Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
64.233.183.107
64.233.187.99
66.249.85.107
If you do a site: search using Google UK's 'UK results only', the index pages of ten .com domains and three .net domains (out of 65 that I manage) are not listed.
1) All sites hosted in the UK across 4 different servers in 3 different DCs
2) No link exchanges, very little outward linking, no excessive inward linking. No inter-linking. These are not directories, MFA, affiliate. They are contact/services offered websites for UK companies and sole traders. Some are dynamic, some static. Size from under ten to under one hundred pages.
3) No canonical issues, no dupe content issues, no over-optimisation. I use the same techniques and links for all my sites. Number of affected sites has not grown since this problem was spotted. Unaffected sites re-cached this week.
4) Internal pages all listed AND RANKING for their terms.
Would other UK based webmasters like to share their experiences? Perhaps we can collectively contact Google and refer them to this thread.
Beck.
Been all through previous updates upaffected
Shows best results generally for pages from the web
droped maybe 6/10 positions or MIA in .co.uk
Odd
It is a .com site sitting on UK hosting.
Still ranks when searching the web but not on pages from the UK.
So I guess it's a google problem
I was obviously writing my last post as you were posting yours.
Has Matt Cutts been alerted to this thread?
My .com index page IS included in the UK index, but is WHOLLY excluded from UK-only search results in site:, domainname or text searches. The same symptoms have come and gone several times, and the difference in degree is all or nothing. It isn't a ranking issue.
The site has always shown up within the UK until now, and is physically hosted in the UK. This particular problem only currently affects the homepage, none of the other pages are affected. For this reason I believe it to be a Googlebug and I am confident that it will be fixed shortly. Fingers crossed ;-)
I own the .co.uk for my site so could in theory move it from the .net using a 301. However, I do not have sufficient faith in Google's handling of 301's to even consider moving domains. I have hundreds of backlinks pointing to the .net.The site has always shown up within the UK until now, and is physically hosted in the UK. This particular problem only currently affects the homepage, none of the other pages are affected. For this reason I believe it to be a Googlebug and I am confident that it will be fixed shortly. Fingers crossed ;-)
I also don't trust 301 being handled correctly. I wouldn't trust google to wash its hands after going to the toilet at the moment!
It may be a bug but it seems to be a recurring one. My site suffered all August and came back for a week or so and is now gone again. So even if you do recover don't expect that you are out of the woods.
I think I might have found the problem.....at least with my site.
Anyway, when using the site command WITHOUT "Pages from Australia" the home page comes up fine as the first result, the URL is http://www.example.com.
However, using the site command WITH "Pages From Australia" shows up http://www.example.com/index.php as the 5th or 6th result, but is nowhere to be seen when not using the "Pages from Australia".
In the past (ie until about 6 months ago when I cleaned up all the URLs), I did link to index.php. Also, index.php would be included in my sitemap (which I deleted a few days ago) as I used the Google python sitemap generator.
I'm now going to 301 the index.php to /. Hopefully it will work.
See where you are about six months or so after you apply the fix.
It will work, but might take a bit longer than you expect to see major results.
i don't think that is the issue here. The issue is that google is indexing both http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.php - both the same pages (thus duplicate content), but the index.php is the one showing in "Pages From Australia".
If I 301 redirect http://www.example.com/index.php to http://www.example.com/ then there will only be one page to index.
Bizarrely enough, this seems to be confined to searches from Monday -Friday here in the UK when selecting 'pages from the UK'. At the weekend, the site is present in the index.
Google is clearly a fan of my site - it is fully & correctly indexed and I rank very well in the SERPs. But still the homepage likes to vanish at certain times of the week.
A week or so ago I did .301 .com/index.htm to .com/ .. but who knows when (or if) this will have any effect.
Where's Googleguy when you need him?
however I have a term in the UK results @#2 that is not in the "from the web" results
AOK for "pages from the web"
MIA for "pages from UK"
The data is new - several sites have appeared for the first time in my industry. At least two went online last autumn, around eleven months ago.
This update is looking extremely interesting - at least one 'authority' site has slipped from the #1 spot to #9 after being there for three years - leaving me at #2.
I've already had 20% more traffic than yesterday ...
what industry are you in (roughly)
Has Matt Cutts been alerted to this thread?
It may be a bug but it seems to be a recurring one.as with others here, this is what I am seeing too, on some sites. Others have been re-cached 4 times since returning to the index and are fine.
do you agree that a 301 would be the best way to solve this problem?
Just the old - my authority site has plumeted for the singular term and most longtail phrases associated with the singular term.
Also today the plural term that was #7 on google.com (not uk at all) just gone back to #10 - which was where it was last week.
This is not IMO related to 'canonical' issues.
I agree. Everything I've read seems to place the blame squarely with Google for this.
The annoying thing is that it quite literally defies logical explanation.
Does anyone have any more information about this DC: is it new, old, or a being used as a toy by someone at Google HQ?
As I write this, the old SERPs are now back in place (66.249.93.104).
Google has at least two different versions of its index in play right now, as well as a small collection of datacentres that are doing something bizarre, whacky and completely different [webmasterworld.com] to all of the others.
So, for reports to be useful, we need to know what you are looking at.
66.249.85.99
66.249.93.104
66.249.93.147
66.102.9.99
66.102.9.104
66.102.9.107
66.102.9.147
Apart from a brief period - less than two days - right at the beginning, the page has been cached on all of them, and found by (UK-only) info: searches on all of them, but missing from site: or text UK-only searches.
When I first noticed the problem - before the parent of this thread began - my index page very briefly disappeared from the cache of a fifth DC, but I didn't make a note of it at the time.
Maybe it's a coincidence - maybe not - but I'm back in the 'pages from the UK' index for the first time on a weekday since mid-September.
Fingers crossed.
