My site has been First Now vanished from Google

My site has been the first of its kind, I drop off Google

[sabine7777]

For the past year I have experienced periodically being completely dropped off Google. My site has been the FIRST of its kind and is in all the natural search results on the first spot. I'm just a small business, but since spet of 2004 I have been vanishing off of Google every 6 weeks or so--recently it has been more often and for longer periods. Does Google discriminate against Older sites? Are they doing it so that we will advertise with them? Any help, advice, comment from a desperate single mother of 4!

[Adam_T]

Possible competetion optimising and taking your place? I can't see them doing because of advertising reasons, etc, there must be a logical explanations i guess :)

[Stronkie]

It may have something to do with the data centre updates.

The following article may help you understand how Google updates its index regularly:

[#*$!.com...]

[Stronkie]

Sorry... the link above doesn't seem to have worked so I suggest you do a search on Google for "Google datacenters"

[texasville]

it has to be more than serp fluctuation if you are disappearing from them all together. Are you checking your logs and seeing that it is happening after a crawl? Perhaps the bot can't access your site due to internittent problems with your server. When it comes back and finds you again, you are back in the top level serps.

[Gavolar]

Im a ware of this problem and I have spoken to other webmasters who are experiencing it...

If I enter my unique website name my site turns up about 80th place out of 20,000 results all referring to my site.

If I enter very competitive financial search terms that are related to my site I pop up around 30th out of 6,000,000 results when I have always been on the 1st page (for around 3 years on and off).
Personally I think my site has received a penalty, as there have been many attempts to hijack my site, and there are several sites out there that have copied my site word for word, graphic for graphic.

Although these sites have been band in Google, I think they may have been around just long enough to give me a penalty for 6 weeks.. Well Im 7 weeks and counting now but Im expecting my site to come back soon.

sabine7777:
Try selecting a "unique phrase in your site using quotes" and search in Google, MSN and Yahoo to see if any one has been ripping you off.

[tbear]

This happened to one of my sites recently (4 year old site, gone for about 4 weeks). It was restored (within hours) when I put frame breaking code on every page. I assume someone was messing ;)
Try it, it can't hurt and may help.

[sabine7777]

Thanks to you all the caring folks who give me such valuable feedback: i will have to learn carefully all these responses and see how I can apply those I haven't. I have been appearing on all the other search engines, still on top, except for aol, which copies Google word for word. How do i know whether a competitor's site hijacked me?, Google has asked me that very questions--they were interested to know themselves--that's why I do NOT think I'm being penalized. I cahnge pages everyday, because my merchandise is all cash and accry, one of a kind items--could that have something to do with it?. Another questions, does being a site operating under "Homepage" affect Google's robots reading you?. Thanks to all of you! thank you, thank you, thank you!

[nsqlg]

One directory (just one folder!) of my site has been penalized for 2 weeks, wiped from SERPS, but last week back again ranking very well, with 30-40% more traffic than ever... lol :)

[fiu88]

<<<This happened to one of my sites recently (4 year old site, gone for about 4 weeks). It was restored (within hours) when I put frame breaking code on every page. I assume someone was messing ;)
Try it, it can't hurt and may help>>>

Why would this help restore a listing? How would someone b " messing" and cause a drop in listings?

[mossroller]

My site which has been doing well since Bourbon is now missing from almost all my SERPS. 2-3 word combinations I owned I am now nowhere to be seen.

[tbear]

Re: messing.....

Check out some of these threads [google.com]

Oh, and welcome, Gavolar!

P.S.
The script I added to my pages is the following:
<script type="text/javascript">
if (parent.frames.length > 0) {
parent.location.href = self.document.location
}
</script>
Inserted between the head tags.

[nutsandbolts]

Some think the older the site, the safer it is... but that theory was blown out of the water this morning for me.

Five year old site based on a form of artistic writing (as usual, clean as a whistle) dropped from Google... pages still in the index, but nothing showing no matter what the search is.

Must be a bug... I hope....

[dt1961]

I think Google is completely broken. My site has disspeared although it ranks well for MSN and Yahoo. At a complete loss to understand this.

[stargeek]

"<script type="text/javascript">
if (parent.frames.length > 0) {
parent.location.href = self.document.location
}
</script> "

if google views the page through a frame, could this possibly be seen as a javascript redirect eg spam?

[travelin cat]

This has happened to us as well... we were #1 for a very popular ravel term for over 2 years.... occasionally we would go to 2nd position but always back after a week at most. About 35 of our other phrases were all in the top 10 serps for 2 plus years as well.

We still have a pr of 6 on index.html and 4 or 5 on all others. Then, on 8/23 we were gone. poof. just like that.

We had changed nothing up to that time, but now we are not in the top 100 serps (stopped looking after that)

A search for site:http://www.mycompany.com shows even more pages then previously and our back links have slightly increased as well.

Here is the worst part, the other results for the serps are showing one of my competitors and the others (for a U.S. site related term) go like this:
#1 Australian company
2 a competitor here in the states
3 Australian company
4 UK company
5 Maltese company
6 French company
7 UK company
8 UK Company
9 Peruvian Company
10 Chinese Company

it goes on and on....

sigh.

