Can't find our articles searching by text or author name

[LuckyLiz]

Like some other reports here, our traffic has dropped tremendously in the last month. In trying to troubleshoot why, I decided to look to see whether more of our content was being stolen. (A recurring problem for our site.)

So, I searched for the phrase "by author name" not only for my own name, but also for other authors (staff writers and paid freelancers) who write for our site. Their articles on our site did not show up in the first page or two of search.

Then I tried searching for a couple of sentences of text copied from articles on the site. (That, too, used to always show our page in search.) Again, nothing showed up.

Is Google no longer showing results when you search for author's names or for text in an article? Or are we being penalized?

Has anyone tested their own sites?

[tedster]

I've got several sites where authors work and excerpted sentences work, but we are seeing more reports here of it not working as well or as often. Something did shift in this area - and Google is apparently trying to function more like an answer engine than a conventional database search.

However, the stronger a site's trust and/or authority, the better these kinds of searches seem to function. Now how do youo build trust and authority? That's a big one!

[phranque]

have you tried a site:example.com "by author name" search to see if these pages are indexed?

[LuckyLiz]

Thanks! I hadn't thought of using the site command and the by author search. I can find all the author's articles listed when I search that way. So, the problem isn't that anything was dropped from the index.