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Upon investigation and numerous e-mails to Google back and forth it became apparent the sites were not banned. There weren’t SPAM techniques present in the majority of the checked sites. Backlinks checked out to be none, PR was grayed and traffic halted 100%
The terms partially indexed and fully indexed came into play. The sites before hand were fully indexed in Google’s database. All of a sudden they dropped out, and it was said that the sites were indeed not banned but they were only partially indexed.
What brings a site that was fully indexed to only being partially indexed? The sites now have their ranking back as they have been reindexed fully, but before they dropped out they hadn’t been touched in ages. The sites offered information, solid info and such and for the most part they weren’t touched because why change your sites if it has good ranking?
Possibilities came to mind why the sites could have only been partially indexed, as they hadn’t had any changed info so Google saw it as staleness. Since the incidents of the partial index more content has been added to the vast majority of the sites and data altered to show changes. However many of the sites are back without altered data. The sites were never down, the bots still came to them, no error pages.
A few months back was data lost in Google a few months back? If so this could explain a partial index, as they had the URL but no content spidered from it.
Is partially indexing data a common practice for fully indexed sites after a period of time?
Just trying to put my thumb on what happened, or what is happening – In short you can never tell for sure unless it comes from the horses mouth itself.
EliteWeb
Sorry to hear what happened but congrats on getting it sorted. All your possible answers seem pretty sound. I'd just like to add one and see what you think.
GoogleGuy has mentioned there are time limits on Google crawling sites. Maybe Google was crawling your site and ran out of time. Just another theory for your equation.
Chris
