Google still ranking down site in top 10

Listed site has been down for months

[tombo]

A site that has been down for months is still ranking in the top-10 for very popular and competitive keyword pair. The listing displays no title or description just the home page url with the "similar pages" link below it. It just so happens that the domain name for this listing is made up of both keywords searched on.

How can this be? Does google put that much weight on the domain name that is will continue to index a site that has been down for months, in the top 10 no less?

Any ideas about this?

tombo

[tombo]

Anyone have any ideas?

[iProgram]

No idea. I use (header verified) 301 redirection to move my content site www.old-domain.com/* to www.new-domain.com/* at May 2004. At Dec 2004 I deleted www.old-domain.com/*.* and DNS setting of this domain completely. But, "allinurl: www.old-domain.com site:www.old-site.com" still returns 2000 pages.

[Just Guessing]

Shows the power of backlink anchor text!

[tomtomclub]

We've got the same thing in our niche index.

An authority 'info only' site that has been dead for several months (and not updated for over a year before that) still has the #1 spot in a G.com search.

It shows no date but does still show 'cached' and 'similar' links and a snippet of text (although as it was a frame based site even that is just a 'your browser does not support...' type message! The 'cahced' page is blank!

Very frustrating but I've no answers for you I'm afraid!

[raptorix]

Is this a very old site? Like before 1998, i have a very old site from before 1997, it was on a geocities account. I removed all content and placed a big banner that points to my new site. But for many searches in google this old site is still ranking 1 (content was removed for over a year ago.)

[Sweet Cognac]

Here's an idea, but I don't know if it will help.

We transferred ownership of one of our domains to a new owner. The domain is still active on our server. When we contacted our server about moving the files, etc to the new owner's server. They said this:

That we would have to delete the domain from our server, delete the email names, delete the hostnames and then contact them, so they could clean it up on their end. (Which means they need to do some deleting too?)

Maybe whoever had that domain just deleted it from their side of the server, and didn't notify their servers of the deletion? So even though their site is down, their server doesn't know it yet.

[tombo]

The site I am refering to is an older site. It came online in 1996. If google is still willing to list dead sites in the top 10 it shows me how difficult it is for new sites to compete for traffic from google.

[Sweet Cognac]

Maybe if they got rid of all the dead sites, there would be no sandbox. But it's probably what Just Guessing said, "Shows the power of backlink anchor text!"

I can still type in an old domain of ours, that has been deleted for 5 years now, and there are still old, unmaintained sites (with useless emails) linking to it.

We emailed google and DMOZ and asked them to get rid of our deleted domain out of their searches, and they eventually did, after about 8 months it started disappearing from our stats. Then we had to wait another year for the images to stop getting pulled up.(alot of 404's)

But they told us we had to contact who was linking to us, to get it out of the serps and directories.

[mrMister]

after about 8 months it started disappearing from our stats.

How are you getting stats if you've deleted the domain?

[MLHmptn]

Proof that Google still owns all the search engines! It indexes and ranks sites that are no longer there! :>~ GO google! Keep inflating your index!

[rfgdxm1]

>How are you getting stats if you've deleted the domain?

Good point.