Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My small site has been indexed since April 06 and all bar one or two
pages have stayed out of the dreaded supplementals.
I have non-www redirecting to www and /index.html redirecting to / using .htaccess. No changes have been made to the /index.html since 18th Dec. Sitemaps shows no problems or errors and googlebot is crawling the site regularly. My other sites don't seem to have been affected.
The site ranked #2 in google search for the main two keywords which is the name of a European ski resort and the really frustrating thing is that January is the peak month for this sort of website. The timing is terrible and traffic has been hammered.
Any tips, suggestions, pointers would be greatly received. Even if it's only the number of a good therapist.
On highly competitive terms, your competitors WILL try anything, so be like a ROCK and make sure they cannot penetrate you in any way.
:)
[edited by: tedster at 5:04 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2007]
I've put in a lot of effort to make the whole site google friedly. All hand written unique text ( nothing hidden ), validated html, unique meta tags. Generally all the stuff I've been reading on here over the last 6 months.
As you can see I haven't had cause to post before but I suppose all good things have to come to an end :(
I'm hoping its just a google index update glitch and that it may resurface in a few days ..
But, you might be right and its a "glitch". I HAVE seen that as well. I saw one of my interior pages go completely out and then right back to #1...I guess they check them sometimes to make sure they were right on their previous assessment of that page.
Very well could just be a glitch on this one. I did a site:http://www.example.com/ search on your site, and you are right, your index does not show up (at least in first many results anyway).
I wouldn't worry too awful much since it has only been a day or so, I had same thing on different pages and then wham, it was back to #1 and has stayed there for YEARS...so I wouldn't get too concerned unless its been a week or two, etc...
Hope that helps, for what my opinion is worth :)
Netmeg - your scenario is similar to mine. The last change I made to the site a couple of weeks ago was to finally get rid of the old image javascript navigation menu and replace with simple text controlled by a style sheet. So the change was made on every page with the same content.
Seeing the exact same thing here for our company page... gone. Trying to figure out what's going on. This site has been white hat since day one and everything is there except for the home page. nada...
On Google, I've observed that the problem can be query specific.
To check to see whether it's a duping problem, try adding "&filter=0" (without the quotes) to the end of the Google search url and see if this brings your page back.
To locate scrapers, try searching for unique 4, 5, or 6 word strings from your page enclosed in quotes... and try various searches, as some scrapers are breaking text up into pretty short strings. Generally, the scrapers are MFA (Made For AdSense) sites.
I'd appreciate comments from others who have been through the problem. Whether the engine figures it out or not, this is always worrisome, and it can cost a site real money.
I tried your suggestions and still nothing. I can't find the home page, nor any scraper sites. I tried searching various phrases and still nothing. What is really strange is that when I try copyscape by typing in either the domain (http://somesite.com) or the root page (http://somesite.com/index.html), it can't even find my home page. A different sub-domain pops up and it looks for duplicate content for that page. It won't even show my page. So then I got thinking... can anyone see the home page? I went to some of the free anonymyzing sites and it seems to display okay. Had some clients hit it as well. Using &filter=0 still does not display the page. nothing... nada. Just the home page. All the other pages are there. Doesn't show for a site: search neither. Does not show anything for cache either. This is something I have never seen before. Toolbar shows some green but I don't think that means anything.
Now I am starting to get worried. Did I do a booboo somehow? It is just a straight html page and has been in the serps for at least 8 years.
Any other suggestions out there? Could some competition have hurt the page somehow?
I just don't get it :-\
Interestingly, for my two main keywords in the UK I'm back at #2 but for the US I now seem to be #1.
We are listed in every yahoo directory out there for every country I can find. Japan, Singapore, Canada, India, Netherlands, Australia... you name it, we are there. What is wierd is that the word "programs" in the description for many of these is spelled "programmes." We are also listed for b2b housing (name your town) all over the place in Yahoo. Our site has nothing to do with housing, yet it is there. It appears in what Yahoo calls the local directory. Nothing I ever submitted. I am also finding our link in Yahoo's "What's New" pages. A bunch of them.
I found several references and links to our site in Wikpedia that I did not put there. It shows up on a page of a list of companies in a large metropolitian area. We are one of just 8 companies listed. It also shows up on what looks like nonsense pages. Things like "You ever laugh at a picture of a woman with a headset on? And then a list of sites with ours being one of them.
I have been finding our link in blogs hidden in the most strange ways. There will be a sentence with every word linked to a different website, ours being one of them. I have been finding our site linked in RSS feeds the same way.
You will find links to our site in the wierdest places, directories that are not even remotely related to our site. Drivings schools, wireless directories, hotel directories, etc.
I have found our text for our link in several places that actually lead to other sites. In other words, the link will be [somesite.com...] but the actual link will go to [someothersite.com....]
So... is there anything I can do about this? I have narrowed a lot of these links going up in mid-November. I think it may be the reason we totally disappeared lately.
Any thoughts?
I am going to do that. I'll keep you informed...
I don't see exactly where you can email Google in the WebMaster tools unless you are trying to do a reinclusion request. It is very clear from the directions that to use this tool, you have faulted G in some way and now have cleaned it up and want to be reincluded. Well, the site is white hat all the way and I am not sure where you are talking about contacting Google with this problem
Second, I went into the google forum and saw a lot of people who have just their root page missing (cache, link, site, etc). Seems to be a lot more of this then just me. I searched around trying to find some sort of common denominator for this problem. One thing that struck me odd is a couple of the posts there had the root pages disappear to be replaced by a sub-domain. This is exactly what happened to me! I have a subdoamin that is now popping up first for my site. It seems to have replaced my homepage.
mysite.com - gone
demo.mysite.com - first for site: (used to be mysite.com)
Anway... just keeping you posted :-/
...I have a subdoamin that is now popping up first for my site. It seems to have replaced my homepage.
mysite.com - gone
demo.mysite.com - first for site: (used to be mysite.com)
webdude - Grasping at straws here... Was your DNS by any chance set up with wildcard subdomains, to handle typos in the "www" part?
Webmastertools shows the last crawl at Demember 7. I find that odd. Sitemap accessed 17 hours ago and showing okay. Everything looks normal. No errors, no nothing. All of my other sites have been unaffected. No other pages have been affected, just the home page for our company site...
mmmm.... :-/
One of my website's home page taken off the index - so many of my rankings have gone away!
I hope this is a short term glitch as my website was, for sure, not over-optimized!
It is quite alarming when it happens, but be patient!
Unfortunately, another site of mine (personal) has suddenly completely vanished from the index, except for the plain text sitemap page. Webmaster doesn't report anything and says it's in the index (but I don't think they're updating that very often these days - I've had the same exact query stats on ALL my sites for weeks now, and some of those terms were holiday-driven and certainly wouldn't be current now)
Again, trying not to panic for a few days...
(Serenity NOW!)
*biting nails in anxiety*
We need a Webmasters in Distress - Support Group Forum in here, eh?
:)
They say knowledge is power. It's also very good for stress levels.
Anyway, two sites of mine are seeing changes today. One, 2 years old that has had pages removed / gone supplemental. Another new site with pages coming in. So this time I'm going to ignore the situation for a few days and concentrate on other matters. Then I'll panic.
Webmaster Central is telling me Google last accessed my site Oct 15 2006! However I run ClickTracks and Googlebot is visiting at least the homepage daily .Any more ideas, or should I just have patience?
