Temporary repeated Site disappearance from Google search

[Sevou]

Our site is 14 year old and has always ranked first page of google for its URL keyword. For the past couple of days not only does it disappear from the first google page but it disappeared all together from all google searches. It came back this morning and now it is gone again. We tested different locations, browsers and at the same time it disappears on some , it does not on others. How is that possible, it seems to be linked to the IP address and the browser. Is there any way to avoid it?

[tedster]

Is it just your domain root that's gone off and on, or are all your site's pages going in and out of the index?

[Sevou]

Everything, every page when it disappears. Yesterday it happened on different machines, IP addresses and browsers most of the day. But mostly through google searches on firefox. Today it was only on Firefox for the afternoon for some ip adresses (we ask friends from different cities and locations to test).

[tedster]

Wow. I've never heard of anything quite like that. Home pages will occasionally go missing but the whole site? that's crazy. When there are no pages, you mean that site:example.com shows no results, correct?

First, I'd suggest you start watching which Google IP addresses are giving you which results. You can use the Firefox add-on ShowIP for that.

And please excuse my poor manners - I forgot to welcome you to the forums. I hope we can help you get to the bottom of this.

[edited by: tedster at 4:23 am (utc) on Sep 25, 2010]

[Sevou]

Thanks for the welcome... heard great things about the forum. It is really weird. It has to be noted that none of this happened on bing, yahoo, msn, aol... Never happened on google searches on all kind of mobiles, iphones, ipads. Today for example I could see the site on google search on explorer on my computer but not on firefox the whole afternoon. Somebody from a different IP address could see it on safari but not on firefox. again we are taking landing page and all pages. It happened less today and just on firefox so I am hoping it is some kind of google bug? will keep checking and was hoping others had experienced something similar...

[tedster]

What exactly do you mean by "could see it on safari but not on firefox". Are you doing a search for your domain name and your site isn't in the search results - or something like that?

[indyank]

i too don't get you when you say that you couldn't see it one browser and not the other...

but temporary disappearance from Google search seem to be too frequent these dayss. I have noticed this for new sites but not for something that is older and it will be strange and unfortunate, if a 14 year old site experiences this too :(

[Sevou]

So some other sites experience it too? Yes i think i am not suupposed to give specifics but lets pretend my site is about everything you need to know about cupcakes , has a very strong keyword url and always shows up on first search engines pages. Suddenly you can t find it under the keyword cupcakes anywhere when you do a google serach with the key word. Then you type the url in google search it does not pull it , noere any of the other pages url. But it comes back eventually. Couldnt it be linked to some recwnt changes in google searches?

[WarrenBuffett]

I would say your site is under some kind of anchor text over-optimization penalty. This happens very frequently lately. (From my experience anyway).

[Sevou]

Thanks a lot for the feed-back. I think that it could be linked to some kind of test of whether or not we were over optimizing or had real content. We do have real content, we are the wikipedia of our keyword so that's probably why they put us back in? It does note explain though why it was not doing it for all search engines and ip addresses....

[Seoering]

i too don't get you when you say that you couldn't see it one browser and not the other...

Google can and does serve up different results dependent on the user agent, which is why you do find different SERPs when using an iPhone compared to FireFox on you're machine. Could be for testing purposes, but i'm noticing two different sets of data here:

[173.194.36.104...]

Check the 'About....results' section after searching a few times:

About 106,000,000 results
And:
About 103,000,000 results

I think there is an update going on right now.

I would say your site is under some kind of anchor text over-optimization penalty. This happens very frequently lately. (From my experience anyway).

Just wondering if you've actually had a look at the member's website in depth as i'm confused as to how you've jumped to that conclusion?

[Sevou]

That makes some sense. Though I had never noticed it before for any of our sites so it might be something going on recently ? and hopefully will be temporary. I have not given my url but what WB says could make sense. I understand dropping in ranking and pages but disappearing totally seems like some penalty of some kind