removal from GOOGLE index

how do I know if Google has removed my site

[denarend]

I have the same pages on two different domains in order to give my customers a shorter URL to access their pages. I did this about was 6 years ago when I couldn't know that Google would punish me now.

So how can I find out whether Google has removed my site from its index; I never look beyond the third page of Google's results.

<Sorry, no personal URLs>

[edited by: tedster at 2:06 am (utc) on Oct. 17, 2005]

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, denarend.

If you do a search that uses the site: operator [site:example.com] -- that will return all the pages that Google has indexed from the domain. So if you use the domain that you wanted removed, you should get no results.

[denarend]

Thank you for this tedster,

I didn't know the operator 'site:'. I should have.

Sorry I included the domain names I was referring to. They are indeed mine. It won't happen again.

Lucien den Arend

[meeko]

HI, on similar lines.
I have woken up this morning to find my site has not had any hits at all which normally would get about 800 unique hits a day.
Running various searches I cannot find my site in the high spots it used to be. I ran 'site:mysite.com' and the 200 or so pages all appeared and they all seem to have the PR they had a few days ago. Any ideas why this would be as I am extremely worried this. Have I been chopped?

[denarend]

Meeko,

How much did you drop? I've seen some of my sites fluctuate step by step - but never huge leaps in a day.

Lucien

[meeko]

HI Lucien,
Normally by this time of day I will have had between 130-200 unique visitors on one of the sites, so far I have had 27.
Do you think I should be worried?
I have specific keywords related to my site and local area which are now nowhere to be found which have been between the No1 and No2 spot for quite a while - ARGH!

[Wizard]

Removing duplicate domain is not the best solution. Use 301 redirect instead.

And don't forget to 301 redirect from www to non-www.

For more details what 301 is, you can refer to many thread previously discussed here.

[jaffstar]

Meeko, read the Google Update thread. I am in the same boat as you and it looks like thousands of webmasters have also been hit by this.

[meeko]

All my main competitors websites are still in the top spots and i am either way down or not easily found.

Will this be a long term thing do you think or is Google just moving things around and maybe I should just allow things to settle for what days, weeks or even months? i dont know

[davew999]

Hi

I have just found the same problem.
With my main search terms I have dropped from the first page to about the 10th page on Google.

Has an update been released?

The search returns are completely different to the last 6 months and my main competitors have also moved down the list.

Any ideas please or do you think just wait.

[jaffstar]

just wait.

[meeko]

How long should i be waiting?

Without boring you too much, i was made redundant 4 weeks ago and decided to make my internet hobby a full time job as at the time and for the past year has been generating a small income - now thats been taken away things are a bit more serious.

[Ouroboros]

What you guys are describing happens to me all of the time. For the last 5 years, my site has fluctuated from the top position for a search of my primary two keywords, all the way down to something around the 800th position. One day it's on page one, stays there for a few weeks, the next day it's on page 80, or somewhere in between. That's just how the algo works.

Personally, I'm experiencing something new: complete and total removal from the database. I've never even heard of such a thing before.

[meeko]

Ouroboros, how do you know that you are completely removed? i take it if you type in www.yoursite.com it does not appear at all?
Have you been doing something bad?
For a year my site was getting better and better and avoided previous updates - not this one unfortunately!

[crankin]

Same here, complete removal from the database.

Nothing using site:mysitename.com, nothing using links:mysitename.com, all kinds of stuff about me on other people's sites if you look under My Site Name or MySiteName.com.

And I have a PR-0 whitebar, not a grey bar like I would if I was actually banned. What the heck does that mean?

No clue why, haven't done anything bad, heck, haven't done much of anything this year, just let my visitors post their chatter in the user forum. I'm just a mom-n-pop site, and been a good Google PR5 to PR6 citizen for years. I really don't get it.

[jaffstar]

Nothing using site:mysitename.com, nothing using links:mysitename.com, all kinds of stuff about me on other people's sites if you look under My Site Name or MySiteName.com.

How old is your site?

[Ouroboros]

@Meeko:

Ouroboros, how do you know that you are completely removed? i take it if you type in www.yoursite.com it does not appear at all?

Correct.

Have you been doing something bad?

I don't know!

[meeko]

I think i was maybe using a bad tactic, using a noscript tag on the site.
I found a few terms that were normally on the first page in positions 1 to 3 are now at position 147 and 163 :(
Time to look for a job!

[crankin]

How old is your site?

jaffstar, it's 4 years old, almost 5 now.

I did find that there's a site (suspended by their provider) that shows a massive number of pages for a search for a proprietery snippet of text found only on my site.

Is it possible I'm a vicitm of some psychotically malfunctioning duplicate content filter? It seems like Google thinks this bozo site is the real deal over me, even though if you click on listings there is only a generic 'account suspended' placeholder.

It's like that for other proprietary snippets - pages that redirect to my site, pages that have no mention of me at all, pages that are large trash directories obviously made of slurped front page text, etc.

I'm kicked off the index, and this garbage remains in my place...

[twebdonny]

I am wondering if removing our entire site from the Google Index for 6 months and then resubmitting it would be better
than sitting in this limbo where we seem to be stuck now. No one seems to know why we are stuck here, or how to get out. We have PR, we have good backlinks, we had good position, we have changed our htaccess as discussed to remove any chance of dynamic urls and non www pages. We have placed framebreaker code to prevent jacking, and have been successful at having some offending sites remove our pages from their redirects, yet here we sit in limbo, no answer from Google, no feedback, like we are in a bad sector in Google's big hard drive in the sky, and no one knows how to fix the problem.