Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The situation is:
Cache => none
site: search => no results, both www and non-www
search for domain name => no results, both www and non-www
Tool bar PageRank => still shows 5
I obtained the domain in 2007 after its expiration.
The former owner got it in 1996.
I totally changed it from what it had been:new theme, new title, and new contents, etc.
Until vanishing the site had kept ranking at #1 position for a year with very competitive keywords.
It has a lot of good backlinks. many of which are from Yahoo! Directory.
My site itself is also registered on the directory.
(My site is Japanese. So Y! Directory means Yahoo JAPAN Directory.)
I've got some reciprocal links and links from my own blogs.
I have done nothing to my site for some time past.
(so, it's gone all at once without any signals.)
I have not received any message on Webmaster Tools.
I'm afraid my site get banned by Google.
But I don't know why.
What else should I examine?
One more question.
What if I would 301 redirect it to another domain?
Does the new domain inherit the penalty, too?
If I could do that, which is better?
301 to:
#1. completely new domain
#2. 3 year old domain with related theme
#3. subdirectory of 3 year old domain with related theme
#4. expired domain that has been run under the almost same theme.
P.S.
I understand I'm asking you a kind of tricky question.
site: search => no results, both www and non-www
Suzuki-san, yes, it means that no pages are in the index and you will get zero traffic from Google.
Make sure that your site is running normally and is accessible by Google spiders.
Finally, try to write to Google for a review.
Leave it alone for a few weeks (at least), and see if it comes back. If not, then carefully assess your outgoing links and make sure that they lead to sites that are exactly on-topic, high-quality, and *useful* to your site's visitors. If more than a very few of them don't meet all these criteria, then get rid of them -- even if it costs you a reciprocal link back from them.
Don't panic and go 301-ing this to that. You will further confuse the spider and ranking algorithms, and the results will just get worse.
Before taking action at a technical level, you need to know exactly what the problem is, and the best way to fix that problem. Only with that knowledge should you proceed to the implementation phase.
Jim
If it's the one in your profile then I do not see a problem. I see it when I search for it in Google.
I've got some reciprocal links
Check all your outgoing links, especially where they are reciprocals; if some of them have gone bad, they may have dropped you into a bad neighborhood.
Sadly, link checking is an essential piece of housekeeping, and reciprocals do carry a greater risk.
Some server hacks hide links from the ordinary visitor and only show them to googlebot - sneaky. So you can't jsut trust what your eyes see on the page. If you do find evidence of a hack, you need to clean it up and also patch your server software with the most recent versions.
