Yet another site disappearing post - and sitemaps are implicated

[judge2005]

I've read several posts about sites disappearing from the Google index, supplemental results, sitemaps etc. But they all seem inconclusive. Many just say that the number of pages listed has dropped dramatically. Others say that keyword searches don't hit their site. Others say they onlyhave supplemental results etc.

So here's the thing. About 1 week ago my site <edited> was getting some rankings and had a bunch of pages listed with a site: query. Those pages were a mess. Also the link: query was claiming that there were no incoming links, even though many pages return by searching on 'sysstats' did have links to my site.

So I decided to use sitemaps to clear things up.

Blamo: Now no pages are indexed. As in the sitemap site says so and site: returns no entries.

The sitemap site just says that 'indexing takes time', but googlebot has dropped by several times. My pages rank low, but then that is surely not the same as not being indexed at all? The links from the sitemap site also don't actually answer any questions. For example the answer to 'Why doesn't my site appear in the index' is 'Most such sites actually do appear in the index' - i.e. they never actually say why a site actually *doesn't* appear in an index.

The real annoyanec about all of this is that I just can't get an answer. Does having a low page rank now mean that your site is not indexed? If not then why the hell is my site not indexed? Why doesn't the sitemap site not have more to say about this?

Ah. Whatever.

<Sorry, no personal URLs.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 4:11 am (utc) on May 24, 2006]

[hvacdirect]

Sorry to hear that, but I have no answers for you. Been fighting the same battle myself. I think the real problem is that Google does not see it as a problem. They've got a few people reaching out lately, but they'll just refer you to the webmaster guidelines and not offer any real help. They have moved away from indexing the web to becoming an edited directory which is voted on by the members, high ranking members at that, that vote by linking.

good luck, learn to live without google and consider it bonus traffic if/when it returns.

[tedster]

Also the link: query was claiming that there were no incoming links

Google's link: operator has never returned accurate information. At best, they intend in to give a sampling of links. Because their algo is so sensitive around linking, they've admitted that they withhold that data to slow down attempts at reverse engineering. Moral - use Yahoo Site Explorer, and trust that if Yahoo finds a link Google also knows about it. How they treat it is another matter, however.

A lot of linking issues in Google can be better understood by studying their 2005 Patent on using historical data [appft1.uspto.gov]. I'm personally convinced that what we are seeing right now has to do with what that patent claims the rights to.

[bigmack19]

judge2005:

Make sure your sitemap is setup correctly.. there's a few free generators out there that work great.

Checked your robots.txt I guess too right?

It's pretty much accepted that the site: command has been bugged for awhile now. It does seem to be straightening around.

Check to see if your pages show up for an obscure search of a line of text from your site using quotes around it. If you find your page listed then you know you're still in there somewhere despite what the site command says.

[edited by: tedster at 6:10 am (utc) on May 24, 2006]
[edit reason] Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[judge2005]

Interesting replies. Thanks. BTW I tried the 'obscure phrase' search and nothing was returned.

As you guessed, I did check my robots.txt file, I generated the sitemap with a tool also.

Thanks anyway.

[firstmark]

Would be interesting if pages found via sitemaps are initially ranked lower than pages found via regular crawl. Inktomi used to do something like that and ranked pages manually submitted lower initially than those found via a regular crawl.

Sitemaps if it helps pages be indexed than otherwise would is serving its purpose. I doubt any sitemaps program is going to ever help increase the ranking of any page already easily found.