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We just launched a new site three days ago. We only had like 2-300 uniques until today and I have been looking for googlebot in the logs. So I found it once a couple of days ago and google detected and registrered it.
But now suddenly our site disapeared from their index. I also found a hidden div with some text that I forgot to take out from our front page, wich also contains a window.location javascript. Could this be interpreted as spam?
Is it worth waiting for google to return or is our site forever banned from google?
I am a no-know in the SEO world so any advice would be great.
David
If it was just picked up a few days ago, it is possibly just fluxing in and out, and your bot-visit situation might be that it has found you, has you on a to-do list, and will soon come back. One would think that if the hidden div were a problem, the site wouldn't have been listed in the first place.
Be patient. The bot and listing could be back, to stay, before too long.
And, by the way, how could it be detected by Googlebot if, for example, you have a hidden div but your css is external and placed within a forbidden to * bots directory (robots.txt)?
It probably can't - at the moment. If Google or other engines decide to check spam by viewing the CSS file, then one of two things could happen if you block the CSS by a robots file. Firstly, it could ignore your robots file for the CSS (taking the assumption that the html should be indexed so they need to check the CSS for spam) or secondly, they could respect your robots file and possibly drop the pages using that CSS file, assuming that if you are blocking it, you do not want it indexed (or anything that uses it).
Is it worth the risk?
The question is: what could be considered spam in the css file? If it's visibility: hidden or display:none then all the beautiful pull out menus will be spam too? And the things like tooltips, etc ...