[LunaC]

"<script type="text/javascript">
if (parent.frames.length > 0) {
parent.location.href = self.document.location
}
</script> "

if google views the page through a frame, could this possibly be seen as a javascript redirect eg spam?

I was wondering the very same thing yesterday. I've used a similar thing on my sites for years and recently have been taking a beating in Google.

<body onload="if (self!= top) top.location = self.location;">

Could be part of the problem, but then again it could be something totally unrelated... I have no idea.

[stargeek]

it seems ridiculous to label frame killing as a spammy redirect, but its not like google is afraid of ridiculous.

[Lorel]

I use a similar script on my site and have been using it for several months and I rank on first page for most of my important terms and have never dropped in google.

For those interested in seeing if you've been hijacked search for ''302 redirect"

[martinibuster]

I don't believe that a framebuster script is going to cause you to lose your ranks, much less get banned. I see one of my sites with framebusters dropping one or two positions. That's not a penalty, it's just losing rank position. So from my experience, there is no penalty happening for a framebuster script.

I think what's going on is an update or algo tweak.

[linkjack]

I can't see them doing because of advertising reasons

Right. These "updates" come near the end of the quarters to match the season and fashion trends.

U$ 200,000,000.00 in advertising profits has absolutely NOTHING to do with it.

That's why we give Google plenty of free advice here, because they're out there to help us and be our friends.

[steveb]

"Must be a bug... I hope...."

Every example I've seen points the blame at Google re-adding millions of Supplemental pages, and/or penalizing pages that have too many Supplemental copies. Also, sites showing ridiculously inflated page counts are the ones effected, while I haven't seen any sites with normal page counts effected (though that might be a coincidence).

Nothing to do with an algo here. Lots of sites are being penalized because their content has been stolen sometime in the past two years, and Google insists on keeping the copies in its database forever, even though the pages don't really exist in most cases. (Other things can be going on of course too.)

[wiseapple]

That are three things about Google I have never understood...

1. Certain pages seems stuck in time. The dates Nov. 1, 2004 - Dec 2. 2004, and Feb. 05 - 2005 are the key dates for our site. All the supplementals list these dates as the cache dates.

2. Why are there inflated page counts? Not just inflated but wildy inflated. If a site has 10,000 pages the "Site:" command will list 100,000. What are the other 90,000 pages - links - etc... made up of? There must be a database record for these 90,000 elements? And if you submit a sitemap to Google with the exact 10,000 pages on the site - why does the count not adjust? You are telling Google exactly what pages exist on the site.

3. It seems common sense the there should be no difference between www and non-www (www.mysite.#*$! and mysite.#*$!). Why have a difference between the two?

Google has tons of computig power. I would suggest the following activities for them.

- Clean up supplemental index. Go out and find out if these pages exist any more. Get the junk out of the index. Do not worry about competing on size. Worry about relevance and accuracy.

- Do not see non-www and www as two separate sites.

- Get the inflated pages counts back in control. Why 100,000 for for a 10,000 page site? Why are some sites completely accurate - while others are way out of sync?

Just my thoughts.

[Salon99]

"Also, sites showing ridiculously inflated page counts are the ones effected, while I haven't seen any sites with normal page counts effected"

This could be correct Steve. We added an entire library to a section of the site a couple of months ago, and now it is hit.

The problem is that the library is very very popular, so we are not about to delete it again, whatever happens with Google.

The situation is a real mess.

[sabine7777]

Linkjack: you write: "U$ 200,000,000.00 in advertising profits has absolutely NOTHING to do with it." do you see how ridiculous you are sounding?, you are stating an oximoron fact! that sounds EXACTLY like why they bouncing the high ranking site Off completely--so they'll advertise and Google will make a profit--you said it yourself...Duh! are you a google exce or something?!, that's what you sound like. I bet yah, in a couple years, someone will reveal this on 60 minutes and this unethical treatment by Google will come to light--perhaps not yet illegal, because this is still the wild West...but let's wait and see how Judges out there like this unethical practices...why all these problem ever since Google went Public?, very clear--so they can increase profits...DUH...Capitalism--remember what that's all about...

[walkman]

plenty of changes in Google right now as I see...hang on.

I'm still holding up though, which is always good. I haven't gotten, or asked for a link in 3+ months. Not even to those directories that Google says is OK to add our sites to. I'm playing it extremely safe till I reach a certain amount in the bank.

[TammyJo]

I noticed a huge drop today in ranking for our major site. Dropped to page 2 for major keyword, which is as good as dropping off the planet :) Other pages have lost ranking, but some have stayed the same.

Is this another update that needs a name? How about google Roulette :)

[skibum]

Seeing big changes here, somewhat of a rollback to pre-Bourbon update. It doesn't seem consistent across pages sites, page size, navigation structures, or type of content. Hopefully they'll keep tweaking and there will be more changes ahead.

[reseller]

TammyJo

>>Is this another update that needs a name?<<

I believe that its an update (also including alog changes). As to the name, I have suggested "Update Brett", but its our kind mods who have the final decision of course.

[reseller]

skibum

>>Seeing big changes here, somewhat of a rollback to pre-Bourbon update.<<

Not exactly, because we see fresh data on the serps. Maybe the new algos of this update are somewhat similar to those of pre-Bourbon.