Not One Page Found In SERPS - But site Indexed? Help Please!

[Love2Blog]

Another Merry Christmas for me, one of my sites has not one page that I can find in Google SERPS. But, what is weird is that it is still indexed.

This site was semi ranking, pages 2, 3 and several position 1's for the last few months.

My rank checker showed Not Found and the tool usually shows position 670 and beyond.

So I checked SERPS manually for several terms that ranked last week to the last page of SERPS and did not find my site pages at all.

Allintitle - nothing (home page)

Allinurl - nothing

tld without .com - nothing

Site Is Still Indexed because:

SEO Quake toolbar shows all pages indexed

domain.com - position one

site:http://domain.com - shows all pages of my sites

Site Stats

Site age - almost 3 years old

PR 2 with many internal PR pages of 1, 2 and 3

Also - cannot be found in Bing or Yahoo anymore either.

More Data

This happened around December 21

Google bot still crawling site, came today.

What is this? Penalty? I've never seen anything like this, where the site is indexed but not one page in SERPS?

Anyone have any ideas?

Thank you

[Planet13]

One other thing to try is search for a unique string of text that appears on one of your pages. Take a sentence of about ten words or so and search for it.

Please let us know what you find. If someone is scraping your content, I think it is possible it might be showing some of the signs that you describe, but there might be other reasons, so please don't take mine as the final word on it.

And if it turns out someone IS scraping your site, maybe google thinks it is the other way around, and that you are copying another site...

[Love2Blog]

One other thing to try is search for a unique string of text that appears on one of your pages. Take a sentence of about ten words or so and search for it.

Please let us know what you find. If someone is scraping your content, I think it is possible it might be showing some of the signs that you describe, but there might be other reasons, so please don't take mine as the final word on it.

And if it turns out someone IS scraping your site, maybe google thinks it is the other way around, and that you are copying another site...

Thank you for replying.

Tried several passages and even Copyscape checked a couple of articles no dupes were found.

[tedster]

Also - cannot be found in Bing or Yahoo anymore either.

This fact points to something beyond Google - maybe there's a technical problem with your site or your hosting, something like that. Do you have a Webmaster Tools account? If so, is there any clue there?

[Love2Blog]

This fact points to something beyond Google - maybe there's a technical problem with your site or your hosting, something like that. Do you have a Webmaster Tools account? If so, is there any clue there?

I do not use WMT, I stopped using them a while back, I did add the site yesterday over there and used the Fetch as Googlebot tool and everything came back okay.

Googlebot came the other day and I can see a fresh cache of the site from Google, everything looks good. I even used some tools I have to check for crawl errors and problems, nothing came up.

Site loads fast.

Haven't had it WMT long enough to see comprehensive data, but when I search for site:domain.com, google returns almost all the pages of my site, it's just that there is nothing in the SERPS for my kw's.

I realize the Bing thing is odd, and a part of this equation.

I am wondering if both search engines consider the site SPAM. There is a lot of written original content, guides and articles, but it is an affiliate site and has affiliate ads pages like ebay auction listings AND the site is targeting a pretty competitive product KW.

But, nothing horrible, no doorway pages, no masking or redirects, no kw stuffing of any kind.

So do you think the site is really just deindexed and the search of site:domain.com returning all the pages of my site is just a temporary situation and that since it's not in SERPS this means the site has been banned completely?

[Love2Blog]

After some research regarding Bing it seems that they are removing from their index all sites they deem to be "thin"

Bing Told Seach Engine Land

"One of our main goals at Bing is to deliver quality results for our users. Consistent with our guidance to site owners, websites that seem to rely mostly on affiliate content or that offer only thin content often don’t deliver the value searchers are looking for and may be demoted or removed from our index. This is something we continually refine and look at closely throughout the year."

This is from an article on Search Engine Land where they discussed Bing removing all sites having to do with Cyber Monday - more info at this Webmster World Thread - [webmasterworld.com...]

And, Bing mentions this in their policies as well. And since this seems to be a fairly new thing at Bing it makes sense that my site has suddenly been deindexed because it is considered an affiliate site or what Bing deems a thin site, though to me there is a ton of info on the site that is unique, useful and much "fatter" than many other affiliate sites.

What is confusing is if Google too sees my site as a thin affiliate site why is it being removed from SERPS completely?

I've never seen that, I can see being dropped very low in SERPS but not found seems odd, or maybe it's just my KW that I am trying to rank for that are demoted?

Even with Panda sites were pushed to page 100 maybe, but not removed completely were they?

[Planet13]

Even with Panda sites were pushed to page 100 maybe, but not removed completely were they?

There are stories about a -950 penalty where the site is returned back near page 100 (this predates Panda).

But how likely is it for something like that to happen in all three search engines? It would have to be an egregious penalty and it would have to be detected by all three search engines.

