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It appears that G has added about 4 billing pages to the index in the last week or so. Most of those additions are URL only listings in the SERPS at this time (My totally uneducated guess!)
I too thing we are going to see changes in the SERPS this weekend!
Google "down grades" the second page found that matches a prior page found. That just means, it will be buried so deep, that you will be lucky to find it under its own url.
If this is the case then Google is not unable to tell which site came first, or I would not be in the position I am.
Has anyone any experience in getting out of such a situation?
Has anyone any experience in getting out of such a situation?
I am not sure if this is the same situation. I had 2 sites early this year with almost identical content, the old pointing to the new (my goal was to change URL's to the new one). They both ranked in the top 10 for about 2 weeks and then the second site disappeared from Google. I put noindex/nofollow for Google on the 1st site and within a couple of days the second site came back. I experimented a few times removing and re-adding the noindex/nofollow and it always had the same effect. I then left the noindex/nofollow on the old site for a few months and concentrated on establishing the new site. It now ranks well. I took the old site and re-deployed it with new content, not related to the new site, and allowed Google back in. It is also ranking quite well now.
I used to have several sites on the same general subject, some domains had the same .html filenames as my 'best' site, but the sites were different in content and overall structure.
Google started treating my secondary sites poorly after florida, but my 'best' site (best links and PR) was still doing fine until recently.
I hadn't crosslinked the domains for years, but I still had multiple domains covering the same topic (with unique content), on similar IPs, and same Whois info.
I've now banned Googlebot on the remaining 'abandonned' sites, for most I've allowed the domains to expire, but a couple were still around. I hope Gbot obeys the robots.txt
Other people seem to be getting away with 'similar content' networks, but maybe they are more clever about concealing themselves? I dunno.
This might have something to do with my recent drop though, so I'm trying everything to make sure I'm now 'pure as the driven snow'.
As for sites getting banned, I imagine there has to be a common denominator. I would like to try to figure it out. If anyone with a site that was banned yesterday wants to stick me the URL, I'd like to research it a little.
wellzy
- if your site appears in SERPs, (say an internal page of mine on page 5 of SERPs, and my index jumping is from page 1 to page 20 and back) it's not banned, but could be penalized?
- if you have all your pages cached, showing PR and showing up with the site: command it's not banned.
Freshbot hits a few of my pages daily, and my index page and some internal pages have fresh tags (but the internal pages are all but buried in the SERPs, index does OK).
I've heard the term 'soft penalty' around here, but does anybody actually have any experience with such a thing?
My site that was affected 23rd September was my primary income. I can't see why it would be banned, but I'd like to get that out of the way before I try to figure out if it's an algo thing I need to adjust to, or just a 'burp' that I'm experiencing.
I did add a forum to my site (php based) just days before the drop, with links from all my pages to the forum. When I do a site: command I see some forum pages showing up like this - mydomain.com/forums/viewtopic. php?p=6&sid=46dfgss6df44s3fg46sdfg (made up the id, but you get the idea)
I've removed the forum, just in case it was to blame.
Sorry for the long post, but desperation is setting in, my brain is getting stressed, and that's making it hard to think straight these days. I pity my family right now :D
I'm reluctant to do it, but maybe I should just write help[at]google.com and ask if my site is OK?
It is odd how it has happened around the same time Google increased the size of its index and I'm wondering if that had anything to do with it.
I'm not about to panic too much just yet, I'll wait for a few weeks to see if the pages re-appear. The site still has its page rank, but all static pages have been dropped, I dont at all believe this is a ban, so expect the site to eventually re-appear (fingers crossed).
1 year ago, I had site A which I 301 redirected to site B. I kept the same url structure so that www.a.com/foo/ does a 301 redirect to www.b.com/foo/
Google crawled every page of site B after the 301 redirect and everythings been working great since the last one year.
But now almost half the pages of site A have reappeared with the 31 Dec 1969 23:59:59 GMT cached date and those same pages in site B have become url only pages.
