Site disappeared from Google around December 10, 2007

[gomer]

A site of mine site 'mostly' disappered from Google around the time shown in the title and site: command is displaying odd behaviour. I am posting this to find out if others have experinced something similar.

I should explain 'mostly' above. My site had thousands of pages indexed.

Now when I do site: Google does show an accurate page count (in the thousands which it used to have) but when I try and scroll through the pages, Google only shows me about 150 page are in the index.

These lost pages are not in the index (despite the accurate site: ) because when I search for snippets that are unique to those pages, Google returns no results.

My homepage is still in the index along with those 150 pages. My homepage still ranks for a very competitive term. It is second for a query with 240K results (last week this same query showed 2.4 million results).

My referrals from Google are now less than 1% of what they were prior to 7pm EST.

I am hoping this is an issue of Google temporarily losing a site.

I really don't think this is a penalty issue, just a lost site issue. Would like to know if anyone else is experiencing the same thing.

Thanks
gomer

[Swirleigh]

Our site disappeared for a week and seems to have just returned.

Last Monday, 12/3, I did a site: search and found that the number of urls in the index dropped from 1.2 million to 11,900. Traffic and listings were normal however... until Thursday. We then dropped out of sight through the weekend.

Yesterday traffic returned to normal. URLs in index: 120,000.

I'm holding my breath, hoping everything just stays this way... with tons of referrals coming in.

[jgold454]

Swirleigh, when your site disappeared was it completely gone from the index and cache?

[Swirleigh]

When it disappeared... site: search reported 11,900 urls in index. I could find some of them in SERPS using whole title tag... but they were ranked about 300, where as, usually ranking in top 5 for basic keyword phrases.

I didn't view cached versions... but I believe it was there in listing.

I see now that last cache is dated Dec. 9th.

[gomer]

Thanks Swirleigh, that gives me hope.

[superbitz]

Again, the problem "most" of us are having is our sites are just completely gone out of the index. No cache, no urls, nothing.

So if someone has experienced this since Monday AND your site has since popped back in make sure to post here. As of today though, I haven't see any examples of that yet happening.

[SEOPTI]

This is most likely a duplicate content issue. They are now able to check for near duplicate content across different domains on the web and are dropping the duplicates.

I think this step was necessary so they can make the supplemental index searchable.

[edited by: SEOPTI at 8:25 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2007]

[developerfood]

Put me down as disappeared. Went from ~500k entries for more than a year to 13k over the past few weeks, and as of last night a search for my domain (i.e. "example.com") returns my home page on the second page of search results.

I've thoroughly searched for proxies and find none. PageRank is still a healthy 5, Webmaster Tools shows everything's good - the web crawl diagnostics show no errors. Nothing wrong in the server's logs, sitemaps is good as always. AdSense ads are idiotic, as though it's forgotten everything it knew about any page.

Let's get this solved. Please, others, keep posting on your progress.

[edited by: tedster at 7:55 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2007]

[divine7]

Again, the problem "most" of us are having is our sites are just completely gone out of the index. No cache, no urls, nothing.

Am experiencing exactly the same. A few proxy sites listed my site and I filed a spam report. There seems to be nothing wrong with my site, I have never done anything fishy with it.

I hope someone at Google looks into the issue and help innocent webmasters like us.

[Rasputin]

Same here, site completely disappeared monday (i.e. not one single page now returned by the site command)
I'm pretty sure it's not a proxy problem, but if a proxy problem doesn't always show the proxy site in the results I'm not completely sure.
The site has no sold links, crappy footer links etc. Not one page has yet returned.
Two possibilities have arisen in discussion elsewhere that might be related:
- There is a niche directory that forms a small part of the site - perhaps that could be mistaken for a link farm (the links are related and almost all one-way, not reciprocal)
- I had recently added quite a few links towards the bottom of a lot of pages in the site to improve navigation - these were all internal links, but could have been misinterpreted perhaps.

[gomer]

I think what Swirleigh went through applies to most sites in this thread.

Yes, Swirleigh did have some pages left when doing site: but the idea is that most of the pages (>99%) were 'lost' by Google. After about 1 week these pages were recovered.

I'm hoping this happens to all of us.

[mikki]

Hello @all,

my name is Michael and i am new to this forum. I am running a site in Germany since 2002... its a Authority-Site.

My site also disappeared from Google (started 06. December, Afternoon), but lost only 70% traffic from there.

