Site missing completely from Google

even our domain and company name

[wiskur]

We've had a domain for our company since 2000 and sell approximately 2000 different products retail to customers. We've always ranked fairly well, not always at the top, but well enough in Google.

Our domain is not even showing up in Google currently. I checked our records and this started around the middle of August. I even type in our domain name, as well as our company name in google, and nothing. Just some our dealers and clients show up on the results page. Our traffic from Google is completely gone.
We have not done anything to our site within the last 3 months as we are working on other projects, except the normal add/delete/modify the occasional item from our online product database. The only other thing I can think of is that earlier this year, we did set-up a new domain name with links back to our website: ie: namebrandwidgets.com (we are a reseller of this namebrand.) We listed products and describe them, and then linked them back to our shopping cart when the customer wanted to purchase.
Even if this is considered unnecessary linking by Google, I think totally de-indexing our site is too harsh, so I honestly don't think that is the reason.

I've seen the other threads about the Google Directory and DMOZ being updated, but everyone talks of dropping in results, not being totally de-indexed.
I noticed it a few days ago and kept telling myself to be patient and it just must be a glitch somewhere and it will work itself out. Well, it hasn't worked itself out yet.

Luckily, this dilemma has showed us that we can survive without Google, but it would be nice to at least show in the search results for our company name.

Any ideas?

[Quadrille]

It is worth a final check - search for ["a string of 10-12 words of unique text from an established page"] - if that's a nil result, then your site has gone.

If it's positive (but not you), then you need to investigate duplicate content issues. If it's negative, then you are, indeed, banned.

Just because the ban is recent, does not always mean the problem has only just happened; often it's a cumulative thing, and some minor point appears to 'break the camel's back' - then all the earlier stuff is counted.

If the 'ban' is Google exclusively, then first check your outgoing links - all of them - for any obvious problems. then consider incoming links.

Broadly, you will NOT be penalized by Google for incoming links (which are usually out of a domain's control), but will be for outgoing, which are within your control. Unless the incoming links appear to be part of a pattern which suggests search engine manipulation.

Look and look again; it's nearly always a linking problem.

Finally, don't even think about asking for reinstatement until you have identified the problem, fixed it, and spring cleaned the site - reread Google's webmaster guidelines to be sure.

Premature re inclusion requests meet the "You're Avin' A Larf" barrier ( © Dick Van Dyke), and can make a second request, er, futile.

[edited by: Quadrille at 11:13 am (utc) on Sep. 2, 2007]

[wiskur]

I did the search query for a unique phrase.
It did return a product page to our site, but it did not show the domain name. It started with an IP address, and the gray question mark indicating that Google had not indexed it yet. So I clicked on it and submitted the page for testing.
Strange.
Also, I don't think it is outgoing links, because we only have 6-7 outgoing links on the site going to our dealers who sell some of our products (non-affiliate but actually stocking dealers).

We are still showing well in Yahoo, MSN, etc.

We are hosted by a hosting company, and perhaps they did something, but then again wouldn't that be affect the other search engines as well?

Thanks for any info.

[netmeg]

Do you have a Google Webmaster Tools account? You might want to start one. If Google is for some reason having a problem seeing your site properly, that's where it would show up.

[g1smd]

>> It started with an IP address <<

If that is your site and not a scraped copy of the site residing elsewhere, then you can fix this indexing problem using a site-wide redirect to your canonical domain.

At this point, you could also benefit from using Xenu LinkSleuth to spider the entire site and give you a report about any broken links within the site that need to be fixed.

[Quadrille]

G1 - why would that happen?

[tedster]

I had a website with the "IP address indexed" problem once when a legitimate newspaper linked to an article using the IP address for some reason. One backlink using the IP address can be all it takes to start a cascade of duplicate urls being indexed.

[g1smd]

If the website can be accessed at 12.34.56.78/ or, for virtual hosting, at 12.34.56.78/whatever/ and those URLs return a HTTP status code of "200 OK", then the content at those URLs will be indexed.

Google's Duplicate Content filtering may see those URLs indexed in preference to those from your domain name, either with or without the www in the URL.

A set of site-wide 301 redirects to the canonical form will fix those problems.

[Quadrille]

Thanks, both. I've always found the whole business of linking to IPs as odd - I see it most often on phishing emails, weirdly; but I guess they think we'll believe our bank domain is hidden beneath it, while my instant reaction is "they've got something to hide" ... sorry to go off-topic ...

[g1smd]

The phishing scams often use servers that haven't got any domain name registered. Registering a domain would leave more of a trail that could be followed to the culprits location.