 9, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[seaboy]

a quick update (still looking for any suggetsions anyone may have), but there is a cache for example.com (not www.example.com), but it says:

"as retrieved on Apr 19, 2004 23:48:31 GMT"

I'm extremely perplexed by this. This is a quality site, was PR5 or 6, no spamming or anything.

[Jakpot]

I have many urls with the same condition.
Google was notified 2 months ago.
Apparently they have higher priority profit
oriented matters to address. Who knows?

[john_s]

Sounds like some strange happenings going on at Google right now. I've been watching my site slowly fade away all this week. First my home page, now one by one my other pages. My home page just vanished, and my other pages show the reported no description, no cache syndrome, then gone. My site hasn't changed for quite some time now (no spamming attempted), it stills shows a PR in the toolbar and I'm still ranking well in the other engines (MSN, Yahoo, etc.) so I'm thinking that hijacking is not my problem. I've looked using the techniques noted but so far nothing obvious shows. Since it's local to Google (so far), I can only assume (yes, I know what that means) it's something on their side. Not much else to do for now except wait and hope I get reindexed during the next few weeks (months?).

John S.

[seaboy]

John_S - I don't think this is a hijacking issue either, and I'm seeing exactly the same thing. The homepage vanishes, then the inside pages disappear, but not all at once. I'm seeing this on several sites now, not just the one I mentioned above.

I'm happy to show examples if anyone wants them.

Did find something that may provide a clue though. If I search for www.example.com, there is no cache, just a title ('Untitled') and description ('UP'). *However*, clicking on that link takes you to example.com (no www.). If I use the Google Toolbar to check the cache it says:

This is Google's cache of h**p://example.com/ as retrieved on Apr 19, 2004 23:48:31 GMT.

Almost a year old!

[davthp]

My site has ranked reasonably well in the index. This week it dissapeared COMPLETELY - searching on the URL brings up loads of sites that link to it.

It seems as though they have just pulled the site - WHY?

[adb64]

In the past days I also saw a lot of pages (+/- 300) of my site displayed with only the URL iso the page title. While before they were displayed normally.
One other thing I noticed was that in the past days only a few visits per day from Googlebot occured while before it went up to sometimes a few hundred hits per day. So what's going on there at G?

[john_s]

Yep. Seems to be the pattern. It's frustrating not knowing what's really happening and when things might settle down again. I was ranking in positions #2 or 3 (depending on the day) on the first page for my search results for about a year. Didn't see much movement the past few weeks when I heard rumors that things were happening, so I thought I was OK. Not much to do but wait for Googlebot to arrive.

JS

[pcarlow]

Since Jan 15th my home page dropped out of G with no title no description. A site: search on my URL will show anywhere from 40 - 100 pages. (I used to have over 400 fully indexed).

Of those pages only about half will have a title and description. As the week wears on, the pages start dropping to be replaced by URL only or dissappear from the index altogether.

Googlebot comes by pretty consisitently (avg a dozen hits a day) and then when it seems almost every page in the site is gone from G, I'll jump back up to another 100 pages in the index and the cycle repeats. As of last week the PR from home page keeps disappearing and coming back.

I've tried everything I can think of to remedy the situation. Removing duplicate content, 301 redirecting domain.com to www.domain.com, removing suspect outgoing links, getting more incoming links, getting other webmasters to remove 302 redirects to my site.

Thing that drives me crazy is I can't figure out if this is a penalty or if Google is just messed up. If I knew one way or the other I could just get on with my life.

Biggest lesson I've learned from this is don't put all your eggs in one basket, started six more sites this month. :/

[oagady]

I believe that one of the possible explanations is that Google is getting more and more bugs in its application these days. May be their application got so big, that they lost control over it (Or may be they don't treat their programmers nicely, so the programmers pay them back with a buggy code - LOL)

Olga

[john_s]

I know the feeling...pretty frustrating. Is it you or is it them?

Just went to my site and the toolbar still shows PR, so G must still know something about my site. Gone from the index, but still in where it stores that info. Checked my reports, found Gbot only once 3/4/05 to 3/10/05. Not sure what's going on there.

JS

[adb64]

Yesterday I had a few hits from Googlebot again, not many. I also saw a lot of my old, since long gone, pages returned back into G's serps, while they weren't there some weeks ago and my new now pages only show up with URL only and they were fine until a week ago.
I've seen the same going on at G somewhere in August/September last year and it took them about a month to have it all restored to normal.
So maybe we have to sit back for some weeks and then hopefully we suddenly see Googlebot spider our pages like crazy as it did back then.

[glengara]

Any of you using Valueweb hosting?

[adb64]

No, I'm living in The Netherlands and hosted on a virtual host with a Dutch hosting company.

[itloc]

Well from my side:

- Lost around 20'000 indexed pages within the last 2 months.
- Lost all my good rankings
- My old site (redirected with 301 to new site) came back to the index

My reactions so far:

- Changed a lot in my site
- Posted a lot in different boards
- Invested too much time for this

Effects:

- None. Still there are different indexes. Some good, some from hell.

Further actions:

- Today i banned Mediapartners-Google and terminated Adsense.

- By the end of this month i will ban GBot. No traffic - no bot.

Regards

itloc

[john_s]

Yes, I'm on Valueweb.

Checked my logs more closely. Gbot came through on 3/9. As of this morning, my home page is back ranking from where it left off. Cached on that day.

JS

[jk3210]

<<Any of you using Valueweb hosting?>>

Yep. Why?

<<Gbot came through on 3/9. As of this morning, my home page is back ranking from where it left off>>

Same here.

[glengara]

DP forum, "where has Googlebot gone" thread, post no.20...

[john_s]

A little help please? I cannot find this. I'm sure I'm looking in the wrong place, but I did a site search and still couldn't locate it.

Thanks

JS

[jk3210]

Wow, a web host router blocking googlebot?

[RS_200_gto]

After some research, I made a small conclusion about our search term in Google SERBS and found out why we are not in the SERBS the conclusion based on our search term is that (Results 1 - 10 of about 1,350,000 for widget employment is being filtered by holding (widget) employment hostage so that there may be rules or filters that Google applies to specifically exclude certain sites or search terms from the primary index.

[john_s]

That's more better. Thanks for the hint. I wouldn't have figured it out. An enlightening post. But G moves around so much on its own during an update period, understandable why it would be suspect first. But then, I wasn't checking my logs as often as I should either.

Thanks again.

JS