Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Site 1 – 2 years old – PR5 - 1,810 Links
Site 2 – 2 years old – PR5 - 1,540 links
Site 3 – 2 years old – PR5 - 1,840 Links
Site 4 - 1 year old – PR4 – 40 links
Site 5 – 1 year old – PR5 – 142 Links
The first 3 sites listed had been in fantastic positions on Google consistently for over 18 months. Everything was always stable and consistent. None of these sites were ever affected by any updates.
However, consistency and stability all ended in January! All 5 of these sites started to slide from their positions. By the middle of January they were in the supplemental index. The only way to find these sites now is to search by domain name, which just displays the URL without title or description. Here is a typical case from my sites:
If I search for: ‘www.mysite.com’
I just see just the domain name with no title or description. Sometimes it is www.mysites.com and sometimes its just mysite.com.
If I search for: ‘site:www.mysite.com’
The index page is missing. 50% of the internal pages show title and description, while the other 50% are just the URL. The cached of the pages with title and description say: ‘did not match any documents’.
If I search for: ‘allinurl: www.mysite.com’
I see www.mysite.com%20. This %20 seems to be added on to a lot of my urls’s for some reason. The cached of what small amount of internal pages that are displayed can range from September 2004 to March 2005.
Some facts about my sites:
1. All 5 sites disappeared from Google at the same time in January 2005.
2. All 5 sites use shared hosting with a big inexpensive domain register with a silly name!
3. All 5 sites shared the same name server IP address block.
4. I only see Googlebot visit my sites about once every couple of weeks.
5. My hosting company admitted that they had a domain name server problem in January. However they were not very specific about details.
Could my sites have been penalized by Google?
At first I guessed my sites had been hijacked. There seemed to be a lot of sites linking to me using redirects. So I emailed Google explaining that my sites had fallen into the supplemental index and about my concern over possible hijacking. Google responded back by saying, that there had been a spidering problem. They went on to explain that their index contains two types of pages: fully indexed and partially indexed pages, and that my pages are currently partially indexed because their robots were unable to completely review the content during our last crawl, thus my site appears without a cached copy or detailed title. Instead, it's listed by its URL.
Six weeks later I emailed Google a second time and I got a more cryptic response. This time they said that they are unable to send personal responses to all of the requests they receive to review individual website content. They said that Websites can fall out of our index for many reasons, including penalization. Certain actions such as buying or selling links to increase a site's Page Rank value or cloaking - writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users - can result in penalization.
My sites comply 100% with Google’s guideline. I have not engaged in buying links, cloaking, or link exchanges with bad neighborhoods. All my link exchanges are with appropriate similar theme sites as my own, and in fact, I have not exchanged links with anyone for at least six months.
Remedies:
Based on what I have read on Webmaster World, I have made several major changes in the last 6 weeks. I have re-written all the content and re-designed my 3 top sites. I have put a java script time stamp on several sites. I have moved to a dedicated name server IP on the top 3 sites too. I am also submitting to Google on a daily basis.
However it appears nothing I do makes any difference. Googlebot is not visiting any more often in spite of the number of incoming links I have.
Although there still appears to be a few sites using 302 redirects, I can not accept all 5 of my sites have been hijacked all at the same time. I am beginning to suspect there is a major flaw on the part of my hosting company and the name server.
Any advice or suggestions, anyone?
Regards,
Panacea
