Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
About 2 weeks ago the site owners reported a pretty big drop in sales. Upon further investigation we realized that none of our products were showing up in Google. Previously, we had always been somewhere in the top ten for almost all of our products.
I did some further investigation and found that we still have over 300,00 pages index (the usual number). We submit site maps regularly and nothing out of the ordinary was being reported there either. I also noticed that we now have a PR of zero.
The only thing I saw that was a little strange is that the descriptions listed in Google were being pulled from the content of the product pages rather than from the meta description that they used to coincide with.
We rolled out a new site design (mainly cosmetic) about a week ago, but this was after the problems were reported. Nothing else material has changed.
We had a duplicate content issue about a year ago that was quickly fixed, so I don't think that is the problem. Is there anything else I should be looking at? Is there any chance that this is a temporary glitch? Could reporting the problem to Google help?
Is your site dropped from all kinds of searches or just the keywords you've been paying attention to?
I mean does it come up for queries unique to your pages?
(or at least unique enough so you'd definately have to rank top for them)
Are the inner(most) pages supplemental?
If I add site specific text to the search (e.g. <product name> <site name>), they will show up.
I don't think the pages are supplemental. How can I tell for sure?
Out of 300,000 you should have about 260,000 or so :P
Basically any page that doesn't have enough PR weight will be marked supplemental, meaning it will stay in the index, but only come up if there are no non-0 PR pages that are relevant and trusted.
Okay back to your problem...
There are two things you should check.
One is site navigation.
I mean how come an inner page can come up and at a place where it probably belongs judged by its weight, and all pages above are wiped out? There has to be something. The URLs changed for higher level pages, the design put links into flash, onto images, into javascript, something.
The other most likely is duplicate content.
You had problems a year ago. Okay but solving THOSE doesn't mean you're exempt from messing up ever again ;)
There was a redesign recently... right?
Meaning either stuff on the site has more than one copy, or the same pages can now be accessed through more than one URLs. ( typing in two or more different URLs would get you the same page, that's a duplicate in G's eyes ).
The relevance is there, the trust seems to be there ( you wouldn't show up with ANY page in the primary index otherwise ), the only thing that is not there are your higher level pages. I'd suspect the navigation links or even the URLs of the higher level pages first.
Check those, and correct whatever you did to them recently.
Supplemental Results - what exactly are they? [webmasterworld.com]
I have been running the link checker all morning and it has not reported any errors yet.
Assuming your site is always listed with the www in the URL, make sure you do these searches, and do each search both with and without the &filter=0 parameter attached:
site:domain.com
site:www.domain.com
site:domain.com -inurl:www
site:www.domain.com -inurl:www
Make sure that you do all of these searches with the &num=100 parameter so that you get 100 results per page every time.
Look at the first couple of pages (1-100 and 101-200) as well as the last couple of pages (801-900 and 901-1000) too.
It will take a while to work out what is going on, but some patterns will emerge.
Lastly try these searches on several other datacentres, because Google has several (slightly) different sets of results in play at the moment.
