Is the site banned?

or is it part of the 950 penalty

[paladin]

Here is the senario - I appreciate any insight you can give me to help the client...

Client's site was ranked in #1 in Google for a 2 word phrase for the past several years (top 3 in Yahoo & MSN as well). Recently it droped out of that phrase entirley in Google (it is not on pages 1-3 and not iin the 950-1000 results either), but remains the strong in Yahoo & MSN.

A search in Google for cache:http://www.domain.com/ returns:
Your search - cache:http://www.domain.com/ - did not match any documents"

A search for site:www.domain.com returns about 1% of the pages that used to be indexed a few months ago. Most of those returned are in the Supplemental Index

There have been no major on site changes during the last few months (with the exception of adding products and changing their descriptions to differ from the standard manufacturer descriptions).

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Quadrille]

If Google finds 1% of the pages (rather than 0), then the site is not banned.

Better to find out why all the pages are going supplemental and fix that.

To be sure, test a few "unique chunks of text from a selection of pages in quotes"

Webmaster searches really don't matter, and in this situation, rarely help.

[paladin]

Thanks - that makes sense for the most part. The only mystery remaining is that the site is not cached now. Would that be part of the supplemental issue, or would that hint at a different problem?

[paladin]

Found it!

I guess I can't blame Google for this one. Turns out that the company that is managing & hosting the site added the following to the HTTP Headers:

Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache

Now I just have to get them to removes those headers, and get the client's site re-indexed.

[topr8]

are you sure?

i thought those headers, eg:

Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache

were to do with preventing the browser caching the page not the search engines indexing them, i thought the google 'cache' was something of a confusing misnomer, as it isn't a cache in the same sense of a proxy server or browser.

i'd be glad to hear some other input on this one.

[Robert Charlton]

Turns out that the company that is managing & hosting the site added the following to the HTTP Headers:

Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache

These have nothing to do with Google's "cache"...

Pragma & Cache-Control
Are these Safe with Search Engines
[webmasterworld.com...]

Search engines don't care* about no-cache and must-revalidate. They use the word "cache" in a different way - they really mean "temporary archive." This is evidenced by the fact that Google - for example - has a special on-page HTML <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> tag that you must use if you don't want your page copied into the Google "cache." This is a completely different thing from proxy and browser caches.

[TaLu]

If you search for site:www.site.com the site appear?

If not, possibly its banned, but if appear maybe its semi-banned, I can see a new type of ban on Google, the site have PR and appear at the index but when you search for the domain name the site dont appear in the first 100 results.

[Quadrille]

The only reliable test is to search for "a chunk of unique text that's been there a while"; you'll either find it - or not.