Pages still in with PR but no Description or Title!

4000+ pages all retaining their PR but no Desc nor Title

[super_seo]

I dont know whats happened, but sometime around the 21st of Oct. the titles and descriptions for 4000+ (all) of my pages just disappeared along with of course my positions! The PR for the time being is holding strong but what the hell could be going on here. Spiders havent been by for more than 2 weeks now.

Help please
suggestions?

[spud01]

can we now say google is going through bad patch?
or we have no clue whats going on and just how google is intended to behave.

[GodLikeLotus]

The term "Bad Bot" has been mentioned to me several times over the last week.

[Imaster]

I did a 301 redirect for an existing site/domain to a new domain in October and google crawled the new urls pretty quick within 15 days. Almost all of 150k pages were crawled and looking fine until 20 days back when around 25% of the pages went missing and several others are listed with only their urls without description or other information. The site is a 7 PR with around 500 unique links pointing to it (some of them are 7 PR and many are 6 PR).

I am completely baffled over the issue and fail to understand what may be wrong as the site under the old domain was fully crawled for over 2 years.

[ciml]

> can we now say google is going through bad patch?

Or maybe they're attempting a renaissance, back to the days when webmasters didn't control the results?

Just because we don't understand Google, doesn't mean it's broken. I suggest checking these three Google searches:

link:www.oed.com/ [google.com], link:dictionary.oed.com [google.com] and www.oed.com [google.com].

Google merges identical URLs to avoid double listings, which is a good feature for users. Google also chooses to credit the remaining URL with the backlinks and PR of both, which is a positive benefit to webmasters.

[GodLikeLotus]

Ciml <Or maybe they're attempting a renaissance, back to the days when webmasters didn't control the results?

So why does Google give any advice at all to webmasters?
"Do this and you will be OK, Unless we change the rules", and then we don't care one bit what happens to you. The "links issue", has to be a classic. Google suggests "finding quality links from subject related sites" but now it turns out that the "quality links" from sites who call their links page LINKS.HTML are worth nothing, at least in terms of PR or backlinks. Imagine calling your links page something like LINKS, must have caught out 1000's with that one Google.

With reference to the OED.com site, anyone looking at this can see that something is not quite right. I thought there was a problem with www and -www, Google was counting this as duplicate sites and you better get a 301 done quick or you are next to get hit. Guess you can't beleive what you read here anymore.

I agree that nobody except Google themselves now exactly what is going on and that we all just play a guessing game hoping we don't fall foul to next algo change. I do prefer the term "filter" it is much more fitting.

Someone recently pointed out to me that Google can change its algo but exclude certain sites from the changes. A kind of "just in case we look stupid" for excluding major sites clause.

Sorry to go on, side effects of being out of Googles index and quitting smoking.

[edited by: ciml at 12:03 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2004]