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!

[djmick200]

I have now looked at 11 sites belonging to people from this thread including my own.

They don't have much in common at all that Im aware of, the one common factor among them was this:

Urls with keywords in them. 8 using kw1-kw2.html , kw1_kw2.html some with more than 2 kw.
Titles with kw1 kw2 some with more.
Descriptions with kw1 kw2, again most with more.
On page kw1 kw2 (kw3 kw4) as the main heading (wrong word - sorry) for the page. eg. MY kw1 kw2 Page

The above is the only thing that is common when looking at the html for all the eleven sites. To see this I clicked only 1 link from each home page. All had at least 3 of the above factors, most have all of them.

I personally think there is more to. I also added a lot of pages (now removed) and added more links in the past month than normal.

I beleive a combination of all of this has taken me over the limit in some kind of filter scoring system and triggered it for me.

At someones suggestion I used a unique search phrase that would only apply to my site and was out ranked by a guy who is using alexa listings as a scraper for his amazon aff program (removed now),supplement results, and it came 9th. Can anyone explain that to me please as I honestly dont understand it. In the supplement results that listed above me there was an old Lycos search result, a hotlinker to an image, a site that links to a different site i own. Strange.

[Dayo_UK]

OK - last post for know - I think/hope Google are listening but they need time :)

So if not fixed I will have to remember where I am at (93)

Listen Google - I will say this only another 93 times. The canonical url for my site is the homepage with the www - I have done the 301 - this is the page with the most backlinks - it is the page that should rank for the company name search. Etc."

After all Matt did say in his blog:-

As we work down the list of canonicalization issues that people run into and cross them off the list, I wouldn’t be surprised if this issue + 301s taking longer than before is the next thing on the list.

I really hope they will cross this off the list soon. Matt or GG - any point in doing another re-inclusion request - I have done one before but no progress.

Also - when you do sort - I hope the fixed domains dont then go into the sandbox :( - which I think is likely unfortunately as I cant see the domains just getting all the power back without triggering another filter - eg the Sandbox.

Lol - quick explanation why I am giving Google a breather from my constant nagging - I just cant deny that a little crawl went out on one of my sites and Google looks like they got it right - just hope it leads to a big crawl

[FattyB]

Well I noticed some changes this morning when I search on "Site Name."

Though very odd is that some of them on second and third page are just a page with my site name on them with meta data from our sections and a link to the site...they also spawned some winfixer popunder that tried to install something and crashed my browser...

Might odd results, obviously still movement...

[AndyA]

I personally think there is more to. I also added a lot of pages (now removed) and added more links in the past month than normal.

Does anyone else find it pathetic that we can't add new pages as we like, for fear of tripping some unrealistic Google filter, which penalizes the rest of the site?

The tail is wagging the dog!

[km911]

"The tail is wagging the dog!"

That hits the point....

[almar]

GoogleGuy do you have a response to this?

[stargeek]

"GoogleGuy do you have a response to this?"

I hope he does, but i bet he won't

[MrSpeed]

djmick200-
How many pages were in each of those sites?
Were they in any way affiliate sites using a datafeed as part of the site?

[Tinus]

<Have done the same (manually) on 137 pages just after the 22nd July 2005 where my site got the second hit by Google (first one was on 2-3 Feb. 2005). >

Reseller,
When you had to change those 137 pages, did you try to stay out of the sandbox or did you changed everything within a few days?
I am fed up so I think will change everything as fast as possible and forget about Google for some time.

[wiseapple]

We need a place to list all of the sites... How about a new Google Group?

Or at least we need to develop a common set of questions and things to look at. Anyone up for this?

Here are my questions:

- When using "Site:" command, are counts correct?
(Our answer: No, 10X number of actual pages.)

- Have you redirected non-www to www? How long ago?
(Our answer: Yes. about 3 months ago.

- Are you seeing non-www appears in serps?(site:mysite.com -www)
(Our answer: Sometimes. Somehow Google picked up on our "FTP" subdomain. This resolves to the same address as WWW. This was removed sometime in Feb. However, these pages still pop up.

- Are you seeing old pages that are no longer exist reappear in the serps?
(Our answer: Yes, pages from last year came up in the serps yesterday. I checked this by looking for 404's in our logs. Googlebot was hitting these pages.