The pages from site A (which all have the 31 Dec 1969 23:59:59 GMT cached date) do not appear at all in the results even with the exact title keyword combination for which it should show up. They even do not show up with the command site:www.a.com But they do show up when I type the exact filename.html and thats how I learned about this problem. Some days back, a lots of pages from my site B started showing url only pages and that's when I discovered this problem.
The fortunate part is that i haven't lost any traffic at all, so maybe some other pages have come up higher in ranking for site B.
The site in question is an authorative one with a 7 PR and 1000s of unique backlinks.
Any one facing the same problem.
Strangely, we are still getting a trickle of referrals, but they're to very old pages with our OLD domain name. Doing a "site:b.com" search reveals results with our new data, but none with our domain name in the URL - instead, the URLs contain our old a.com! The results page also says "results 1-3 of (fairly large number)" which makes me wonder if they're still IN there, but for whatever reason aren't being displayed...
I'm certain the 301 is part of my problem, yet I'm equally certain there's not much I can do on my side but wait it out...and wish I'd never changed my site's name if I'd ever wanted to continue to be included in the index with updated results. :/ I also emailed help(at)google as well, figuring it costs me nothing further to ask.
Hope this data point helps somebody!
Over the years I have deleted some files. For 4 years now I've had in my .htaccess file some lines that would redirect a surfer who gets a 404 error code back to my index page. So if a surfer goes to mydomain.com/trashedfile.html, instead of the default Apache 404 page, they go straight to my index file.
This seemed to me a good way to handle people looking for deleted files.
Recently I noticed that, when I do a site: command, and click the link "include omitted results", I can see all those deleted pages, AND - they have the title and snippet of the my current index page! They also have the 'supplemental' tag beside the listing, and a cached date of 1969.
This wasn't how it was before, the deleted pages didn't show up at all, much less with title and snippets belonging to the index page that g-bot must have been redirected to at some point.
Maybe google has changed how they handle redirects, or changed how they view duplicate content (or both) and now they think I have 20 clones of my index page with different URLs?
I've deleted the lines from my .htaccess so that people just go straight to the default 404 page now.
Even if it's not why I've been slammed, it's odd and I think it's new behavior.
Anybody with custom .htaccess 404/403 etc, error redirects might want to check their 'omitted results'.
Both were hosted on free hosts and didn't have many pages or links, I guess they were just deemed not "crawl worthy" this time around.
Normally though, in the past Google seemed to always keep sites like this in their index, even if the sites themselves were rather small and didn't have a lot of links.
1. Google last month did an internet backlink update and downgraded site PageRank to those site that had bought sold or traded links.
Also as Google is moving to a more continual indexing those links websites have maintained for years are now stale and therefore any weighting given to these links by Google previously were withdrawn.
If one takes Google PageRank explanation as votes from Site A to Site B. Then votes in the past having little meaning value in the present makes complete sense.
We don't take votes from past elections and count them in the current election so Google would be expected to do the same.
The other thought is your website could have been hojacked by a competitor.
Clint
Most of whats been discussed here sounds like one of two recent happenings.
1. Google last month did an internet backlink update and downgraded site PageRank to those site that had bought sold or traded links.Also as Google is moving to a more continual indexing those links websites have maintained for years are now stale and therefore any weighting given to these links by Google previously were withdrawn.
If one takes Google PageRank explanation as votes from Site A to Site B. Then votes in the past having little meaning value in the present makes complete sense.
We don't take votes from past elections and count them in the current election so Google would be expected to do the same.
The other thought is your website could have been hojacked by a competitor.
Clint
The original post is below:
Dont know what happened.
I dint update it or anything.
It just completely disappeared from search results and PR bar became grey (used to be PR6)
What could be the problem?
Now where in do you see your internal links redirects etc being the cause of the problem as opposed ot Googles IBL update or other areas?
Secondly
When you were about 4 years old I accessed the Internet for the first time in my life. At that time it was DOS commands over a 1200 baud modem ( Know what that is? ) to access with green text and black screen.
When you can surpass those years of experience and two years optimizing sites to the front pages of google yahoo msn odp alexa inktomi, and most others, and all for each client site, then maybe I will feel you are qualified to tell me I do not know what I am talking about,....until then Peace