Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Could it be caused by the linking methods by a poorly designed scraper site (an accidental hijack) or is it more likely that some kind of filter in the Google algo has filtered the page out?
Good question.
Since jagger I have noticed the majority of internal pages from my sites not ranking for the terms they should.
The homepages continues to perform as expected but internal pages (not all but most) seem to be "supressed".
These pages are listed in the index and seemingly indexed correctly. They are not supplemental either.
Although I have seen some other posts around this subject I am suprised there is not more talk about it.
I would be careful about changing URL's, with Google in its current state you may be risking duplicate and even supplemental problems.
I noticed this very same thing this morning, again some - but not all keyphrases vanished in Google.
We haven't done anything significant, and neither have the competition by the looks of things.
Did you mean "Out of the index" when doing site:www by page dissapeared?
As I think this is a different phenonomem to remaining in the index on site:www but being blasted to knowhere in the SERPs.
We had that "Out of the index" problem recently with our "Main" internal page, however its just returned along with the SERPs following a re-indexing on the 1st after a period of about 1 month.
I do not think it was a penalty rather a Google indexing problem. (What Big Daddy is all about I think)
These days Google = wait/hope/pray...yawn.
I'm still none the wiser really...
Best quote of 2006!
weird...
The second best quote of 2006!
One barely went up but seems to have been scraped anyway. The other has been up for at least two years and always appeared in first page of serps until recently.
I am wondering if the problem could be from how the scraper sites have linked to the page. Could sloppy and perhaps ignorant webmasters with made for adsense type sites have done something that hijacked the pages in terms of Google?
Is there any other hope in getting these two pages back though?
Eliz.
This happened to a specific page on a site of mine recently; got rid of the old page, made a new one, ranked great a few days, then back to being pinned at the bottom of my site:example.com listings. I don't think I changed it enough.
What do you mean by "solid" sites?
All my other pages on the site still rank consistently high (usually on the first page for obvious search phrases) except for the two affected pages.
Also it has lots of well researched content with links from universities and such.
So I don't know if it's different from when all of a good solid site has the same problem as happened to a different site of mine during Bourbon.
Seems like if we could figure out why a page plunges like this it might help figure out why a whole site can go as well.
Losing a page is annoying but I know too well the same unexplained thing can happen to a whole site.
The affected pages are about two level deeps, but there are few inbound links to them, so I thought it might Googlebots' hiccups during crawl. Now I'm seeing for the 3rd times (or cycles) of this symptom since Jagger started in mid Oct. I'm also interested to learn how to solve this issue.
That is the question, that I have yet to read a plausable theory for.
Two ideas I have (not theories as I have no facts to back up)
1)Sites which do very well but are border line for optimization get the homepage correctly ranked but an arbritrary number of its internal pages discounted, to err ..level the playing field.
2)Google is just losing pages, in a patchy increasing flaky index/algo.
#1 would be logical but may be crediting Google with too much expertise/application.
There's no mystery to the ones going URL only. They lose rankings because Google doesn't know any words on the page. They will regain rank once they get crawled again.
The mystery is why they go URL only...
And how can we be sure they will regain rank once they get crawled again?
Last week my local language site-map suddenly went url only. On a site: search on BD it has disappeared completely (canonical fix!)! This page used to be the best ranked of all of my local language pages. It looks the same as the English sitemap, only all the words are translated and the links go to the local language pages.
They lose rankings because Google doesn't know any words on the page.
I have to say that's not necessarily true. As I said in my post above, I've had pages that were previously indexed normally and ranked well, which then suddenly turned into url-only AND dropped out of the SERPs.
They will regain rank once they get crawled again. That's a different phenomenon from pages that seem otherwise normally abruptly losing rank.
Again, I don't think this is true either. Pages like those just described were crawled again many times but nothing happened to them for months. Obviously I did things to try to change the situation, but nothing seemed to have any direct effect. That's not to say that perhaps it did have an effect and it just took time to see that in the index.
In this context, sitemap <priority> is critical. If Google does this (and I believe they've already started) it's up to webmasters to tell it who their "loved ones" are.
There are very obvious implications for site structure in particular.
1)Sites which do very well but are border line for optimization get the homepage correctly ranked but an arbritrary number of its internal pages discounted, to err ..level the playing field.2)Google is just losing pages, in a patchy increasing flaky index/algo.
The correct answer iiiiiiissssss #2!
The sites and pages we are talking about here are good sites with rich content. I do not believe Google is trying to get rid of these pages for any reason. These pages are just getting caught in a snare in some way. Is it an algo or other mix up? I don't know.
So what we need here is for people who have had this experience to describe as well as they can what seems to have happened.
I keep coming back to scraper pages that have somehow mislinked to our pages in such a way as to get Google to think they are gone or something.
All scrapers don't do this. It is a glitch of some sort. Anyone with content pages is going to get scraped. In fact the better the page does in the serps the more likely it will be scraped.
I don't know if this is the cause at all. Maybe I'm way off track and we will find another possibility. Lets just focus on those little hunches we have and see if we get anywhere.
Now only 10% of internals actively rank, this is the same for all of my sites.
Change happened Between Sept 22 and first phase of Jagger.
I have tweaked the actively ranking pages and they respond as per pre-Jagger.
Have deep linked and tweaked the suppressed pages and they just stay dead in the water.
Nothing I have found can resussitate them ..yet.
I appreciate the pages may be clean but who knows what the current algo does not like.
If its an indexing problem time will probably fix that too.
Basically, "mix it up".
The old one that did well for a couple of years is the real mystery to me. I hadn't touched it for a long time so it wasn't a change I made.
The new page I launched in September. It went up briefly then disappeared, almost like it was put in a single page sandbox. I do wonder if new pages are looked at differently now. Maybe they have to earn their way up kind of like a sandboxed site. I can't think of anything that would trigger this unless I just had too high a keyword word density.
Unfortunately I no longer have a copy of the original version and I've changed it a couple of times trying to get it back into Google. It might have helped if I could have looked the original over carefully.
