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

[capslock]

< moved from another location >

I made this website for six month,and everyday,google bring about 1000 ip to me,and this namber is rise up everyday,but today,I found my traffic is fall down so much from google,so I visted www.google.com and use "site:www.mydomain.com",then it reply nothing to me,did google kicked mysite out,or it just a "Sandbox effect",and what should I do now~? :(

[edited by: tedster at 5:00 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2007]

[divine7]

All my pages are back in the index (as they were before), but are NOT ranking anywhere.

Earlier I used to get 1500+ traffic from Google daily, and now I am getting zero.

However the pages are back in index and I am hoping they will start ranking soon.

[Hemanth]

A massive drop for my vBulltin forum too.. I dropped from 316K indexed pages to 116K. My site is having a 90% traffic from Google alone, which is gone now. Alexa rank dropped from 40k to N/A. So do adsense earnings.

A few points:

1. A search for the title of my forums returns pages from RSS indexing sites like boxxet and few pages from technorati

2. inurl:my_forum.com : Six results along with the Omitted results text. Clicking on it gives 127K pages.

3. site:my_forum.com : Flatuating from 108 K to 148K.

4. The main keyphrase I ranked in the top 10 : Now not in the first 15 result pages.

I'm waiting and watching closely. A few things I suspect:

1. Recent server change and a few hours of downtime.
2. High server load and thus very slow page loads in the last two weeks due to the import of other sites to the server.
3. Corrupted sitemap gz files due to a bug in the vBSEO sitemap generator. Fixed now.

Googlebot and for the first time Yahoobot is spidering my forum like mad now. 4-10 hits /second from googlebot. Hmm.. I dunno what's happening.

[Rasputin]

Same here, site back but now all terms are on page 5-6 instead of page 1.
I thought it was good news, but having been reading about -30 penalties etc I'm not so sure its time to open the champagne quite yet.
Does anyone have experience of a de-indexed site coming back after a few days? Is it normal to get a penalty at first?
Cheers

[TigerSBT]

Hi everyone,

Feeling a bit better now as all 4 of my sites are back showing the exepcted number of pages in the index for the site command.

However, previously all 3 out of the 4 sites held many page 1 positions for many terms but they are all on page 6 or 7 of the results now.

A sign of encouragement from Google, but we need to get the rankings back too. I hope that this will adjust itself back to 'normal' over he next few days.

[divine7]

A sign of encouragement from Google, but we need to get the rankings back too. I hope that this will adjust itself back to 'normal' over he next few days.

Yeah, I hope so. Fingers crossed. I don't wanna spoil my Christmas.

[Rasputin]

As of a few minutes ago I seem to have my SERPS back as well.

[Hemanth]

Hmm.. For me no changes so far. But one of my competitors (who also faced the same drop) seems back now. His forums index dropped to 30k last week from around 400k. Now he got a whooping 777K indexed pages. OMG!

I hope this will happen to me as well. :o

[mikki]

Yesterday was the day with the lowest traffic from google to my site :)

Today a few of my single keywords are back on the old positions. :) At night some pages have been crawled by an other G**glebot, i mean... from another g**gle-ip.

So i will see what this day brings to me :)

[Stiphen]

We're back to but not at our old rankings for most of the keywords. Some are better than other.

Anyone has any suggestion to what really happened? Rebuilt the index based on new link algorithm?

/S

[mikki]

@ Stiphen

You should wait a while. I think all is coming back keyword by keyword :)

[jgold454]

I am back as well. I hope it sticks. Man, what a roller coaster, it's truly wrenching on the nerves!

[mikki]

@jgold454

But not on all Datacenters, right? :)

[jgold454]

I seem to be back across all the datacenters.

[divine7]

Are your rankings back to normal as well? If yes, on which datacenters?

For me, all of my pages are indexed, but absolutely no rankings. (Doesn't rank for even my domain name, without the extension.)

[jgold454]

rankings are a little different but mostly the same and are across all datacenters..

[aok88]

I also have a site that dropped to page 6-7 for thousands of keywords. It is still a PR 5. The site was never 'lost' in Google though, it always showed the correct number of pages. This huge SERPs drop happened Dec 4th.

Anyone else who has had this happen to them? Where they got moved from page 1 to page 6 for all their terms but never got de-indexed by Google in the last 2 weeks?

