Can't get my site changes re-indexed

[johnnie]

My site (well, man yinner pages) has been suffering from greybar-disease for quite some time now and I have decided to drastically change some things. Amongs these changes, I have removed my 'links' page, added content and have improved internal navigation in certain instances.

Google however seems completely ignorant of my work. When I do a site: search I still see my links page (and all its subpages, its one of those crappy mini directories) listed, even though it's been gone for weeks now. I submitted my site to social bookmarking, made a new sitemap and built some links, but no love.

How to get google to act?

[johnnie]

Today a new clue appeared: TBPR dropped from 4 to 0 (whitebar). I have no idea why, since the site is completely white-hat! WMT is not really helping either...

[tedster]

There's a chance that your backlinks have lost some or all of their power, and that would drop your PR even though you did nothing.

How many weeks since the last version of your page was cached? Can you see from your server logs if googlebot has successfully spidered since then?

[SEOPTI]

I see some real evidence with my own sites ... devalued backlinks in Googles system don't appear in the toolbar as PR any more.

If they devalue your backlinks the TBPR won't show the same PR as before, the TBPR will also decrease. I'm seeing this for the first time with about 10+ of my sites.

[SEOPTI]

johnnie, check your crawling rate and supplementals and compare with current situation.

I see with my sites where PR has been devalued crawling/indexing and supplementals have not been affected by this devaluation at all.

[johnnie]

How do I check for supplementals again? I believe there wa sthis weird query with *** or something, but I forgot...

[SEOPTI]

Just go to search.aol.com and do a site: command there.

[johnnie]

Wow! That seems to explain a lot; only a few pages turn up on AOL. Guess my fresh, original content has somehow ended up in supplemental hell... I also still see a link-page listed that has been removed eons ago...

[SEOPTI]

The next step is to do a domain check without the extension (example.com without .com) on Google and see if you are still #1.

[johnnie]

Nope, not even on the front page. Looks like I've been hit by some sort of penalty. But why? I swear that the site is completely 100% white-hat; no shady techniques at all!

[johnnie]

Maybe it's my backlink profile? Although I do have quite some quality backlinks (including DMOZ), it seems to be leaning towards the directory side a (wee) bit. Could that be it? I have to make mention of the fact that I also have one-way in-content links.

[SEOPTI]

If you don't rank #1 for your domain name without .com and your domain name is not competitive it's probably a filter and/or a negative manual review which leads to a backlink devaluation.

In all these cases it doesn't matter how many quality links you have or how many quality links you will get. They simply killed your site.

[tedster]

There's another possibility - you may be linking out to a site that Google considers to be a bad neighborhood. This can happen quite innocently if you link to a site that once was helthy but then changes its nature.

Problems can also happen if your server gets hacked - and you may not be able to see this easily in every case. See the thread How Hacked Servers Can Hurt Your Traffic [webmasterworld.com]. It's available from the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

I'd also recommend you become familiar with many of the discussions in Hot Topics, so you can get an idea of various areas you can check into.

[johnnie]

I've checked my outbound links; no shady stuff going on there. I'll have to ask my ISP about any possible hacking attempts, but that doesn't seem likely since WMT reports no such thing (its supposed to do so nowadays, right?).

SEOPTI, you make it sound pretty definitive. However, since my site is 100% legit and features original content I am determined to get the ranking I deserve. I am not greybarred and as such am not banned, but something, somewhere is triggering a filter...

[tedster]

Webmaster Tools might tell you if your site was hacked to serve a virus for regular visitors, but not if it was hacked and you're now serving "parasite" content to googlebot. The link I gave above has a lot of details. I suggest you not take your host's word on this, check into it yourself.

[johnnie]

I've done several tests (UA spoofing, DNS report and checking various files), but everything seems OK. I have asked my host to take a look at his logs to see if maybe he can find anything suspicious going on.

WMT is correctly reporting the link pages to be 404 - not found as of dec. 20 (some dec. 30, so googlebot is still crawling), but somehow these pages are still in the SERPs.

[asinah]

(and all its subpages, its one of those crappy mini directories)

If you just removed this pages a while ago, you may have to give it some time. Two weeks is not enough to see positive results. As you mentioned its a crappy mini directory, so Google too has figured that out.

Maybe what you could try is put new content on that pages that you removed.

If the page is about redwidgets you could write a nice unique article about redwidgets.

Also you mentioned about you removed a link page. Was this a link exchange?

Also do you still get got incoming traffic from Google?