Can a DoS Attack cause us to be delisted

[eskipii]

Hello all,

We have a shop and we have been listed in Google since end of 2000.

And lucky enough to the have been #1 in our top 2 terms since mid 2001 and it hasn’t changed since then. I know it’s a long time in "web time" but it just hasn’t changed until today. Everything disappeared.

Nothing has changed for us even when I would read here of changes like the Florida thing last year...nothing at all.

Googlebot visits daily; this month it’s been about 2.2 gigs, normal just like every other month.

We do not have affiliates, link exchanges, nothing like that; the only thing we use on the non-shopping section of our site is AdSense.

I just wanted to ask you all before asking them if something is wrong or maybe others are experiencing something similar..?

The only other thing I can think of is that our hosting provider was hit by a Denial of Service Attack last weekend and had a downtime of 45 minutes, would something like this cause us to not show up today?

Thank you.

[Rosalind]

A DOS attack could cause you to not show up, but in practice it can take a very long time before Googlebot will stop listing a site altogether. Usually if the page is down it will just revert to a url-only listing, and it will be back to spider in a few days.

If there's nothing at all in Google then you might have bigger problems than a simple outage, and it's worth investigating whether you may be inadvertently involved in black-hat SEO, or whether your host may have done something that would warrant a ban.

[zeus]

Are you totaly out of Google, also when you make a site:yourdomain.com

[eskipii]

hi,

thanks for your help and tips.

now when I do site:yourdomain.com, I get some links but the links I get are from our old shopping cart software from April 2004. (we used this from Dec 2000 - April 2004)

I emailed google directly today and explained, now I'm waiting...

thanks again =)

[bumpski]

I've found if your site is unavailable through two crawls you are out of the index completely (on a per page basis) at least until the next crawl. If your site, (or page) is unavailable through one crawl your listing will only have a URL shown to the page, no description, no "snippet".

So yes a DoS can cause you to be delisted.

In addition, it appears to me that pages that have been missed by two consecutive Google crawls may be subject to a penalty in SERP's position, perhaps for a significant time.

Sorry for the bad news,
Bob

[eskipii]

hi,

well I still havent heard back from google after I contacted them... I hope they respond.

now when I search for sitename alone we come out with our snippet, from April 2004.

if i search for sitename.com or www.sitename.com only the url comes out, no snippet.

googlebot continues to spider, more than 200MB today and its only 3pm.

our only down time was those 45 minutes. hope this get resolved soon.

[eskipii]

hi everyone,

After almost 2 weeks of not being in Google I think I found the problem (I think).

Swithing shopping cart software.

We switched shopping carts and I think Google saw that now as duplicate content and penalized us.

We've never done anything against Google's guidelines and from one day to the next we dispappered.

I emailed them again and received a ...Unfortunately, we are unable to send personal responses to all of the requests....

I just don't know what else to do...