Key pages disappearing

Has anyone else experienced similar....?

[Nick0r]

Over the past 6-8 months I've experienced something really weird going on with my key pages and google. Google seems to be delisting key pages. Not only do they disappear completely from the SERPs, but they don't appear in their normal positions in site: (e.g near the top) and when you search their URL they are not #1 or sometimes not even found.

The problem isn't anything onpage, it's not duplicate content, it's not bad code. Could it be possibly caused by sitewide inbound links? I doubt it.

Note: these are some of the best internally linked pages of my site, yet others that are equally well linked are still alive and kicking.

Anyone care to shed some light on the situation?

[Wibfision]

I've had some pages that have disappeared - not even supplemental - then they come back later. I don't know what causes it.

[netmeg]

Are those pages getting any traffic? Like I said somewhere else, I don't really trust the site: command these days at all.

[WiseWebDude]

I've had the same thing, ESPECIALLY my number one pages, then they come back to number one after a day...its almost like Google is checking itself to make sure it got it right or something, weird!

[Wibfision]

One of my missing pages got traffic from the image search where it was apparently indexed - but not from the normal search where it wasn't indexed.

[iridiax]

This problem is very familiar to me. One of my site's pages would be indexed and then later deindexed. Sometimes the pages would show up in the index again, especially the well-linked pages, but they would sooner or later be deindexed yet again. This problem continued for months.

I think that I may have discovered what was triggering my site's Google problem, text and a link in noscript tags that had been added months ago. The text and link were non-spammy, but I removed them after discovering that they could be considered hidden text/links. I then submitted a reinclusion request to Google. Soon after I did this, the repeated indexing/deindexing problem ended... And hopefully it won't return.

[Nick0r]

This problem lasts for months, where key pages disappear from SERPs and don't get ANY traffic. As of yet I still haven't found a fix, or the cause of the problem.

[proboscis]

Me too. Pages that rank for popular terms, near the top, that bring in good traffic disappear for a few days then reappear in the same place - where they have been for years.

[steveb]

Disappear isn't a very helpful term. Big difference between "not indexed" and "ranks #950 at the end of the results". The second is a clear penalty, while the first could be multiple things.

[Nick0r]

They rank on at least the 10th page, but sometimes not even found by the time you get to the 20th page (200th result)

[mattg3]

My main keyword now outranks Wikipedia again .. top spot, was on page 200 2 days ago.

I seems as if the daily updates created some instability in the serps.

Guess:

If we assume that daily update doesn't mean that the whole index is reranked every day, but only that changes in filters etc will be infused daily, the delay until everything is reranked would cause some "ripples" I assume, like water. The more changes, the more ripples and then wild effects.

On a montly update the ripples will fizzle out soon, but daily they will remain possibly and produce artefacts. Any system that is constantly perturbed will show this effect.

Maybe there are long term effects. It's now a highly dynamic system, but not only from the webmaster side but also plex side.

And the changes will be huge for some and unoticable for others.

< Discussion continues here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 9:17 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2007]