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This is my first post after spending hours looking around this excellent board for help, so please bear with me if I ask a dumb newbie question and forgive the long story.
Anyway, my site is about a month old. On Friday it showed up in Google for the first time and I was getting some decent placements for decent keywords. I ran one report on WebPosition Gold on the Saturday to see how well I am ranked in the other engines, but the next time I checked Google my site had disappeared!
Reading around this board I discover WPG is not liked by Google, and when I checked my logs fearing the worst, my steady bandwidth usage of 8mb per hour (ave) drops to 0.5mb per hour the SAME HOUR I ran the WPG report and it's not recovered since.
I then installed Google toolbar and my PR is grey. A search for my url returns "Sorry, no information is available" and a keyword search for my domain name produces nothing.
However, I get some minor placings for a few keywords that appear on my homepage, although not the important ones and nowhere near as high as prior to the WPG incident.
So am I in or out of Google? Have I been banned or penalized, and for how long?
When I contacted Google to apologise for using WPG as I'm a newbie and didn't know it was frowned upon, and ask to be taken off a 'blacklist' (or whatever) they wouldn't be drawn and just said there are many reasons a site can disappear yada yada. It seems obvious to me though that I've been penalized/banned.
I am so disappointed as prior to running WPG my hard work building the site looked to have paid off and I was getting excellent placements and loads of traffic for such a young site.
Now I'm considering buying a new domain and starting again. Anybody got any ideas/comments/suggestions?
Thanks.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
my site is about a month old
If your site was not live on or about October 4th, then you are not yet in the index. Your site may have temporarily appeared due to the activity of the "fresh 'bot".
A single use of WPG is not enough to get you banned, otherwise, you would see every webmaster doing repetitive WPG checks on all his/her competition to get them banned.
I'd say, check your logs and see if you were deep-crawled at the beginning of this month. If so, your pages should appear solidly in the index at the end of this month or the beginning of next month.
Do a site search here on WebmasterWorld for "fresh bot" and "site dropped" or "site disappeared" and you will find that your experience is the norm for new sites. But WebmasterWorld probably gets a third of its new members due to the panic that this causes!
The cure in this case is to wait a month.
Jim
I suppose I should wait a month or so before doing anything drastic like getting a new domain name - it's just so frustrating hanging around waiting though, knowing I have customers who can't find me!
While the 'users' enjoy the web for its instant gratification aspect, webmasters have to take a much more 'hurry up and wait' approach.
The time scales you've indicated sound far more like coincidence than a ban.
It's perfectly normal for a new site to fade in and out over the first month that Google picks it up. It's part of the "Everflux" effect. Your site should become stable in Google after the next update - towards the end of this month.
I just checked my logs and was visited by Scooter spider on 8 November, but no sign of googlebot yet. I will wait patiently for him to come a'calling...
I put up a new site after the middle of September. Google crawled it in October. Until the last update, it was in , then out, then in, then out . . . well you get the idea. Seemed to be more out than in. After the update settled down, it's been in. Wait until after the update to start worrying - and then you probably won't have to.
lawman
Just done a Webmaster World search on bots and discovered the fresh bot has an IP of 64.68.... and the deepcrawler 216.239....
I examined my logs in more detail and was visited by the fresh bot on 8 Nov, 9 Nov and 11 Nov, and the deepcrawler on 8 Nov and 11 Nov (hooray!).
So when do you think I can expect to be included more or less permanently (although I understand I may get dropped from time to time)? This time next month perhaps?
Be sure to come to Webmasterworld Nov 22-30th. The forums will go wild. You'll have a blast!
The BIG DANCE may begin litterally any minute now. Though my guess would be that we're not quite there yet. Wait and see if anything changes with that. If you're still out after the update we must try to analyse your situation.
I've been through the same thoughts - being a Newbie.
I've got the part about Fresh sites but:
"I examined my logs in more detail and was visited by the fresh bot on 8 Nov, 9 Nov and 11 Nov, and the deepcrawler on 8 Nov and 11 Nov (hooray!). "
How can U tell a deepcrawler from a Fresh?
Thanx.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, ibpotter (If I haven't said that before. I get confused by all theese new members!)
One last Q:
Waiting for the big Dance - is it based on visits already made - or will the visit come right before the Update?
Me personal impression is that the deep crawl of the complete WWW (or the part of it that Google is able to find and crawl) takes a rather long time and perhaps isn't finished yet. My own statistics do not give me access to the original logfiles. But as I interpret the statistics one of my websites had still not been deep crawled as late as 4:03 CET this morning.
