Reports of index coverage changes--we're listening!

Google Reaches out

[hvacdirect]

Over in the sitemaps google groups, the infamous Google Employee has asked for input on sites that specifically have lost pages recently.

Sounds like this is a good opportunity for all.

[tedster]

GoogleGuy also asked for input here, with a dedicated email address:

[Send] the site name to bostonpubcon2006 [at] gmail.com with the subject line of "crawlpages"

from Pages Dropping Out of Big Daddy Index [webmasterworld.com]

[Whitey]

I've sent:

-an email to bostonpubcon2006 [at] gmail.com
-an email to Google Employee
-sent 2 reinclusion requests via Sitemaps
-put 4 or 5 posts on Matt Cutt's blog
-identified myself with WebmasterWorld forums so that my posts be referred to

To ensure we comply with guidelines I've

-engaged a "professional SEO"
-applied feedback from WebmasterWorld
-applied a painstaking compliance "audit"

This follows a 180 exclusion period following a hack attack in Jul05 which placed robots.txt on our sites. Out of the exclusion period in Jan/Feb06 we were hit by "BD".

[ I accept we are only one of 10,000's of site owners who are hurting right now - so the self pity is mutual with the entire webmaster community ]

We're still waiting, but have heard nothing in this period of uncertainty.

The only reason for me "bleating" is that i truly wonder what can be done and indeed if anyone is receiving communication from Google, in understanding if their webmaster guidelines or G's indexing are technically at fault.

Clearly, the DC's are playing a different role in aligning crawls to eventual results and will fluctuate, but gee - there's a lot of collatoral debris out here [ i think ].

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

It sounds like they have been trying to figure out what has been causing the problem and have failed. If they can get some specific examples to play with then they can tweak the knobs until the problem goes away in some or most of the specific examples.

I wonder what new problem will be caused by removing the existing one ;)

Sid

[Whitey]

What's worrying is that some results appear stable.

In fact i've communicated on the sticky with one WebmasterWorld member who received some inputs from Google via Matt Cutt's blog and he has been stable for 6 weeks.

Our results are not there - neither is our traffic - but at least there's some page indexing [ albeit fluctuating from 280,000 2 weeks ago to 604 and now back to 17,900! ]

My problem is with all this flux and confusion nobody knows whether they are at fault or if Google is just "winding down" the final elements of where they want the SE to be.

As for the future - more disruption is "guaranteed" ;)