website washed out of google completely last night

[sunnyk]

I noticed last night around 9.00 pm when I checked Google that all of a sudden we can't find our site by looking for it by domain or any keyword (site was coming up earlier in top ten for several keywords)! Site has hundreds of pages and site had a pr 5 last month and was showing good rankings on sj this month when the dance began and now it shows pr0 greybar for main and all other internal pages. Site has been around for more than a year. Gooblebot visited the site several times yesterday and last time it visited was around 22.40.06. Log file shows altavista scooter and another crawler also came in around the same very second. Google Directory shows the listing once every fifteen tries but google search does not show any pages expect 3000 pages for term "mydomain" only and still has links from february 2003. Site is still listed in dmoz directory if you go straight and check on dmoz.dir. Can someone please help.

[nancyb]

Hi sunnyk and Welcome to WebmasterWorld. Things like this have been happening to lots of folks lately.

You might want to check out the Google Charter [webmasterworld.com],
the Google Library [webmasterworld.com],
and especially the Dominic update threads, starting with the first one [webmasterworld.com].

There is also a thread about freshbot and deepbot [webmasterworld.com] behaviour this month that might give you some insight.

These threads may answer your questions, but if not, you will have more background on how to ask for more specific answers.

[sunnyk]

Thanks Nancy. I have been going through all the threads for the last 2-3 weeks. Website had PR6 in feb and pr4 in march and pr5 in april and most of may 2003. So the site is not getting pr0 because of feb/march backlinks but due to something strange that happened lat night.

[nancyb]

I think I remember seeing something this week about some sites going PR0 all of a sudden, but can't find the thread right now. Things seem to be in a lot of flux right now so I wouldn't worry yet - unless you think you may have committed one of the sins like hidden text and in that case I'd fix if ASAP while freshie is still around.

[rfgdxm1]

Is your site squeaky clean sunnyk?

[sunnyk]

Thanks. Site is kind of clean. Site's main page is more like a directory with pictures and text links(lot of links). My log on the night when the site was washed out had 64.68.82.18 - - [22/May/2003:20:08:58 -0600] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 204 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)".

Does 404 means deleted old pages or if the server was down at the time of crawl?

[Chris_D]

No, that 404 message (page not found) basically means that your website doesn't have a robots.txt robot exclusion file.

Don't worry about that log file entry - it has nothing to do with anything else you are discussing now.

[sunnyk]

Thanks Chris_D. Do you guys think it is some kind of penalty because something was hit by a filter on the web site or could be a glitch? I can understand pr going zero because of recent toolbar problems. If the site is penalized normally the the pr will be lowered? In what situation would total site would go down to pr0 and be completely out of the index?

[AthlonInside]

I have seen a few hidden links penalty in action. All site went to grey PR and is deleted from the google index.

One of them has returned today (replacing you maybe?) after they clean up everything. I don't know if the penalty expired itself or they write to webmaster AT google.com but I believe it is the formal as mentioned by GG before.

[Chris_D]

Hi Sunnyk

You said

we can't find our site by looking for it by domain

Can you go back and redo that search ie search for your domain in google - and tell us exactly what google returns?

Chris_D

PS Check your stickymail.

[heini]

There are two options: Either it's a Google thing, inconsistencies between the indexes floating around.

Or you tripped a filter/got snitched by competition. Current favorites include hidden stuff, evergreens are dodgy link exchanges and tools like WPG.

[Critter]

I have a grey bar on my home page now, and am out of the index completely.

Does this mean I'm penalized? Or is it because my site is youthful that I got lost in this index transition?

Originally I thought that it was simply the index flux lately, but now I've read that some sites got hidden link penalties and went to grey bar, so I'm trying to confirm.

BTW, my site is squeaky clean.

Peter

[sunnyk]

Thanks.

a.Sorry, no information is available for the URL mydomain.com

Find web pages that contain the term "mydomain.com"

b.mydomain search results in 3000 plus pages but not returning a single page with www.mydomain.com

c.Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.mydomain.com

Find web pages that contain the term "www.mydomain.com"

d. still has 30 plus backlinks from feb-march.

[NFFC]

Chris_D, they have changed how they deal with that.

