Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My colleague Vanessa just posted a note which should hopefully make your weekend a less stressful one :).
Specifically, she's noted that we've had some issues with our "site:" operator [sitemaps.blogspot.com] not returning appropriate results when used with hyphenated domains... so it's quite likely that much of the falloff you've seen is thankfully illusory.
We've noted similar discrepancies with site: searches using domains with a trailing slash as well.
And yes, Googlers are working to correct this stuff as quickly as possible!
That is pretty darn quick. Hope the fix is just as rapid...
< admin note - this thread began at his address:
[webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 5:12 am (utc) on May 21, 2006]
We have recently launched a new redesign so we own a more SE freindly and user freindly site.
We surely did not expect this to happen.
Hope by fixing the bug we get all of our pages indexed again.
Thanks Google for taking care of this issue!
"It seems to me that the site: searches with a trailing / seem to be returning only "normal" results, and are omitting the "supplemental results" each time."
That's how it seems here also, g1smd.
Right now, site:www.mydomain.com/ produces 23 regular current results with May 2006 cache dates -- no supplementals.
site:www.mydomain.com produces 21 regular results with May 2006 cache dates and 185 supplemental results with circa July 20, 2005 cache dates.
According to Vanessa Fox's posting, the bugs have frozen their refreshing supplemental results. She foresees being "back to normal" in a few days.
I'm hoping that normal will be actual currently crawled results replacing all those old supplementals. It almost seems like they lost most of the current cached copies, and are plugging in archieved versions until they can recrawl everything.
e.g. www.mysite.com/United-States/
Glad it's being fixed, but I know that I mentioned this problem back on March 4th [webmasterworld.com]
So they could have been working on it for months. I posted again on May 2nd [webmasterworld.com]and djmick200 also confirmed my observation when posting here [webmasterworld.com]. Hope the fix is coming soon.
Now what about the domains which are of one word and still have the problem that all the pages have been dropped leaving only 3 pages when used site query.
Does this also has same problem or some bug with Google or is this the result of an update.
Please post your replies on this issues.
Thanks in advance.
C
[added]I just read the rest of the article and it answered my question. Sorry for posting my question before I read deeper [/added]
But crobb - could you please also post the link where you were reading the article and you got the answer so that even we'll be at peace. That would be much appreciated.
Thanks
[72.14.209.104...] Anyone else or is this just a freaky DC for me.
The article [sitemaps.blogspot.com] says "This bug doesn't involve any pages being dropped from the index. It's the site: operator that isn't working properly. "
Kaled.
If you have this, then now is a good time to sanity-check your title tags and every meta description too.
They must be different on every page, and the text should represent exactly what is on that page.
No, something's definately being fixed on this DC. I've got 850 on there compared to 650 elsewhere. Another 100 or so since the first time I posted this.
We have a hyphenated site, but most of our pages are lost in the index..
I don't think by fixing this bug it will have any affect on our pages that dropped out of Google's index.
If the "repeat this search.." link appears quickly, then the pages are deemed to be very similar or duplicates.If you have this, then now is a good time to sanity-check your title tags and every meta description too.
Kaled.
I can't say that problem is not having unique title's or meta's or something like that. Or site: command, maybe its not working or its fixed or whatever but its not connected with droping pages from index.
We do have a hyphenated domain name (www.my-site.com) and our number of pages indexed had been going down dramatically over the past couple of weeks.
The numbers still seem to be fluctuating but hopefully the gain in indexed pages is a sign that things are getting patched up with this issue.
I hope others might be seeing this as well with their sites.
*fingers crossed*
Berry
" Adam Lasnik at Google - Let's find a way to communicate "
Some of you might be interested in Adam's comments here on communicating problems back to Google.
If only there was some acknowledgement of the main issues on Google.
Page indexing , IBL's and effected results
" Adam Lasnik at Google - Let's find a way to communicate "
We have been trying to "communicate" for years. Report after report, email after email, post after post, and we are still here in 2006 with these problems.
A start would be for the datacenters to get in line. There are so many inconsistencies and it makes the end user very frustrated when they can't find the pages they are looking for.
Regarding this site: operator problem...is it really that significant? If it isn't a bug that is going to affect the ranking of pages, then what is the fuss about? They need to get on with real "Big Daddy" and other indexing issues, IMHO.
I have reason to believe that certain other hyphenated searches also fail in subtle ways too.
Try looking for pages that contain a hyphenated email address by using that email address, or part of that email address, as the search query.
See what happens if you replace the hyphen with a space. Yes, more pages are returned. Those extra pages are Supplemental Results and do contain the wanted phrase.
That is different to how it used to work.
We tend to think about things we don't know about in detail as a "black box". In our minds it's just "put in this kind of input, and xyz will come out, but never mind how." In this case, the site: operator black box is clearly a lot more complex than a domain name index and the "number of urls" as a related field. But that is how we tend to think of it.
