Most of the pages disappeared in the last few weeks

Number of pages indexed drops from 400 to 37!

[mariella]

Hi,

I am the webmaster for a relatively new website (launched in September 2005) that and up until mid-March was correctly indexed in Google. Over the course of the last few weeks I have noticed the following:

- Most of our pages have disappeared. NB: Our website has slightly more than 400 pages and all were correctly indexed up to mid-March. Over the course of the past few weeks the number of pages indexed has declined. Today only 37 pages are listed in data center [64.233.167.104...] I have listed this center for two reasons. 1. All of the other data centers are showing a different problem as set out below. 2. The 360 odd pages no longer indexed on data center [64.233.167.104...] have disappeared from the top 1000 keyword search results independent of the data center searched.

- Old urls, notwithstanding a 301 redirect in place since December 2005, are now listed on all data centers except [64.233.167.104...] Again this change was noticed around mid-March. At first, the listing of the old urls was somewhat erratic. But for roughly the past 2 weeks they appear to have taken root. I have not cross checked the 2800 pages and various data center but given my statement in point 2 above I would hazard to guess that only 37 of the 2800 listings shown are correct.

- A sharp decline in the traffic from Googlebot. The traffic for the month of April was approximately 3000 hits or roughly half of our monthly average of 6000.

Our site is an original content website. Pages are frequently updated and new pages are slowly but continuously added. We are not a blog or forum and we have not made anything other than cosmetic changes to the site since early December 2005. I promise. I have nothing to gain by an improper description of our problem.

Of note, we deactivated the Google site map generator in early January of this year and reactivated it roughly 1 week ago. The log suggests it is working fine. Finally we have not had a similar effect in Yahoo or MSN.

Any suggestions you may have are greatly appreciated.