Is there a new filter?

[senkron]

I have experienced a big change in some my search results. Around 40% of the top ten sites were not in the list at all. First of all I thought about Florida, but when I checked further I found out that these sites had a different type of ban; their domains had a filter which affects only their home page. More clearly, you can't find their most competitive homepage in any search result but other subpages are still in the index, somewhere in the 4th-5th result page.
With a little more effort, I have found out this common situation for all these sites:
[xyz-domain.com...] gives PR0
but when you try for
[xyz-domain.com...]
you get the actual page rank of these sites. Also all the subpages show actual pagerank too.
It's also same when you check for their backlinks.
link:http://www.xyz-domain.com/ gives no result
but when you try for
[xyz-domain.com...]
Google shows the backlink results of these sites.
Another point about these sites, even their subpages are still in index, they're not getting any update at all. All their pages are missing date label since April 23rd.

Is there anyone who can tell me about what's going on? Is this an old issue or totally new experience?

[vx11ss]

Hi Senkron
Something very similar has happened to my site although I still cannot find my site when you try
[xyz-domain.com...] but all my sub pages are still there with pagerank and the backlinks check is doing exactly the same as what you are referring to.
I have been informed that this is a ban but do not know why as I have had a couple of SEO people check our site and they do not think it has anything to warrant a ban.

[anime_otaku]

sounds similar to what I have experienced, a specific webpage in my domain had a pr0 for a short period of time then had it's pagerank reverted back to normal (without me doing anything). now another genuine content page of mine (in the same domain) has a pr0 and can't be found in the serps. I am suspecting google or my host might be acting up :/

[kaled]

Sounds like the infamous index page bug is back again. There was a major hullabaloo shortly after Florida (November 2003). Many primary index pages vanished from Google's index (but not index pages in subdirs so far as I can remember).

Unfortunately, the expert on this phenomenon is no longer with us (but perhaps he has a ghostly presence).

Kaled.

[percentages]

>Is there a new filter?

"new" is time relative. If you mean in the last 2 months the answer is no.

Since Nov/Dec 2002 Google has applied a number of filters. They don't always catch sites on day 1 or even month 3. But, eventually you might get damaged by one or more.

I suggest you create a few test sites that only exist for the purpose of testing the Google Algo. If they get "hit" for some filter reason then you can use them as an early warning system for your real site(s).

Of course it doesn't prevent all damage, but it can be used to quickly back track on some of those that Google is about not to like :)

[senkron]

Hi all victims :(
The problem is still there and no clue exactly what it is.
Pr0 for [domain.com...] but pr6 for [domain.com...]

If this is a bug, I should admit it's doing the job perfectly. It choses only some of the top10-20 web sites of the some very competitive search terms.
You know what I mean, most of the dissappeared sites should join adwords to survive.
If it's a bug, I should name it "Google"!

[sarnia]

Hi All,

I noticed a similar thing and tracked it down to PR6 version of the URL being exactly the same URL as listed in DMOZ. Any other variation of the URL is showing PR0.

[senkron]

Hi sarnia,
Dmoz doesn't say a lot to me; my site is not indexed by Dmoz and I can't build any relationship with this issue.
Any combination of my site shows pr4+ except the one [domain.com...]

[claus]

Uhm... this is a 302 redirect bug [webmasterworld.com].

When you ask for the domain name without the slash, the web server will try to find a file called "www.domain.com". As it is not able to find such a file, it will look for a directory with that name in stead. As it finds the directory it will redirect the request to the directory (folder) in stead and serve a "302 Found" status code.

Server header checker: [searchengineworld.com...]
(Try, eg. yahoo.com without the trailing slash)

Server status codes: [w3.org...]

[senkron]

This filter/problem is turned off/solved by google at the moment.
As a final point we couldn't decide if it was a hack, mistake or prototype of new filter.
Maybe later in another thread, we will catch a clue what was this.
Hopefully we have WebmasterWorld.com here :)

[claus]

I was wrong, sorry about that.

The explanation is in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

[george123]

indeed was a problem but is getting fixed I recon ,I have notice a huge site(2000pages) PR5 disappear (only the index) 10 days ago, since yesterday is back in the index of G with the same PR and same position in serps.