Google drops 2K pages from my photography site!

[slrobertson]

I have been operating a stock photography web site for a couple years now and am currently hosting 2-3K images online. My site is all static pages and Google had, over time, indexed virtually every one of my large image pages (a page with a single, large image, descriptive H1 title, keywords for my own site search function, etc.). This was driving lots and lots of traffic to my site. In fact, up until a week ago I was showing up in the #1 spot on a couple keyword searches like "photo of X" or "stock photo X". Over the past few days I noticed a rather dramatic reduction in traffic, so I checked Google's indexing of my site and discovered that all of my image pages have been dropped from the index, every single one! I don't knowingly do anything "against the rules" re. page design, so I'm hoping that I'll be picked back up soon. On a lark I tried checking a fellow stock photographer's web site who uses a similar site structure to mine, namely, image pages whose URLs look like /images/category/subcategory/slideshow/img7.htm, knowing for a fact that most, if not all, of his 24,000 pages had been indexed. All of his have disappeared from the index as well! In fact, on both sites, I get zero results when I try the following from Google:

allinurl:images site:domain.com

Apparently, Google has dropped every page below the "images" directories on both of out site. Am I reading this correctly? No other pages from my site have been dropped that I can tell and I haven't suffered any loss of PageRank. Any ideas about why this has happened?

[robotsdobetter]

Give it sometime to work out. Also is there any text on these pages?

[Vicente Duque]

Punishment without Crime

Slrobertson :

You are not alone in your problems. I visit other forums and I have found several people like you and me that have been punished without crime by Google.

I am also waiting to see if my pages are returned to Google's Index.

I think the best policy is to have faith in ourselves, in our ( mental and talent ) assets, in out Honesty and Decency.

If we are Honest People, hard working and cultured, then someday we will find Search Engines that link us, or not very expensive methods to get traffic.

If we are not spammers, flooding the net with idiotic ecommerce, or with Commercial Garbage, Scum and Scam, Dirt and Filth, then it will certainly be that someday we will get some friends that link to us.

Faith and Hope here are more valuable than Gold.

I don't wish evil or misfortune to anybody. But if Google continues in the same trail of killing honest people's websites while at the same time promoting trash, garbage, repetition and filth. Then one day Yahoo, MSN and others will be before Google in Traffic Statistics and Earnings.

Keep the Faith and Don't get Depressed. Google is not God. Even if the first two letters are the same.

Vicente

[BReflection]

Do your images show up on Google Images? It is my observation (I run a photo gallery also) that Google is removing pages that are soley large images with a little descriptive text to their image search, and taking them out of the main index. This makes sense.

On July 19th I almost completely stopped getting referralls from google.com and started getting 10x as many from images.google.com. My photo gallery pages no longer have descriptions listed in the main index, although their URLs are listed if you do a site:mysite.com

[slrobertson]

Unfortunately, none of my images are currently listed in images.google.com. There were a few listed before I was dropped from the regular index, but none now. I do generally have a sentence of descriptive text on each image page in addition to an image title and a list of keywords. I wonder if the non-prose keyword lists are offensive? There are generally only 10-15 keywords listed for each image and many of them are, of course, repeated in the image title, long description and page title. I notice that googlebot has crawled many of my image pages again over the last 24 hours, but none of the visited pages have shown up in the index or on images.google.com yet. Is this a bad sign?

[trimmer80]

question :
have you added anything that appears in "all pages" on the site.

Google may be seeing your pages as duplicates. Adding a line of text to the template (that appears on all pages) could have made google think they are duplicated.

With the pages that are left in the index, check to see if they have more unique content on them than the pages that have been dropped.

[muesli]

slr, the description of your site would very much match also mine, apart from the keyword-list (some of my photos have captions, some have commenst, but no keyword list).

i just checked, all my pages are still in the index and well ranked.

[slrobertson]

Though my image pages are all very similar, they do have unique title text and most have a longer prose description. The list of keywords, a comma-delimited list, might be an issue, I suppose, but again, many of the keywords appear in titles and descriptions. In other words, the keywords aren't just spam. I think I may even have some old image pages without the keywords section, but I'll have to double check. In any case, every last page under /images on my site was removed. Also, all images from my site were removed from images.google.com, even logo GIFs and such which were previously indexed there.

I may try putting up a test gallery with a different page format and not located under /images just to see if Google picks it up on the next deep crawl.

[trimmer80]

Also on this test page, try putting the title text or any description at another place in the page. Just to get the uniqueness % up.