No description on G serps

only links

[rfung]

Weekends are good days for me, but today I noticed that there was a drop in traffic (and adsense) and while researching this, I found out that two of my sites got 'hit' with the 'only links and no description' on G serps. There was also a noticeable drop in the links listed with the 'allinurl', however, I could not find any links that shouldn't be there (i.e. they're all from my site, or stumbleupon, but I've had that link listed there for ages).

Anyone care to alleviate my stress levels by venturing any theories as to the cause of this? was there some google update that I am not aware of? was I hit with a dupe content (some datafeed pages) - would I still see the pages indexed, just very poorly ranked? or was I hijacked?

[experienced]

same here. Trying to find out the reason.

Exp...

[grandpa]

They're tweaking with things over there, my descriptions all returned after a couple of days. That was yesterday. Now we'll see if the traffic resumes.
It's good to keep a close eye on things, but sometimes I think you guys worry too much :)

[rfung]

when the money goes down, that's when i notice it :)

[experienced]

When money goes down, we need to worry

[Rollo]

I've had this trouble too and it continues, it goes hand in hand with being nowhere in the SERPs, Google unindexing your pages, no new clients, and massive drops in revenues. Still, I wouldn't worry becuase there is nothing that can really be done as far as I can tell. Google is obviously having some issues.

[jnmconsulting]

same here, I have a site that has 600+ pages, dynamic, 600 + distinct products and categories. Had 600 + pages indexed by G with proper title and descriptions using (site:mysite.com). about 2 months ago they all changed to url only and supplemental. then the number of indexed pages jumped to 1200 + with 1/2 showing cach of nov 2004 and full url and descriptions. Then G very much slowed it's visits. All 1200 + are still there without any changes whatsoever.

Penalty, something I did, bad G, not sure, But the site ranks in the top 3 on the other top engines.

[Escape]

All my dynamic pages are url only (static pages unchanged). This happened around 23 March. The pages first lost their description followed by title and now only has URL. If I check the cache on toolbar all dynamic pages show a cached date of 02 Nov 2004. Something very strange show in my logs for the 23 March with the robots.txt file and I can’t make out if this is a coincidence.

We have never had a robots.txt file but my logs have always returned a 200 when robots tried to get the file. On the 22/23 March the logs started showing a 404 and the robots.txt showed as an erroneous file. Y and M weren’t put off and continued to crawl but G didn’t. Gbot tried for robots.txt many times in the following days but would not continue and now doesn’t even visit. Of course we’ve now added a robots.txt and just waiting to see if Gbot will ever show an interest again. We’ll then know if this was just a coincidence.

Has anyone else noticed a change in log reporting for robots.txt?

[g1smd]

I can see that on a number of sites that have an "abnormal inbound link pattern".

Several very well known, but dodgy, SEO firms have got wiped out by that too in recent days.

Ordinarily I would have said to check for duplicate content, and to check that you correctly use a 301 redirect from all non-www to equivalent www URLs. If you have already done that, then it might be your incoming links causing you a problem.

[Rollo]

then it might be your incoming links causing you a problem

Could you elaborate on this one a bit?

[g1smd]

Without naming names, its going to be difficult.

I haven't yet made a post about this SEO tactic that incorporated an overview of the problem.

[experienced]

my pages are now dropped to less than 100 from 1200 and home page cache is also not there. My site has PR 5. What should i do now. Sud i stay offiline and see how does this go or should i use 301 to another new domain because site once goes from google never returns :( this is an informational site using adsense thats it. no duplicate content nothinkg like that but still sufffering.

Thanks
Exp

[Rollo]

I just made a thread about my experience, we'll see if they post it. In a nutshell, I changed the path to all my pages and was back three days later (after more than 6 month out). I think Google is having a few technical problems that are causing the descriptions and indexed pages to dry up like grapes left baking in the sun.

[bbcarter]

1. Re: links without descriptions in G results

Some of my pages have descriptions in G results, some don't.

My best guess is that they are rotating randonly their source (in your html) for the description of your page...

...because up til now I didn't use alt text for images, so that was a significant blank. I used meta description tags 99.99% of the time, and everything else that's important...

Almost all of my pages I found not displaying descriptions did have meta description tags.

2. Re: links number gone down

I think the best theory to explain a lot of what we've seen lately is the "ageing factor" - As best I can tell (from my 2000 pages and other reports), important things that affect page SERPs (perhaps also backlinks? mine haven't changed, but some of my competitors' have, along with their PR) have been rolled back 3-5 months.

E.g. an author who wrote about 100 articles on my site in Nov and Dec 2004 is still ranking well and getting the best traffic (on a variety of topics) of any of 30 authors on my site- whereas those who were newer and had begun to exceed him in number of pages of high rank and traffic have dropped back significantly.

I don't know if you'd call this 'sandbox' or a new kind of sandbox, but it looks like, at least right now, anything you do had better be longview-oriented, because it's going to take 3-5 months to benefit you.

The upside of it is that, if this theory is correct, despite however bad things may seem now, they should improve over the next few months even if you do nothing- but don't do nothing... do more work ;-)

[experienced]

Do you mean you have changed the url of the page. This would affect your PR as i can t do this having PR5 for index and 4 for rest of the full site. This is the major problem i am having after the florida update.

[experienced]

can anybody tell me the url where we can check the google future results for different www in a single window. I missed it.

[jnmconsulting]

well G finally did a complete deep crawl of my site. After 2 days of that crawl all of the old listings and supplemental pages are gone and replaced with the new ones, now lets see if the traffic starts up again.

My assuption is that it was not a penalty it was google not liking the prior site setup and link structure.