Google Indexing Question - home page offline for 8 weeks

[ann9787]

Hi Everyone,

My site which is about 4.5 years old up until March had a #3-#5 ranking on Google for my most relevent keywords. I took the site's index page off line for about 8 weeks while I was restructuring the business and have just put it back up. Now, I don't show up at all....

Is it possible to get back to where I was fairly quickly?

I really need advice as I'm trying to get back to business, thanks in advance!

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:48 pm (utc) on May 7, 2009]

[Robert Charlton]

I've never had a page unavailable for 8 weeks, so I can't comment from experience, but reports on this forum indicate that Google is very good about re-indexing old material that has been offline for a while.

One of the dangers in this kind of situation, though, is that well-maintained directories or sites that were linking to you may have noticed that their links were broken and may have removed them... so you have some checking to do.

There's no dependable way to check historical backlinks. Yahoo Site Explorer, which is primarily what I use to check current backlinks, may refresh more frequently than every 8 weeks... I don't know. Definitely check directory listings, etc, that you're aware of.

If you've restructured your site (or your index page) in the course of restructuring your business, then those onpage changes may affect your rankings, either for better or for worse.

You should also contact Google and advise them of the situation. The best way is to file a reconsideration request via your Webmaster Tools account.

[nndavis7]

Thank you for the reply! I actually wondered if I could contact google about this, so I will take your advice about the webmaster tools account. I honestly never had a lot of links but was still able to get a very high ranking... Thanks again!

[AnkitMaheshwari]

You might also need to check some other issues like if you have changed your index file extension (from .html to php) and their was no canonical redirect earlier or now.

[skweb]

If your page is live now, eventually G will index it and most likely your rankings will come back. G deleted it because you took it offline. A better option would have been to leave the page online but indicate that it was being redesigned and would be back.