[Love2Blog]

There are stories about a -950 penalty where the site is returned back near page 100 (this predates Panda).

But how likely is it for something like that to happen in all three search engines? It would have to be an egregious penalty and it would have to be detected by all three search engines.

I know that is why I am surprised, Bing I had no idea was deindexing affiliate sites, but they did confirm it to Search Engine Land, I guess what ever sites the detect manually they take out. And, if you Google this issue there are discussions about this.

Overall, my site is far from egregious, lots of original human written relevant content along with affiliate links.

I see many other much thinner sites in G and Bing than mine, but I guess they caught mine and I think the high value of my keywords is another reason, most G and Bing results for these keywords is big brands and really big sites like Cnet and PCmag.

It seems to me that when you hit position 1 or page 1 for terms that are being monitored they look at sites manually via their search quality people, I do not think this is an auto filter penalty, I think it's manual.

But I am surprised that the site is not in any SERPS I checked, but is still indexed and not showing up at all for tld without .com.

My understanding was that a deindex was reserved for serious Google TOS infractions, like doorway pages, keyword stuffing, masking, redirects, real spam, not just affiliate sites, but maybe things have changed.

[onepointone]

I had a large chunk of my sites banned by G almost a year ago. (no idea why)

They all still rank well in bing/yahoo, for what that's worth...

[Casper680]

Hi first post! Same thing happened to my site on the 10th October. Is was ranking well in google bing and yahoo. Over night lost all rankings. I have done all the test etc. I thought it might be because I added to many pages and google could of seen this as spam. I have changed a lot on the site even my moz rank has gone up after all the work but as yet I stll have no rankings and I have no idea if my site will ever com back. I'll keep an eye on this in the hope you may find an answer.

[Planet13]

@ Love2Blog:

It seems to me that when you hit position 1 or page 1 for terms that are being monitored they look at sites manually via their search quality people, I do not think this is an auto filter penalty, I think it's manual.

I think that is a possibility. I think that others have mentioned something like this as well.

[Planet13]

The Original Poster (Love2Blog) has allowed me to view the site in question and here are some quick observations:

- The site does deal with very competitive keywords. It used to rank well in google (for what it is) up until December 20th. (Was there a major algo / panda update on the 20th / 21st?)

- Having double checked the keywords for which the site was previously ranking, I can confirm that they are nowhere to be found in the first 100+ listings in the google SERPs

- While the content would be considered thin, it is not any worse than many other affiliate sites that continue to rank well in the serps.

- Rankings in bing and yahoo are gone as well, but it is not known when those rankings may have vanished. Possibly rankings in b and y tanked several months back.

- There don't seem to be any egregious technical errors. I am not a code head, but the only "obvious" thing I saw was two references to the XML site map in the robots.txt file (one as the first line, one as the last line, of the robots.txt file). The owner has taken care of that now.

- There are NOT a HUGE number of backlinks, but some of them are questionable at best. According to Open Site Explorer, there are a handful of links from high MOZ Rank forums that have been spammed. I did not have the time to trace down the exact links. There were some other backlinks from sites that exist solely for placing backlinks (the text on those sites is nonsensical). The Original Poster is not familiar with those sits and is not sure how those links got there. Despite the small number of inbound links, it is possible they are being punished for those links.

- The site owner did mention that: "I did use that blasted ALN network a few months ago, where you post on high PR blogs with spun content, that was a mistake, that was about 30 links."

I am not familiar with that ALN network, but being associated with "high PR blogs with spun content" is probably only going to harm the site.

- The owner has noticed that other sites they own with a similar structure (i.e., other thin content affiliate sites) also suffered at the same time, while their other sites which do not have that same structure did NOT drop.

- Despite what google, or you or I might think of such sites, apparently it does provided a needed service to users, as apparently their are regular purchases by visitors through the affiliate links. So there are probably "appropriate" user metrics for this site. If I saw the page title in the SERPs and clicked on it, I would be served a page that is pretty much what I expected. It is definitely NOT a bait and switch website.

- The owner has not filed a reconsideration request yet, and in all honesty, it is probably better to figure out what is wrong and correct it first (I know that is a "No Duh, Dude!" statement on my part - but just play along with me for now).

So in conclusion, unless there is either:

- a major technical error I am not seeing, or
- a major change to the algo on December 20th / 21st that would knock a site down at least several hundred spaces, then...

...my feeling is that the original poster is correct in assuming this site was manually reviewed and given a penalty, as were a few of their other sites hosted on the same host.

But any other thoughts on this are extremely welcome. It's not a great site, but it doesn't seem that it is so bad that it should be kicked to the google graveyard.

[johnhh]

original poster is correct in assuming this site was manually reviewed and given a penalty

If thats so a reconsideration request should get a response stating that.

