All pages and sites gone!

[endomorph1]

I have just checked the page count on Google using site:www.widget.com and all my pages have gone! Not a trace.

And this has happened to all 3 of my sites.

I have tried all other search techniques, and still nothing!

Yahoo, ASK, MSN, Altavista and all the others are fine.

What has happened?

[sem4u]

Welcome to Webmasterworld endomorph1! :)

Are your sites back in today?

[puppetmaster]

I have the same problem. Yesterday I checked my site and it's gone. I haven't changed anything that would get me band, (no blackhat). I'm just hoping that someone might have a clue on what google is up to.

Thank for your help

[helenp]

Seems to be an dancing going on,
My site has fall, but only 4-5 down.

What is amazing that the top sites donīt have any pr,
are spamming using text repeating keywords and google seems to give more weight on keywords together in title than before like brown widgets better than brown whatever widgets and donīt have any top of repeating keywords in text, as well donīt see diferent widget than widgets.

Seems more onpage than before, that lets more spammy sites in.

[puppetmaster]

At first glance I agree. I'm going to take a better look at what is going on, hopefully I can figure something out.
I really hope that google doesn't keep this index.

[diamondgrl]

endomorph1,

can you describe more about your sites? what kind were they? did they extensively interlink together? were they related?

[Airportibo]

Something has been going on:
During summertime, we have switched all search related pages from the domain www.widgets.co.uk to the domain search.widgets.com
Everything was fine: lots of pages indexed on both domains, nice traffic. There didn't seem to be a problem with the content transfer from one domain to the other. Until yesterday. While the traffic of search.widgets.com dropped like a stone, the traffic on www.widgets.co.uk increased. But the requests responsible for the traffic increase are pointing to way old pages and when I look at the Google cache, it is from march (!). The pages of search.widgets.com are still listed in Goolge, but many without page title and description.
Could this be another backdate?

[endomorph1]

Thanks for the replies guys (and gals). Without sounding funny, I'm glad that others have been affected. I was starting to get worried. In nine years of mastering, this is the first time G has done this to me.

Two of the sites are linked quite well together as they are about a similar subject, consumer credit (one is credit cards, and the other is loans/finance), but the third site is totally different, it's about timeshare.

They are ethically optimised with nothing underhand (gateways, link farms ...etc)

They are all hosted by the same ISP, as with all my sites.

I thought that G maybe going through a dance at the moment, I just couldn't find anything from anyone else.

sem4u,

Thanks for the welcome. I have posted many timeshare before, but forgot my login and email address that I used to register so I had to re-register.

[notsosmart]

They are all hosted by the same ISP, as with all my sites.

Don't do that. You're asking for trouble.

[jnmconsulting]

<They are all hosted by the same ISP, as with all my sites.>

<Don't do that. You're asking for trouble.>

Can you be a bit more specific as to why that is not so smart? I have all of my sites with the same host and shared IP, of course separeate domain names. However they do not link together. Is this a problem? and Why

[Powdork]

Can you be a bit more specific as to why that is not so smart?

Because you don't control your hosts actions. They may decide to ban Googlebot or, more likely, make their clients' site inaccessible to GBot inadvertently. This has happened to several hosts recently. Your hosts servers could go down when gbot visits. There are other issues especially when linking the sites together. In short, it is better to diversify.

<added>here is an example.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[ogletree]

This has happened to quite a few sites in the last few weeks. I'm sorry but as far as G is concerenced you are spamming. If you were doing very well with a financial site then you were spamming. It is very competitive. G defines spam as doing anything to a site that is done to help you rank better that you would not have done for your users. Also it looks like they took a special look at the financial area. Your site might have got caught up in the banning frenzy. Also one of your linking partners may have been a big spammer and G was quite harsh on this last banning taking down spammers and anybody they pointed to.

[endomorph1]

Simple question -

If the sites were "not available" when G bot visited, would google remove all 3,000 + pages from their index?

[Powdork]

Depends on what you mean by 'not available'. If the server was unable to respond then Gbot will usually try several more times before anything is removed. If a 403 is returned then that would probably be another story.

[thaedge]

Im having same problem as endomorph1. Its only one site and traffic is down 75% - from google. Still getting all my other traffic, jsut G has kicked me. Did a check and same # of pages are in the index from my site as the other day, but as of yesterday its been hit.

Checked a few spots that I had had #1 or 2 for a few years and now those are way down in the 20s and 30s

Is G doing something odd or? - never been hit b4, and havent done anything to the site lately other then add a small amount of content.

[Vec_One]

I have the same problem. Still in the index but way, way down in the SERPs. It's the first time something like this has happened to me, too.

[Powdork]

Lets try not to stray too much from the original topic. You guys are not having the same problem as endomorph1. His pages are gone from the index, meaning they can't be found when doing a site:hisdomain.com on google. We're not talking about a reduction in traffic, but complete removal.
those with a reduction in traffic may be interested in this thread
[webmasterworld.com...]

endomorph1, have you read this thread?
[webmasterworld.com...]

I'm guessing from your last post, however, that it doesn't apply.

[subway]

I’ve seen the same thing - with 2 new sites that are less than one month old. They both got spidered and then indexed appeared when I searched for site:www.mydomain.com and then this morning ... gone ... and out of the index.

I don't think it's a ban of any kind, just another google glitch. I have employed no unsavoury tactics whatsoever.

[Powdork]

Subway that shouldn't be a problem. Different datacenters often have indexes with caches from different times. Just as often all datacenters will revert back to earlier indexes (or is it indices?). this can be indicative of a major update or an approaching hurricane. Or it can just mean they're using an older index.

[celenoid]

As a small sign of optimism, a 5-month-old site of mine that was completely (and inexplicably) dumped for the last 3 weeks came back in its entirity + new indexed pages over the weekend.

It was fortunate to see the same PR come back to all the old de-indexed pages as well.

Cross your fingers - if you haven't been cheating you may have simply hit a glytch like we did...

[buckworks]

If the sites were "not available" when G bot visited, would google remove all 3,000 + pages from their index?

That exact thing happened to me, although it was a couple of years ago. It took about six weeks to recover.

When the site was indexed again, pages ranked roughly the same as before. It was a frustrating interlude but there was no lasting damage.

[MarkHickman]

I also had 4 sites taken out the index on sept 16th? no trace. same tactics used on 100's of other sites? just the 4 got hit.

3 revamped sites newly built and one 5 yr old.

[ciocan]

Hello,

In August I just launched a website with over 50k of content pages. In a week I get a dmoz link. Google has spidering about 32k pages and many of them has top ranking in google.

On 25/09 G drop me all ~30k pages indexed from my site. Now it's gone although googlebot spider daily as usual a few thousands of pages.

Is there any chances to get back the pages in index?

[glitterball]

My main competitor (who has historically been no.1 for a highly competitive 1 word term) has disappeared from the serps.
However, they are still coming up on the first page (position 8) thanks to a foriegn language page on their website.

Great news for my site, but you have to say that the results aren't what they should be.

[whiterabbit]

One of the bizarre things I've noticed is when I do a search for domain.com, google shows;

Sorry, no information is available for the URL domain.com

Find web pages that contain the term "domain.com"

Running this search shows

Results 1 - 10 of about 34,100 for "domain.com"

However, I get to page 4 and there are no more results, funnily enough, my site has around 33,000 pages, so, I guess they are being counted, but where have they gone?

Its been suggested in another thread that G has 'lost' my site. Where? down behind a radiator? fallen into the stuffing of their settees? gone to join all the ballpoint pens? (should I say widgets?)

Curiouser and Curiouser

Tony