Index Page Gone

Aug 03 to July 05 - thats a long time

[jamsy]

This morning i notice that our index page is missing from Google. After years of high rankings we are now no where to be seen for our major terms.

I have researched previous threads on this and it appears to be a re occuring problem although googleguy did say back in Aug 03 that this would be resolved with a "binary push" well its now July 05 and still not resolved.

Anyone else got this problem at the moment.

[Chico_Loco]

I'm pretty sure that binary push was just bull plop. Either that, or something which he/she knew we wouldn't really understand anyway.

He was playing with you, they won't be resolving anything for you!

[helleborine]

jamsy, have you considered the possibility of a hijack?

I guess you can say it's my pet peeve, because it happened to me.

[Stefan]

It could have happened for a lot of reasons. Disappearing index pages aren't exactly uncommon.

Is it totally gone? If you search the URL, www.example.com/ , no quotes around it, what does it say? Is it just the index page that is not showing in the serps?

By any chance, does your site work with both of these URL's: www.example.com, example.com?

[Crush]

jamsy if it is not a hijack it is a google glitch. If you recently did some 301's this may have triggered it. Just looks to see if googlebot is still coming and it will sort itself out in a week or 2. I am speaking from recent experience here. Do not panic, do not change anything just wait and you will be back.

[Dayo_UK]

I have just seen another site go like this (dont know when - not mine - relatively well known UK site)

Site is a PR4 - yet Homepage has gone, just this:-

Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.example.com

If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: www.example.com

Find web pages from the site www.example.com

Find web pages that contain the term "www.example.com"

Doing a site check pages still exist and PR still showing in the toolbar.

[Dayo_UK]

Ok - this is a bit of a weird one.

Doing a search for "www.example.com" shows the result as above - however if you do a site search in the format - site.example.com example.com then the homepage is returned in the site search.

[Stefan]

Doing a site check pages still exist and PR still showing in the toolbar.

By site check, you mean they're on the server? Toolbar PR only gets updated every few months, so it could still show PR in those datacentres after the index page has disappeared from the serps database, (I think...)

Doing a search for "www.example.com"

That will give you every text reference, both anchor text and straight text. Your site could be dead for years and still show on that search if the URL text is on other domains.

however if you do a site search in the format - site.example.com example.com then the homepage is returned in the site search

I tried that with my site and got the exact same results as having the quotes around the URL. I don't know how that works....

ADDED: Sorry, checked those two searches again and they give the same number of results, but the order is somewhat different - similar though.

[GeorgeK]

That happened to me too, for a very busy site (more than a million visitors per month).

I redesigned some internal links, to make sure that pages linked to http://www.example.com/ instead of http://www.example.com/index.html and then resubmitted the home page to Google Submit, and was back to normal as of tonight.

Thankfully I get mostly type-in traffic, and don't rely on search engine rankings for my livelihood, but I still monitor things.

[Dayo_UK]

Well known UK site has still gone.

Perhaps they used the url removal tool :/ in error.

[Dayo_UK]

Eeek - Found another one!

Erm this is starting to look bad. (Well at least strange)

It is possible that it could be url removals I guess - very weird for the major UK site to do this though

[reseller]

Dayo_UK & helleborine

Long time no report about your sites!

I see the DCs moving. But that has been expected. GG mentioned something to the effect that the summer is a good time to keep some og Google engineers busy with things and rings ;-)

[edited by: reseller at 8:07 am (utc) on July 10, 2005]

[Dayo_UK]

Hey Reseller.

Not much going on for my site - cant work out whats happening with reference to my above posts.

Dayo

[reseller]

Hey Dayo

Guess we have to wait until the end of July, where things will be more clear by then ;-)

[Dayo_UK]

End of July - maybe ;) - I assume G are still working on things.

Sometimes Google has to go backwards before it goes forward - I wonder if that is what we see sometimes.

[try2]

It seems to me as G went on holiday and they implemented an old index without starting any bot (an old banned page went back, but no new ones were found).

Or might there be a kind of amnesty from G's penatly after some time?

cu, try2

[ramachandra]

Till yesterday my homepage was in index and doing well for some of my keywords in SERPs, but today I noticed only URL of my homepage is getting displayed with no description and all other pages are still in index with description and I am nowhere in SERPs for any keyword.

When I search for www.mysite.com it shows a msg “Google can show you the following information for this URL” ……

Can anyone tell me what it means?

[alexo]

Till yesterday my homepage was in index and doing well for some of my keywords in SERPs, but today I noticed only URL of my homepage is getting displayed with no description and all other pages are still in index with description and I am nowhere in SERPs for any keyword.

When I search for www.mysite.com it shows a msg “Google can show you the following information for this URL” ……

The same is here:
3-4 months ago "www.site.com" dissapeared from google index =>Sorry, no information is available for the URL

1. 3-4 months ago:
www.site.com => sorry no information
site:site.com =>300-400 pages (most of them without title and description)
all keywords don't work, site traffic from G 5-10/per day (before it 1000-3000)
googlebot visits 1000 /month

also , at this time i put 301 redirect from non www version to www version.

2. 2 month ago:
www.site.com => site.com/news/ [it's 2-3 years old homepage, which i redirect to www.site.com]. without title & description.

site:site.com =>400-500 pages (most of them without title and description)

keywords don't work

googlebot visits 1000 /month

i put 301 redirect from site.com/news/ to site.com, read 2-3 messages to google and do reinclussion request.

