Forum Moderators: open
On July 28th in an effort to remove some obsolete pages from the Google index I inadvertently used the "automatic URL removal system" and lost my entire site.
Realizing my mistake, I immediately corrected my robots.txt file and resubmitted my site through addURL.
I contacted Google support and asked for advice on reindexing and they responded with a boilerplate email directing me to their FAQ page.
Google’s notes on their automatic URL removal page state: "submitting via the automatic URL removal system will cause a temporary, 90 day removal of your site from the Google index. (Keeping the robots.txt file at the same level would require you to return to the URL removal system every 90 days to reissue the removal.)"
I take this to mean:
If a person left the same robots.txt file (the one that disallowed Googlebot) intact, that one would have to go through the URL removal routine every 90 days. Otherwise, if the robots.txt file was correct to allow Googlebot access to the site, Google would reindex the site.
I've waited over 90 days, resubmitted 90 days ago and again today and Googlebot has been consistently crawling my site nightly all this time.
My site has been in the top 20 positions for a very competitive search phrase ever since Google appeared 98-99, sometimes rising close to the top. I'm sure that there is nothing SEO-wise that would prevent it from reindexing and it had a PR of 5 before it disappeared.
My fear is that my site has fallen into some abyss, sandbox, black hole, do-not-index list or somewhere from which it will never return. Should I be moving my site's content to another domain?
Google's response to today's inquiry goes like this"
"Thank you for your reply. Although our robots may visit your site, we cannot guarantee that your pages will be thoroughly crawled or indexed. For site indexing and ranking recommendations, please visit
[google.com...]
We're sorry we cannot be of further assistance in this matter." signed The Google Team. I'm quite surprised that it took a whole team to write that response :>).
I'm open to any suggestions.