[webmasterworld.com...]

sunnyk, I have seen a lot of index pages go missing this update, it used to happen a lot in the past but not lately. I honestly think Google have a glitch.

[rincey]

Approx. 2 months ago one of my domains showing about 300 pages was removed from the index (PR gray) and did not turn up again since then.

Today I did a search for "mydomain.com" and got "Results 1 - 1 of about 393", showing only one result which is the index page of one of my other projects linking to the removed domain. There is no "More results from otherdomain.com"-link, only this one result is displayed.

Could this mean that the approx. 300 pages from the (banned?) domain are still stored in the index somewhere, that they are even used to calculate numbers etc. but just don't show up for any reason? Perhaps there is still hope :)

Quite strange...
Ad

[NFFC]

rincey, does this help?

When Google "removes" material, often it's still in the Google index itself, but there's a post-processing step which removes it from any results shown to the user. But sometimes the fact that the "removed" material is still in the index can be inferred

[sethf.com...]

[Chris_D]

Hi NFFC,

I was heading down the path of:

If you get this response to a domain search:
"Sorry, no information is available for the URL mydomain.com
Find web pages that contain the term wehaventindexedyourdomain.com"

= not indexed.

But if you get this response:

"If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: wejustbannedthisdomain.com"

= banned

So you are saying this changed?

I just tried this test on the handfull of known banned domains I knew of - but they are all now back in the Google results! aaaarrgghhhhhhhh

Sunny - Google is unwell. I'm sure it will get better.....

Chris_D

[Critter]

Cool!

That means I'm not banned :)

Are you sure this is a foolproof way of telling the difference between ban/not indexed?

You'll notice that if you type in 'webmasterworld.com' that Google responds with your 'Not Indexed' result.

Peter

[sunnyk]

I just did a search on webmasterworld.com on google "web" it displayed that no information available but if do you "directory" search it gives 52 results.

[NFFC]

[webmasterworld.com...] :)

[Critter]

Ahhhhh...

[Chris_D]

Critter,

Thats how it USED to be.....

NFFC posted that this has changed.

I've just been testing a few pages which have been removed by DMCA request.

Guess what?

The "In response to a complaint under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act..." statement has also gone from the bottom of the serps where pages had been removed.

Chris_D

[Critter]

Man...what are they doing over there?

Peter

[Horhey]

My website was listed for one month and it was dropped from the search this past update. I went from making 25-30 sales a day to 0-2 sales. Whats really weird is my domain name is still listed but Google only indexes the front page.

The url http ://store.yahoo.com/keyword were the pages that Google actually listed but now they are gone.

Can somebody please tell me why this is happening?

[edited by: heini at 5:13 pm (utc) on May 24, 2003]
[edit reason] please no urls per TOS / thanks! [/edit]

[Powdork]

Hi Horhey,
Welcome to WW. My condolences on the recent tragic events concerning your site.
Please note it is against the charter of this forum to post URL's or search terms. Its good reading.
I would hazard a guess that your site is suffering from Dominitis. During this Google Update the index has in most cases been rolled back several months. This means it has rolled back to a time when your site was not there.
I'm not sure how Google feels about the redirect to the storefront. Why do it?

[edited by: Powdork at 5:06 pm (utc) on May 24, 2003]

[Critter]

Dominitus!

Ok, that's the best I've seen :)

Peter

[Newman]

My site is completely deleted from index. Only what I have is the home page and one page with 404 error.

404 Not Found
Not Found. The requested URL was not found on
this server. Apache Server at mysite.com.
www. mysite.com/page.html

But point is, my pages are in htm format not html.
I have DMOZ link and link in Google directory. Loot of fresh pages… but nothing…
I’m tired.

Please help!

[sunnyk]

GG can you please give your take on what would have happened for a site to be removed overnite and getting pr0 and grey bar on all the pages from last month pr5 and feb/march pr4. Could it be server down issue; penalty issue or current google dance case.

[rfgdxm1]

>I would hazard a guess that your site is suffering from Dominitis.

Heh. Looks like in his case his site is in critical condition. My main site only has moderate infection of Dominitis. My hope is that the affliction is a temporary one. ;)

[coconutz]

>>Could it be server down issue; penalty issue or current google dance case.

Maybe doc Powdork can confirm that these acute symptoms are indeed Dominitis. ;)