3. 1 month ago

www.site.com => sorry no information
site:site.com =>10 000-20 000 pages (part of them with title and descriptio)
all keywords don't work
googlebot visits 10000 /month

4. now

www.site.com => sorry no information
site:site.com =>55 000-57 000 pages (+ 1000 -2000 every 2 days)
all keywords don't work
googlebot visits 10 -20 000 /for this 11 days

and got answer from google

============
Hi MY NAME,

Thank you for your note. We apologize for our delayed response. Please keep in mind that we don't personally review individual sites, nor do we comment on webmaster techniques or the details of our search technology beyond what appears on our site.

As you may know, we've dedicated an entire section of our site to answering the most common questions from those who maintain and/or promote websites. You'll find all of our publicly available information posted at [google.com...]

Besides this section of our site, we've created a newsgroup discussion forum for passionate Google users. At [groups.google.com...] in the [groups.google.com...] group, many webmasters and Google users share their questions and expertise.

We recommend performing an advanced search on this group if you feel your question is particularly challenging and you've been unable to find an answer on our site. To do so, go to [google.com...] and enter your search terms in one of the "Find messages" fields at the top of the page. Type "google.public.support.general" in the "Newsgroup" search field, and click "Google Search." If you don't find an answer to your question, you can always post your question to the group to see if other newsgroup users have helpful advice. Please be aware that this content isn't posted by Google, and we cannot verify its accuracy.

We appreciate your taking the time to write.

Regards,
The Google Team

Original Message Follows:

===================

unfortunately, i don't find anythink interesting in the groups :-(

so .. what to do?
reply to this email?
resumbit my site (which gbot crawl and index every day and my homepage is in results site:site.com)

or?

[Vimes]

Hi All,

Well something freaky happened over the weekend.

One of my sites that has been top 5 for its targeted terms for the last 4 years just lost its Homepage.

Not all DC's are returning the same info some have the homepage with a cache of the 9th and others don't have my homepage.

Yet if I do a site: search all dc's return pages of my site including the dc's that don't have my homepage indexed.

Allinurl: which used to be useful (but I'm not so sure anymore) shows some supplemental results that have my url in them but nothing that looks "classic" hijack stuff.
The one result that I am concerned about is that url listing www.mysite.com%20/
So there's a space in between the com and the slash when I click this it returns a "page not displayed" message.

Any thoughts on this I'm going to remove the incorrect listing with the removal tool I don't see it helping the situation.

Anyone have any other ideas why this is happening.

Vimes.

[reseller]

Vimes

>Any thoughts on this I'm going to remove the incorrect listing with the removal tool I don't see it helping the situation.<

Be very careful in using the removal tools, because you might end in removing your index page in practice for the next 180 days or even six months. GoogleGuy has worned more than once about that.

[Dayo_UK]

I would not recommend the removal tool.

But a question I posed in a supporters thread.

For a site that had this problem six months and 1 day ago and if the removal tool was used back then I wonder if that site would be in a better or worse position today?

[Vimes]

Hi,

Thanks for the heads up, tool seems to be not accessible
anyway.

there seem to be plenty of dc's with my index page in them all have the 9th of this month cache.

i'm going to sit back and wait, maybe a glitch, time will tell i suppose if it spreads.

Vimes.

[Dayo_UK]

Well it has spread to a few sites I know.

Perhaps Google should use Yahoos index until they sort this problem out?

At least Yahoo can crawl their own website (He he).

Or even MSNs? ;)

Seriously, GoogleGuys must be on the case by now (dont want to keep posting as I am feeling like an old woman nagging)

But the first sign of improvements must surely be a massive crawl.......

Happy Bday to Me :) Bday wish for the greatest SE the world has ever known to come back :)

[stevet_au]

Hi,

FYI, we re-engineered our site to use .aspx, and relaunched on the same IP address.

Our home page disappeared from google when searching for www.<site>.com, for a couple of weeks, and has just returned today.

Steve.

[panini]

Hey Jamsy and the rest of you guys - this just happened to us - has yours come back?

[jgmiller]

I just had this happen to our site as well. All of my other pages are still indexed in Google and googlebot is still scanning my home page but it's gone from the index.

If you search on our company name one of our deeper pages hows up as #3 so I don't think we've been banned.

Anyone else have any theories?

[panini]

hey jgmiller, yeah googlebot is all over us too - many hits by various googlebots to the home page - and all other pages are still in the index - but if you type either our domain name or the full domainname/homepage.asp it's not there..... haven't changed that page since may

[jgmiller]

Yeah it's strange, we haven't changed our page in ages either. We're a very big Adwords advertiser so I just got off the phone with my Google rep reminding them of that fact; she's going to go over to the index people and see if they can tell her anything.

[JimM]

I didn't see this thread and had posted about this problem earlier. That post seems to be on hold for review.

I had two sites homepages disappear 3 days ago. It seems to have affected the homepages only.

Anyone have any revelations about this problem yet?

[panini]

really jgmiller? we spend a lot on adwords too, but our rep just said it was not their side of the business, and told us to fill in the online help form.... really not sure what you have to spend to get looked after, it must be a huge amount.... can you keep us posted if you get any feedback from them? - Also googleguy, just on the off chance you're here - can you help us all?