Can a single page be penalized?

ONE of my pages disappeared from the index

[ari11210]

My rankings have been going up and down the last few months on all the dates that have been affecting everyone else. I recovered somewhat on Sep 30th, but just noticed that a page of mine that used to get the most traffic of all my pages is no longer in the index (I searched for the page itself and it does not have any results, info:, cache:, etc). My other pages seem to be fine (I only have a hundred pages or so on my site). Is it possible that google penalized this one page of mine and removed it from the index? Do they do that? It is possible that it raised some flag since taking a closer look, this page can be accused of keyword stuffing, but would google penalize a single page?
Any advice? anyone see anything like this before?

Thanks
Aaron

[g1smd]

Yes, when I saw that www.domain.com/somepage.html had gone, I found it had been indexed as domain.com/somepage.html instead. Check for that first.

Next, check that you haven't inadvertently blocked it in robots.txt or with a meta robots noindex tag on the page itself.

Make sure the page is still mentioned in the internal site navigation. You might run it through the HTML validator, just in case some code error is causing a problem.

Finally, use CopyScape to see if someone has duplicated your information on another site, and that one is now ranking instead of yours.

[ari11210]

Thanks for the response, but I am sure none of those are the issue. The page was indexed up to about a week ago, and I havent changed anything on my site. I am doing a cache: and info: search on google and there is nothing found, when I do the same for any other page on my site I get the result. I will look into the duplicate content, but it is not that someone else is ranking higher, rather this page is completely gone from the index, so I am thinking it must be some single page penalty. Just wanted to know if anyone has seen a single page removal before that was not caused by a change, etc.

Thanks again
aaron

[g1smd]

Is there no search query that brings it up, not even a site:domain.com inurl:this.page query?

It might be indexed with a slightly different URL to what you expect?

[ari11210]

I cannot see it in any query, weird thing is I just tried the query you suggested and instead of not getting any results, I got a bunch of supplemental results from my site (none of them the page Im looking for). But when I try it with another page on my site, it works fine, I get the one page. Something is weird.
What I am trying to figure out is if this is a penalty by google and I should be looking to clean up the page, or if google doesnt do 1 page penalties and it is just an index problem with google.

[g1smd]

The Supplemental Results that appeared in that search is a bug that Matt Cutts is aware of, and it should be fixed in a few weeks. He mentioned that one on his blog, just yesterday.

OK. If your specific page didn't appear in that search then it really isn't indexed. And that is odd.

Kudos to you, for trying it for a different page and seeing that it did work for that one.

[bwalters]

I experienced this with a single page, a relatively unimportant one, a few weeks ago for my main site. It is a clean site selling a particular product. This page was for a variant of the product. However, the page was completely unindexed and could not be found with, for example, very specific text searches.

Yesterday the entire site, which is 2+ years old and has historically ranked well in google, was entirely de-indexed. The site: operator returns the dreaded "Your search . . . did not match any documents." Google Sitemaps confirms that we have no pages indexed, of approximately 100 that have been well-indexed for quite some time.

No major changes were made to the site at any time. The only change was that a few hours before the site disappeared, we deleted our AdWords program on this site, intending to replace it with a new one. Probably coincidence, though--I'm not particularly conspiracy-minded.

Anyway, we plan to wait for a while before pestering Google, assuming this is a bug. The site is free of anything that could be considered black hat techniques; we've even avoided anything like keyword stuffing, etc. We are in DMOZ and have a fairly good supply of inbound links.

Back to your question, it may be coincidence, or it may be that single page deindexing is a harbinger of less pleasant things.

[annej]

Every several months I lose a page. Usually any article pages on my sites will be somewhere in the top 10 for related search phrases. So when one goes missing you know something strange has happened.

In the old days I'd just delete that page and put the article under a new URL but now with all the dupe content problems I don't take a chance on that.

Now I just try to increase links to the page from related internal or inbound pages. The latest lost page seems to have come back with some search phrases but not all.

It's a frustrating situation.

[ari11210]

Thanks, glad to see Im not the only one. Frustrating thing is that this page brings me a lot of Adsense income and was the most popular page on my site before the up and downs of the last 2 months. I guess Ill wait a few more days. I also resubmitted my sitemap today.
Be good to hear if anyone else has any experience with this problem.
-Aaron

[riospace]

Most of my site is indexed, but all my new pages since Aug. are not currently indexed. The weird thing is that at least 5 times now all of the new pages showed up in the index for a few days and then they were all gone. All of the pages that where indexed before Aug. are still indexed, but the new pages are doing this weird indexed not indexed thing. What is going on?

[g1smd]

I see today that site:domain.com counts are down 20% to 40% across the board.

The pages were previously normally listed, and now just do not appear in the SERPs at all. e.g. A listing with 165 normal pages + 15 Suppplemental 404 pages, now shows as 120 normal pages + 15 Supplementals.

It is NOT due to a change in Supplemental, or "phantom supplemental" URL reporting. Those are still there in the searches that I looked at.