The OP had a good few years economically, with nice natural growth ?
I had private conversations with forum members here about Google supressing sites that seem to rank where Google's preferred sites should be.

I have no idea what makes a site preferred, nor why some sites are not allowed to grow via natural SERP placings.

However it is unusual to have no rankings at all - anywhere, even if suppressed.

It may be worth looking at the ratio of affiliate product text/pages vs 100% original pages/text.

Although a page may not be thin in the usual sense , i.e have more than an odd paragraph or so plus some original text there are still signals that the product comes from a third party.

[Love2Blog]

@ Planet13
Thank you for helping me out and looking closely at my site.

Thanks to everyone who responded.

my feeling is that the original poster is correct in assuming this site was manually reviewed and given a penalty, as were a few of their other sites hosted on the same host.

Just to clarify:
The host wide penalty did not happen this time. That was a reference to a -50 penalty I received a few months back for another site, THAT one affected all similar sites on the hosting acct at the time, this penalty seems to be isolated to this one site (knock on wood). And all those sites recovered from the -50 at the same time as well.

Overall, I am going to go and completely revamp all my other sites and start building sites in a much different way.

I think that when it comes to affiliate sites the ratio of written guide/article type pages versus those that just have ad type affiliate listings makes a big difference (Panda) and no Panda.

For static affiliate sites a blog attached with lots of original content helps a lot.

I wish I knew for sure whether this was filter or manual, but I think I will test it and try to add a bunch more original content to the site in the next few days and see if it comes backs, with Panda that seemed to work for webmasters as the filter was tipped back and sites returned to some ranking.

Overall, I will take this as another lesson and push forward to build better sites.

What's frustrating is, that as I told Planet13, the visitors found this site useful and shopped and signed up for the affiliate merchant as new users and shopped some more.

So, obviously sites like these do have a use and value, but I guess Google disagrees.

[Love2Blog]

@ johnhh

If thats so a reconsideration request should get a response stating that.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I am always scared to file those because I feel like that will trigger them to look at all my sites, easily detectable by registrar info.

Anyone experience this? I am curious to see what Google would say, but I do worry about other sites.

The OP had a good few years economically, with nice natural growth ?

Not sure what OP means?

I had private conversations with forum members here about Google supressing sites that seem to rank where Google's preferred sites should be.

I have no idea what makes a site preferred, nor why some sites are not allowed to grow via natural SERP placings.

That is for sure, the kw's for my site are all big brands favorites.

However it is unusual to have no rankings at all - anywhere, even if suppressed.

I agree, I've never seen anything like it, either it would be deindexed completely or just major drops in SERPS, but no indexed and not in SERPS.

It may be worth looking at the ratio of affiliate product text/pages vs 100% original pages/text.

Although a page may not be thin in the usual sense , i.e have more than an odd paragraph or so plus some original text there are still signals that the product comes from a third party.

For sure this is true, other sites where my ratio is much higher to written content vs affiliate pages are okay.

[Planet13]

What's frustrating is, that as I told Planet13, the visitors found this site useful and shopped and signed up for the affiliate merchant as new users and shopped some more.

So, obviously sites like these do have a use and value, but I guess Google disagrees.

i would agree with this, so much so that I would think that user metrics for the site would be a plus in your favor.

What I would definitely do first is "cut it off" from sites that might be influencing your sites ranking, or other sites in your control which might be influenced by this site (namely, if this site links OUT to other sites you control, the I would remove those links ASAP).

I would also do my best to try and remove any marginal inbound links to the site. then I would seriously consider filing a reconsideration request with google.

Regarding Adding Content: I don't have ANY experience with Panda, so I can't say whether your site is a Panda victim or not (my gut feeling is not, but then again, I don't know enough about Panda to say either way). So while great content is ALWAYS a welcome addition to ANY site, I would lean toward removing any questionable links and filing a reconsideration request.

(P.S. some people who have been severely penalized in the past and experienced long waiting periods for the penalty to be lifted have instead just set up a new domain and redirected their penalized site to the new domain. No guarantees, but some have said it works, FWIW.)

I really hope this helps.

[Planet13]

Not sure what OP means?

OP stands for Original Poster (i.e., the person who created the thread).

That is for sure, the kw's for my site are all big brands favorites.

that is for sure true.

One problem might be that google MIGHT be expecting the (well-known) manufacturers of the products to link to your site to give your site "authority."

[tedster]

Was there a major algo / panda update on the 20th / 21st?

There have been a number of mentions of a SERPs change beginning Dec 19 - probably not Panda itslef, however. On the other hand only a few reports have come in [reference [webmasterworld.com]] with others not seeing any major changes. So something did happen around that time outside the routine shifting and jogglinh we normally see.

However, the OP's report does sound a lot like a penalty, since it hit too many search terms quite powerfully and all at once. Posting spun content on blogs for backlinks certainly is a good candidate.