The same effect i had between 21. October and 27. October, there i also lost 70% traffic and the site was normal back after 6.5 days. I hope its coming back again soon :)

Sorry for my english :)

Michael

[edited by: tedster at 10:32 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2007]

[gomer]

Michael, your English is great and your message was understood, thanks for sharing that.

[jgold454]

I am starting to see signs of my site appearing in the cache again and in the index, not for any keywords but it seems to be getting cached..My fingers are crossed!

[gomer]

My site pages are back too!

No traffic from them yet but I am still elated about this development.

[mikki]

My Opinion is, that they are actually rebuilding their keyword database :)

[superbitz]

Well my 3 sites are still gone. I did do a inurl:yoursite.com command in Google and found indexed proxy sites for each of the missing sites though. I had each of the sites block these "proxy hijacks" at the firewall level but as this email STILL no sites back in Google.

I will give a shiny nickel to any of you who can explain what is going on. All 3 missing sites were authoritative leaders in their fields and had dozens of top 10 rankings in Google. Each site had very large inlink totals accumulated by total "white hat" methods. I am completely as a loss as to where these sites went, and why?

[edited by: tedster at 4:31 am (utc) on Dec. 13, 2007]

[jgold454]

It seems to have reverted back again. Everything is once again gone from the index.

[gomer]

Was just going to add the same. The pages of my site that returned a few hours ago are also gone. I still believe this is a bug or temporary issue on Google's part that will hopefully be resolved over the next few days.

[Atomic]

I'm going to guess a different datacenter. That's how it was for me. It should go back and forth for a while and then stabilize eventually if everything works out right.

[gomer]

Actaully this is across many (all?) datacenters as I used a datacenter tool. From my experience, datacenters are synching up nowadays within a few hours.

[mikki]

Hello @all,

today morning i see my site is coming back on a few datacenters:

72.14.203.99
72.14.203.104
72.14.203.107
64.233.167.99
64.233.167.104
64.233.167.147

Yesterday the site not have been there on the normal positions :) There should be hope :)

Michael

[developerfood]

Site is back - in a big way! Now showing 9,670,000,000 results for site:example.com query. I'm the man! If that figure were true, my server would have exploded by now...

Something funny going on with the indexes.

[gomer]

I'm not seeing my site on the DC's mikki listed.

developerfood, before my site disappeared, it was showing 10x the page counts when doing site: . I don't think you have much to be worried about as your site already disappeared!

[divine7]

My site is nowhere to be seen, not even a single page.

[mikki]

My traffic still not has returned... but i see the g**glebot is downloading alot... about one page every 2-4 seconds :O

I have never seen the bot so fast!

[superbitz]

Just as an update my 3 sites are still gone AND I am now seeing returns of PR 0 on all the datacenters. They were still returning my original PR values yesterday.

Again, not good. I think this whole thing is a travesty. Two of my client sites that are now just GONE are the largest providers of services in their respective industries? You CANNOT tell me that these sites have no value and don't belong where they were initially.

Needless to say, I am pretty disgusted with the whole thing. You follow Google Webmasters Guidelines to a T when competitors who you know are employing "shady" methods to modulate their results and compete with you, are still in the index and untouched as of this email.

Shame on you Google and shame on the rest of you webmasters who defend this update as a way to "improve the quality of the index!" Don't you think for a minute this can't happen to the rest of you "white hatters" out there, because it certainly is happening to me.

10yrs doing SEO and not one client site has ever fallen out of Google and now I get 3 on the same night? Bull$%^&, something else is going on here!

[SEOPTI]

Unfortunately, SEO is often a dead end, you can sit and wait and pray for the monopolistic companies to make some changes.

[gomer]

superbitz, hang in there, I really think this will resolve itself in a few days.

My pages are not back yet. They still do show pagerank, even the ones that are not in the index.

Sometimes the most important thing an SEO professional can display is patience and belief in that whay they have done is right.

[Vimes]

The presence TBPR doesn’t mean an awful lot I’m afraid, the toolbar doesn’t show actual PR.
Pages that have been dropped from the indices will show PR right up until the next TBPR update.

Vimes.

[gomer]

All my pages are back as of 11:30pm EST on December 13th. The pages are however receiving no traffic but I consider this and important step and hope it lasts.

I have the same page counts in the main index (as opposed to the supplemental index) as I did before I lost pages on December 10th.

I check my pages in the main index by:

site:example.com/* and this has been accurate for me in determining page in the main index.

Let's hope it stays this way and I hope the sites of others similarly affected also return.