[edited by: tedster at 7:31 pm (utc) on Dec. 14, 2007]

[con771]

Yesterday was one of my worse traffic days in over a year and today is looking even worse. Last week I thought it couldn't get worse then it was and yet here we are....
I don't know what to do...20-30% traffic loss from Google

[nuevojefe]

Same here, site back but now all terms are on page 5-6 instead of page 1.

Same here. Very quality website and it's main category pages were those dropped while other pages have not been dropped nor seen any decrease in rankings.

Specifically for those who are seeing their pages ranking around page 6 now and which were formally on the first page... do you have repetitious keywords in internal links on those pages?

For my main category pages on this site there is a chunk of around 15 links which all use the same keyword + location. I've seen this cause problems before.

[gomer]

For my main category pages on this site there is a chunk of around 15 links which all use the same keyword + location. I've seen this cause problems before.

nuevojefe, I have sites that do this exact same thing but were not effected by this loss of pages.

[nuevojefe]

nuevojefe, I have sites that do this exact same thing but were not effected by this loss of pages.

As do I. But I also have sites that did this, this was changed, and they got all their traffic back within a couple days.

[gomer]

As do I. But I also have sites that did this, this was changed, and they got all their traffic back within a couple days.

Interesting to note, thanks. I don't think that is an issue with my site. I will let things sit as they are for a while, but of course, this might be something to try later.

My pages are back in the index, just no traffic yet.

[mikki]

@ divine7

do you often use sub-domains like sub.domain.tld?

[divine7]

Cool. I hope even our rankings get back soon.

@mikki

Nope, not on this site.

[mikki]

Well, g**gle now weight the subdomains like normal url's of the site. Thats my opinion. Links to subdomains look like normal internal links now. Too much internal links with nofollow maybe reducing the internal link power.

Today night i have changed all my subdomain-links to another domain (no important links... only just for tracking, and how ago... with rel=nofollow).

I hope this will help... i should see results within 2 or 3 weeks :)

Mikki

[JoshN]

Just wanted to add that we discovered we are down to page 4 on the SERPs for our keywords. We are white hat and were coming up number 1 or 2 for most of our industry keywords. Just discovered this morning we are down to pages 3 and 4 and have lost a lot of traffic. We are still indexed as before but the ranking is much lower. Will be hoping we come back up...

[mikki]

@ JoshN

So welcome to the Club - and i hope your positions are coming back sun! :)

Mikki

[Hemanth]

Hmm... Searching for my forum's title in quotes gives my home page the 10th Rank. :(

Top 9 links includes technoarti, boxxet, some google groups and RSS directories...

What the heck?

I removed all the paid links and blog podts. Let's see what'll happen..

How about you guys? Did the sites showing up on searching for Titles?

[edited by: Hemanth at 4:42 am (utc) on Dec. 18, 2007]

[superbitz]

I think it's been established that those sites that "popped back in" last Thursday night came back in under a -50 penalty. Most of the sites (including mine) appear to have been targeted due to their backlink profiles. This would seem to suggest this was a "handjob" penalty and thus not automated, I wouldn't expect this type of penalty to just time-out.

So a reconsideration request to force a physical review of the site (if you have removed all those questionable backlinks that is) would seem to be the only way to eliminate this penalty, right? I'm not in a hurry to submit a reconsideration request until I am sure all the backlinks that "might" be causing the problem are found and eliminated, or at least modified with a no-follow tag.

My question is this?

How do you frame the reconsideration request? Especially if you are an SEO yourself, caused the penalty, and are going to be held to a higher standard by Google when they read the review? Any thoughts on that? Do you use the "sorry we linked to a bad neighborhood" argument and we have eliminated all the links that "may" have caused the problem and oh yeah, sorry, we won't do it again?" Or What?

Want to compare reconsideration strategies? Anybody?

[gomer]

Hemanth, my site ranks for its name but not always for its page titles.

I also have a #1 ranking for a popular query with 3.2 million results.

The pages which disappeared and came back do seem to have the -50 penalty, although, sometimes they appear higher (better than) the -50.

superbitz, assuming this is the result of link profiles is speculative and a theory I don't really buy into.

If that were the case, I would not be ranking #1 for a big search term like that.