Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Initially, link:www.domain.com returned results, but now even that syntax no longer returns anything.
However, since we were dropped Google has continued to crawl the site, although at a slower rate than before (they're still crawling thousands of pages a day, rather than tens of thousands). It's continued to download sitemaps; we have hundreds of subdomains, and thus registered hundreds of sitemaps with Google. All these sitemaps are downloaded every few days; in fact, every single one was downloaded yesterday, and half of them again today.
There are no relevant errors shown anywhere in the Webmaster's console, and no messages telling us that we've done anything wrong. We've even sent a reinclusion request (back on August the 12th) and never got a response.
There is one weird little idiosyncrasy we noticed. In our Webmaster's console, in the Crawl Stats charts, at the same time that "Number of pages crawled per day" drops dramatically the "Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)" goes up dramatically.
That's odd...even if there was a server problem--and we have no reason to believe there is, everything seems fine--why would Google drop the site if it were still crawling pages?
A few days before we were dropped, we did a very large Remove URL request, removing 500 URLS; could we have kicked off some kind of bug?
So, any ideas anyone?! If we've been banned, why wouldn't we see a msg telling us this in the Webmasters console? Why would Google continue downloading sitemaps, and crawling our site?
Also, a more general comment here, perhaps with the hope that someone at Google listens!
Clearly Google knows whether our site has been intentionally banned or accidentally dropped. The information is somewhere inside the company. Considering just how important Google is to millions of businesses, it seems a little irresponsible to act like this. They have the information, so why won't they provide it? Why can't they provide a mechanism for a simple query, with an automated response. Has my site been banned, and if so why? If not, what's going on?
It certainly is possible that your removal request included something or other that had effects beyond what you expected. Did your removal use 404/410, robots.txt or robots meta tags for its removal criteria? Have you double checked those areas (especially robots.txt) to be sure that they say what you want them to say?
The other challenge is that webmaster Tools reporting is a bit sluggish, and sometimes very sluggish, Still, a month is usually enough.
One factor I noticed in your post is the "hundreds of subdomains" that you mention. This might be problematic just on its own today. And in the middle of a url removal request, I also wonder about the technical execution of those subdomains and whether they got tangled up in the url removal request.
The closest Google comes to your closing request is the Site Status Wizard at:
[google.com...]
For more personal specific issues, their Webmaster Forums take over - although they are very careful not to give away information that could help websites to spam their search results.
We removed the pages from our site, then simply used the "Individual URLs: web pages, images, or other files" option button in the Remove URL tool. We didn't use 404/410 or robots.txt/meta tag.
I tried the Site Status Wizard...not very helpful, unfortunately...doesn't really say anything useful.
I also got an email back from someone else who experienced this situation -- almost exactly the same symptoms; after giving up the wait, he 301'd the old domain across to a new site and domain name, and the new site did *not* get banned...if the original had been banned, you'd expect that the new one would die too, eh? Very odd.
Yes, I should check the Webmaster forums ... thanks very much for your help!
Peter
