Individual page de-indexed?

[eighty9]

Has anybody ever heard of an individual page being de-indexed from google? The page in question was ranking on the first page for several high volume keywords. Since losing it's rank (nowhere to be found using the site operator) an unrelevant page on the site has started to rank (anywhere from the 25th to 75th position)for the same keywords the original page was targeting. Has anybody ever heard of this happening?

[goodroi]

The site: searches are not always accurate. I have heard of many individual pages disappearing but those were mostly because of the duplicate content filter. Other times there were server problems that made Google dropped an individual url because when it visited that one page the site was temporarily down.

Have you looked at your analytics to see if traffic is down? Specifically look at your landing pages data to see how the traffic changed from Google to that specific url.

[Robert Charlton]

Not ranking is not the same as not being in the index. Additionally, as goodroi points out, the site: operator is not always accurate.

Have you tried searching for a text string that's unique to the page, in quotes? You might also try searching for such a string in combination with the site: operator, eg...

site:example.com "text unique to the page"