Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Maybe some of you have read some of my past posts. Very bleak, very down on Google. I felt that I was doing everything right and getting nowhere month after month. Somthing like trying to swim up a waterfall.
My site disappeared on Sept. 23, then bounced back for brief periods, but by and large the website has been nowhere, as have new clients.
I have a good-sized high PR site offering specialized business services and was being outclassed by off topic PR 3s in the SERPs if I appeared at all. I had been doing very well in Yahoo recently so I was hesitant to make any radical changes for fear that all my traffic would disappear.
Most recently, my descriptions had been drying up in Google when I did a site:mysite.com and pages were being un-indexed.
A few days ago, I decided to do a radical experiment. I took down all of my old pages, essentially taking down the whole site. I replaced all the old .htm redirects with .html so all the old .htm urls would just go to a customized 404 message page and the content (same) would be on fresh pages.
Within three days the new pages had been COMPLETELY indexed by Google (that is it has spidered and indexed them all down to the lowely untilites pages) and the site is riding high in the SERPS again. Unless I see reports of a massive update happening under my nose, other things equal, I am, knock on wood, back in Google and it was because of this change.
Anyhow, I wanted to make this post for those who are suffering similar problems. I'm not saying it will work for you, but then again... I'm not saying it won't.
I think this adds evidence to the notion that there is a glitch in Google and that it is not indexing pages properly. I experienced a similar indexing problem with Yahoo last year that I believe had something to do with the yahoo directory. When got myself unlisted, I came back in the SERPs. Some feel it is a coincidence, but I'm not so sure.
Anyhow, instead of looking for evil redirets and such, many of these problems may just be a Google glitch.
Anyhow, I'm pretty shocked that this occured, and obviously very pleased, so do your worst ;-)
