Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Site: command shows no urls. The site is a pretty respected site at pr 6 and has loads of great links.
Webmaster tools still shows sitelinks and backlink data and my security guy cant see any hacks or exploits.
Any suggestions?
Should I file a reconsideration request? I dont even know what we did wrong, we havent done anything differently on the site that we havent been doing for 7 years.
I assume you are seeing no google search traffic, correct?
Log files do not show any problems, changed my user agent and site is serving properly. Site has been online and no problems with dns or the server for the last week that I looked at. Security seems intact, its just plain html and the server is really locked down.
If you're pretty certain there are no technical issues, you might submit a reconsideration request. You also might take up the issue in Google's own webmaster help forum.
But check some basics first - is there a robots.txt file on the site and does it allow googlebot to crawl? More than one robots.txt accident has occurred to webmasters here.
Similarly, make sure that somehow robots meta tags did not get changed to noindex.
It takes some pretty severe spamming for Google to outright ban a site from their index these days. From what you described, I doubt that's the case for you. So assume there is something that can be found and fixed either by Google or by your team - and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
We have been featured on forbes and fox finance and tons of other sites. I cant find a technical reason yet at least on our end so I hope they can help us figure out what the heck is going wrong.
Google had already severely reduced the site listings... as every domain now had a site-wide disallow in the robots.txt file. They'd also cleared their analytics account number from the Tools section, left the default (example@example.com) contact email address for their contact form in the Comms settings, and removed all of the .htaccess rules that redirected from old CMS URLs to new CMS URLs (and introduced a code typo that stopped every page showing any meta description).
Google will take a few months to get things back where they were...
[edited by: g1smd at 12:19 pm (utc) on June 5, 2009]
This is really getting me down, clean little site that due to content, age and links was competing with fortune 100 companies for great terms for years then one morning you wake up and poofta gone.
I actually showed this site to my wife as a example of how Google lets small sites compete with gorillas for big terms as long as you have good content.
[edited by: tedster at 8:10 pm (utc) on June 5, 2009]
But it says google hasnt visited the site in the last 90 days but we had traffic up to 2 days ago and googlebot is still activly crawling pages. What the heck?
I submitted a reconsideration request last night. Hope they can shed light as to whats going on.
The only thing we have done differently with the site vs the last 7 years is test out microsofts ads on it.
We're seeing something similar at the moment - previously 5000+ indexed pages disappearing what appears to be instantly on may 28th. Googlebot is also going nuts on our site - if anything more crawling than before.
site: query returns a full list as normal.
We did have a lot of internal links pointing at subfolders which redirected to subfolder/ by 301 which we only spotted by going through the logs after this happened, and googlebot appears to be respidering the site bit by bit at the moment. We have corrected the links and hopefully will reappear soon fingers crossed.
An interesting observation is we appear in the serps as normal for phrases if we put speech marks around them - in other words where we used to rank for key phrase we now don't appear at all, but for "key phrase" we appear as before. I've not seen this behaviour before.
