Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My colleague Vanessa just posted a note which should hopefully make your weekend a less stressful one :).
Specifically, she's noted that we've had some issues with our "site:" operator [sitemaps.blogspot.com] not returning appropriate results when used with hyphenated domains... so it's quite likely that much of the falloff you've seen is thankfully illusory.
We've noted similar discrepancies with site: searches using domains with a trailing slash as well.
And yes, Googlers are working to correct this stuff as quickly as possible!
Thanks for the link crobb, Much appreciated
What I understand here is the that site:operator has a problem and isn't working, fine.
But the pages which has been dropped completely what about that issue, if site:operator is fixed will our pages be back on SERP's or is that we have to again do everything from scratch.
I guess that there is something that's going on seriously on the Google side and I feel that they are giving it a name of site:operator that isn't working.
What the others have to say about this?
Graywolf I have sent you a sticky. Thanks
Just when I thought things were finally going the right direction. :(
[google.com...]
If code as old as this was broken in bigdaddy.. imagine what else is messed up.
Hyphenated domain?
Even Sherlock can't find the missing pages...
[google.com...]
lol :D
Since the problems started with G , MSN and Yahoo have been a great help for me. I now get good results overthere. We now have allready a half year with problems concerning G. I don't really think they can handle everything.
G has to wake up.. they act like a small company but are a multinational. They underestimate problems. They are developing new things but the old things are still broken.
It's that those guys have AdSense :).
I've got one site down from 16,000 to 2 pages.
Yes it was hyphenated.
I have a bunch of other small sites with hyphenated URLS (less than 50 pages) where the PR has surprisingly gone from 0 or 1 to 2 or 3. Most (but not all) of them have gone down to one page for a site: search.
One has jumped from 4 to 5 and has 45 pages in site:
I have to ask why they are halting spidering and/or indexing in order to fix a problem that is mostly to do with pulling results from the database? My hunch, like yours, is that there is an indexing problem there too.
I see problems with other hyphenated searches. Try searching for an email address that contains a hyphen. See that you get some results.
Replace the hyphen with a space and search again. See that you get more results than last time, and that the extra results are from the Supplemental index (and do contain the required email address).
But nothing is in thier index..
What's going on?
To me this is taking almost forever..
I have a section on my home page which lists pages that have changed recently - when pages appear on there, they appear in the index, when they're gone, they go from the index too.
I've been checking this for a few weeks now and it seems pretty conclusive to me.
PR is a 5.
I can still find other pages in the SERPS but they are suplimental from Jan-06.
It does seem odd that they have to stop the supplimental clean up to fix a database query.
I tried queries for my other pages, and I dont think they are indexed at all. I could see if the site operator was broken I would see less pages, but surely the indexed page would come back to a simple query? The way the site operator issue is mentioned on the google sitemap blog it sounds like this affects supplemental results. So I'm kind of confused if I should expect when things come back to normal if everything except 3 pages have gone supplemental. Any views?
And why 3 survived? Ah, headache!
No improvement in the situation for us so far. If it’s a hyphenated domain the bulk of the site is missing, and it doesn’t seem to be just a site command problem, but rather the pages are in fact not indexed.
Same situation for all of my hyphenated domains!
Makes you wonder what they were trying to do that went wrong. Their pretty bright boys so my suspicion is they will fix it. (I hope, it took three years to create the 10,000 pages that are missing)
Are you sure we are talking about a glitch in the site command, and not a real disaster in the whole index?
Google is adamant that it is just the site: command.
Unfortunately I'm not seeing pages indexed, and I'm seeing spam sites that are at the top of my keywords listings, along with my legitimate competition. We are shaking out heads at this.
I'm amazed this hasn't hit the larger media yet.
I guess this is a testament for the strength of Google's brand. But, all it takes is for something to bubble in the news and their brand evaporates.
Here in Texas, the search engine "Ask" has been advertising consistently, even mentioning Google by name ... going head to head with them. In one of their ads, an actor says, "Google's not better, just better known".
And, I must asmit, at this juncture, I'd have to fully agree with that assessment.