- Are you using Google sitemaps?
(Our answer: Yes.)

- What is the slant of your site: Content, Images, Affiliate, Other?
(Our answer: Content site.)

Please add other questions you think would be valuable.

[Tinus]

Answers to the questions:
- When using "Site:" command, are counts correct?
(Our answer: It seems to be correct I guess.)

- Have you redirected non-www to www? How long ago?
(Our answer: No, but in the top results of the Serps halve of the sites didn't do. I didn't use a 302 redirect either.

- Are you seeing non-www appears in serps?(site:mysite.com -www)
(Our answer: No, none.

- Are you seeing old pages that are no longer exist reappear in the serps?

(Our answer: Some are a few months old. Others are yust a few days old.

- Are you using Google sitemaps?
(Our answer: No.)

- What is the slant of your site: Content, Images, Affiliate, Other?
(Our answer: content/affiliate)

New question:
- Are pages which disappeared heavily linked intern?
(our answer: yes, some pages still reach the top of the SERPS. They have only a few internal links.

[seoheadche]

Answers to the questions:
- When using "Site:" command, are counts correct?
(Our answer: no we have 25k pages index growing by 20k daily now at 130k.)

- Have you redirected non-www to www? How long ago?
(Our answer: yes about 2 hours ago with a 301 redirect.

- Are you seeing non-www appears in serps?(site:mysite.com -www)
(Our answer: No. )

- Are you seeing old pages that are longer exist reappear in the serps?

(Our answer: Yes pages that have been 404 for ages and also pages blocked by robots.txt

- Are you using Google sitemaps?
(Our answer: Yes.)

- What is the slant of your site: Content, Images, Affiliate, Other?
(Our answer: content)

- Are pages which disappeared heavily linked intern?
(our answer: yes, We have a bank of 50 or so core footer links across all pages in the site. However these are nav links.

[almar]

What about affiliate data feeds and Google?

Thinking about adding some- is it safer to start a new site than have an affiliate data feed on a content site that used to rank high in Google BEFORE last week?

Does Google mess with you if you have affiliate links on a content site?

[reseller]

Tinus

>>Reseller,
When you had to change those 137 pages, did you try to stay out of the sandbox or did you changed everything within a few days?<<

As I mentioned I did it after being hit for the second time, and at that time only around 10% of Google´s referrals left. So there wasn´t much to risk. Therefore I did it in one batch.

Now my pre- 22nd July Google traffic returned back (but not my pre-Allegra traffic), and I would be more careful if I should do the same again. I.e wouldn´t change and upload 137 pages within the same day or few days.

[Tinus]

Hi Reseller,
<I.e wouldn´t change and upload 137 pages within the same day or few days. >

Thanks, maybe you are right. The sandbox is worser then a temporary (?) loss of free traffic after an update.

[glengara]

*Please add other questions you think would be valuable.*

Are you running Ad Sense?

[Fritzms]

Reading this entire thread from start to end, over the last week or so, it strikes me that as an SEO person, and we all know how bad all the search engines are at the moment, and can point out all the bugs in about 10 mins, why waste our time trying to get back in to the one search engine that we all moan about the most (Google), why dont everyone get their heads together, pool resources and expertise and build our own search engine, show all these large companies that are now driven for pure profits how it should be done?
Mind u i would be concerned that if this were to happen then we would all be driven by profits as well and end up in 5-10 years in exactly the same position that the other search engines are in now!
Just my 2 pence worth (i`m in the UK :-) )

[almar]

Once our Adsense revenue started to rise, our Google search positions disappeared.... any thoughts on this strange coincidence?

[thecityofgold2005]

What I reckon the next generation of search engine will have is greater human intervention in the serps.

The product review websites where lots of people rate a product are an idea that works. You would just need to implement it in a search engine.

Another good idea that could be implemented is something like Yahoo's shopping / research beta engine.

Unfortunately, creating a search engine sounds kind of difficult!

[Fritzms]

thecityofgold2005 yes difficult IS the right word, but so was learning to build your own web sites in the beginning, that did not stop you!, yes it could be done, however there would have to a collective will to do so in the first place, now thats the difficult part of the process