Forum Moderators: open
Anyway, in the last day or so, the entire site is gone from the index. A
site:www.domain.com -ireeji
doesn't bring up anything. However, if I type:
"domain.+com"
I get a few of the aforementioned 'directory listing' sites for the theme.
If you go to the sites that show up in the SERPs, our domain is nowhere to be seen. It's only in the Google description.
Could anything they've done penalized us?
Other relevant info:
* The site is on a cheapo host.
* We can't set index.asp as the default page so we have a redirect from index.html to index.asp using a meta-redirect. Nothing else is on the index.html page, though.
Any help or wisdom or thoughts would be greatly appreciated ;)
if I type:"domain.+com"
I get a few of the aforementioned 'directory listing' sites for the theme.
You mean your domain name shows up with the listings of the other sites, or just they keyword?
I've seen something very similar with a site that's having some serious problems problems now, though it's not a competitor doing anything. So that's why I'd like to know a little more about what you're seeing (without telling specifics, of course). I know it's hard to describe, all we can do is try to. The site I'm talking about has had most of its links wiped out and a big drop in PR.
With the .asp default thing, that's a tech question - there are other ways to deal with it, go ahead and ask that in the other forum if it's on IIS hosting.
I've seen someting similar with a site that was changed to .shtml - and they needed to change all their internal links to full absolute links without a file extension and filename rather than relative links.
You mean your domain name shows up with the listings of the other sites, or just they keyword?
Our 'domain.com' shows up as a keyword that's on their page but when you go to their site, you can't see it with the human eye on more than one of them. It's in the Google description, though.
I've emailed Google but haven't heard back yet.
At first we were just gone from Yahoo and I thought it might be because they were using their new index for the moment. I freaked, though, when I couldn't find it by doing a site:domain.com on Google.
It's still showing PR and backlinks, although I understand what it's showing may be 'old'...
--------
added: what makes me ask if it's a competitor is that the sites that come up in the 'domain.com' search are in the same field, same town. We're still showing up in Altavista, but nowhere else.
Could it maybe be we're on a bad IP that was banned (Does Google do that?) because of other sites on the IP that were spammy or using weird methods?
[edited by: kpaul at 6:13 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2003]
Follow up with them on the issue or maybe try and catch GoogleGuy's eye here to get help / advice.
:-) This is wht webmasterworld is there for. To help people.
Should I send to webmaster(at)google.com instead?
That a search for this domain brings up other sites which don't seem to actually have the text on them anywhere is scaring me.
I can sticky details if needed.
Thanks!
kpaul
Are you saying that your site has dropped from the index completely. But a search for 'your_domain.com' brings up your competator's sites with 'your_domain.com' in the page description, and hidden links to your site on the pages? Or no mention of 'your_domain.com' in the HTML at all?
I would think that if 'your_domain.com' is in the description it should be on their page somewhere, or at least in the cache version.
Thank you.
Are you saying that your site has dropped from the index completely. But a search for 'your_domain.com' brings up your competator's sites with 'your_domain.com' in the page description, and hidden links to your site on the pages? Or no mention of 'your_domain.com' in the HTML at all?
Yes, we aren't in the index at all. Even searching for the domain.com brings nothing up.
When I click on "Find web pages that contain the term "domain.com"" 3 sites show up, 2 without cache. Of the 2 without a cache, both have our domain.com in the Google description, but it's nowhere to be found on the actual page.
I would think that if 'your_domain.com' is in the description it should be on their page somewhere, or at least in the cache version.
I would think so too - that's why I'm worried there's something strange going on.
There are a lot of those 'directory' type sites that throw a file up for every single city name with no real content in the SERPs for this and we were beating them all because we actually had content on our pages. Now, though, we're gone completely from the index. Very strange...
If so, that would be grounds for the old 'spam-result' on Google because they are cloaking and "do not fit google's description" of the page.
What about the 3rd page, how does your link appear on that page?
What's odd, though, is that of the other two one is in our niche and the other deals with our city/town (not really as it's a pseudo-directory)...
Could something they're doing get us taken completely out of the index, though? Hopefully I'll hear from someone at Google ;)
I'll also see if I can't find out anything else about the other sites...
Thanks again.
They're redirecting and cloaking like mad. Looks like they just cut and paste a google SERP into their 'page' and that's how we ended up there.
I contacted spam report at Google on them and also got in touch with the affiliate program they were forwarding to...
Could this craziness on their part be what took our site out of the index completely?
still confused,
kpaul
I'm sure that Google will take a look at it to see what's going on, but in the mean time you should probably work on getting some serious incomming links to your site.
If they are causing this problem then more links may help to dilute their effect on you, and will also help Google to pick your site back up.
Start with the major directories, dmoz and yahoo. Then go for the link exchanges that you can find. More links means more chances to get crawled.
