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.
Don't worry about it - Google UK will sort it. It's nice when it happends to the competition :)
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.
I'm back too after the cache date updated.
Grrrrrr.
It looks to me as if Google introduced some kind of new geofilter in August, presumably to reduce the (previously quite high) number of false positives in country-specific searches. From a couple of posts in this thread, this isn't limited to the UK.
Independently - which doesn't make the mechanism any easier to fathom - other periodical changes continue (as at present).
My guess is that Google is aware of and addressing the problem, & non .co.uk index pages (or equivalents elsewhere) will continue to bob in and out of local searches until they get it right.
I'm not planning to mess with anything in the meantime, unless there is an obvious reason to do it.
Any results yet, fishfinger?
1) We added UK word in title of every page.
2) We added local address of where the company was based. This was added on the homepage.
3) We added zip code of the area when the company was located.
The results appeared in the wake of these changes. May be there was some other reason (google corrected the issue) but we feel that these changes were needed as per our thorough research.
I think your results were not due to those changes. My own site met all your added conditions before the trouble started.
plural still #1
it's only the singular that's effected
any ideas on these new filters?
Simon.
lots of lost rankings
One thing I did notice were some https:// pages whilst doing a site: search
The only way google could have picked this up is if they ignored by robots.txt file banning them from there.....
So boom - sales down 50% today :(
I placed it there 9 years ago when UK hosting was in its infancy and not reliable.
sounds like what we did 8 years ago when we found a US host for only $29.95/year! of course they didn't host .com.au domains, so we had to get a .com domain (and pay $35/year to network solutions).
So, what to do? If I move the website to UK hosting will it spring back into the top 10 listings where it has been for the last several years or will it be dumped / downgraded in ranking due to the geo move and IP change? Any bright ideas or suggestions?
Well Google state that changing hosts will not affect your rankings in anyway (unless you move to a banned host of course). I'd move your hosting to the UK, where it will hopefully be picked up by Google as a UK site. If anything, it will improve your site's performance to the visitors that matter the most (those from the UK).
So, what to do? If I move the website to UK hosting will it spring back into the top 10 listings where it has been for the last several years or will it be dumped / downgraded in ranking due to the geo move and IP change? Any bright ideas or suggestions?
Move to a UK Host as soon as possible. I moved my .com from US to UK hosting around six weeks ago and the transition went very smoothly indeed. Before the move my site had been firmly stuck at #3, but only when doing a 'normal' web search. It also did not appear when selecting 'pages from the UK' ... even when using the site: command.
Within 48 hours of moving to UK hosting, both Google and MSN UK began to list the site when selecting 'uk results'. As an added bonus, I'm at #2 in the UK SERPs.
Moreover, if you use a good UK host, your visitors will likely see a slight improvement in how fast your site loads.
Simon.
This morning's results I'm seeing are from DC 209.85.129.104; Sunday they were from DC 64.233.183.104 and Saturday from 66.249.93.104. In amongst all of this I still get Page 2 listings from subordinate pages of my site with an 'older' cache from 7 Oct 2006.
Last time out - I worried and fiddled and emailed Google; this time I'm going to ignore it and leave them to it.
but... the problem of the dropped index page seems to have spread to some .co.uk's as well. The current dataset i'm seeing is showing "mysite.com" about 15th in a search for "mysite.com" and is ignoring the index page.
All a bit of a mess, lets hope they clear it up ASAP.
When I run the following, site:www.example.com and site:example.com I use to get one result for both; www.example.com
Now when I run site:www.example.com the home page is dropped, when you do the same for non www, site:example.com Google return example.com
As a couple of others have said, it’s as if Google is interpreting www. and non www as two different domains and dropping one.
The site is a UK only trade site and hosted in the UK for over 2 years, there are no major change except some product data pages. Like many other posts here suggested that it was a Google bug and hope they will fix soon.
So I decided to wait and hoping for good news, but no, 2 months gone, nothing change.
Is there anyone has this problem and resolved now?
[edited by: Wibfision at 9:00 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2006]
I didn't change much - possibly a word or two, but certainly nothing noteworthy for it to cause its reappearance.
It certainly seems strange that people are still having this problem, if it was a slight bug which was spotted and fixed then why are people still out whilst plenty of us are back!
i re-jigged my home page content and it brought it straight back in, have you guys tried that?
I'm always updating my home page but I haven't completely rewritten it.
when I do a site command, the top result is [example.com...]
ARGHHH! I seem to have to 301 redirect every URL to http://www.example.com nowadays.
I am beginning to think that there are 2 Googlebots - 1 normal one and another stupid one which is still struggling with canonical URLs.
[edited by: tedster at 5:40 pm (utc) on Oct. 29, 2006]
Has been fine for weeks and now vanished...
These current filters are a nightmare!
What evidence do you have that re-jigging your home page content affected inclusion? Was the page crawled immediately after you changed it? How long after it was crawled did it reappear?
My own .com index page (currently global #2 for key search term) has now been missing since 3 October, last crawled on 17 October. I can't see any correlation between page content (or changes to page content) and inclusion/exclusion in the UK index. Everything points to a foul-up at Google, and subsequent tinkering with the problem at their end.
If anyone has clear evidence to the contrary, I would appreciate a fairly detailed summary.
My belief is that the current situation is a bug and rejigging won't affect anything - unless perhaps a huge change to a page does something to the crawling that I am not aware of.
Apologies!
Hughie: any answer to those questions?
