many pages in google, and then none?

what is happening here...!?!

[flex55]

Something rather weired has happened lately to me:
Google visited my site on a daily basis, but in the last couple of months never took more than 20-30 pages a day.

I then changed my site a bit, reduce the amount of links in the pages, removed url rewriting, and - google started to get pages by the thousands, and I was so happy (google had ~800 pages in it). Life looked wonderfull.

And then, 3 days later, googled showed only 80 pages of my site indexed. a day after that, it shows only 20 pages index, and it's been like that for a week now. During this week, google is, again, hitting only 20-30 pages a day.

As you can imagine, I was on the verge of a breakdown :-)
And all of that happened after the last dance... (started on jan 3).
Has anyone experienced something similar? Anyone know what should be the outcome of this
? Is this some kind of a google penalty?

Thanks!
F.

[Susanne]

Don't worry. :) Wait until end of this month for the new update and probably things will calm down. Things do change in Google's index even if we are out of the dance and out of the monthly update. Sometimes a month is very quiet, sometimes a lot of changes take place. The community calls it "the everflux". Cheers!

[MHes]

Hi

I would still be very happy..... looks like the fresh bot picked you up and gave you a glimpse of what may happen at the next update.

Well done! :)

[Jakpot]

All my pages are still in Google but my traffic has decreased over 60%. I made zero changes to any of them.
I've been in the game about a year and use free hosting services until I get my cash flow to the point I can afford paid domains and hosting.
All my pages were ranked in the top ten for lots of keywords
until the last dance now most of them are down the tubes.

Please tell me if Google penalizes web pages from free hosts.
Thanks

[ciml]

I think the moral of the thread is that even when a site stays the same, its rankings can improve or deteriorate.

This can be because your incoming links change (eg. the site with your best incoming link had a server problem in the last crawl); your competition improve (eg. they get some new links or they learn to make their site more Google friendly); or because Google have changed their ranking methods (this happens all the time).

[danfitz]

We have seen a similar phenomenon except we got dropped completely. We have changed nothing in the content of our site but I was wondering if one of the following might have been the cause. 1) We were getting hit hard by the googlebots about a month ago so we asked them to reduce the rate of crawl. They seemed to comply. However, we may only be seeing the normal cycle of "deep crawl" back to "normal". 2). We are phasing out many web sites around the world by having their URL's redirect to our home page. Most of the old web sites are completely different in structure,but do contain a small subset of the new large central site. COuld we have been dropped for this? I've asked Google repeatedly and all they do is send me the Webmaster Guildelines.

[flex55]

ciml, still - we're a PR7 site, and google did crawl thousands of pages from the site - which i guess, it means that the pages are "google friendly" (hope i'm not wrong here) - yet for some reason google shows in the index only 22 pages from my site.
is that normal for a PR7?
could this be a penalty?

thanks!

[ciml]

It doesn't sound like a penalty. Could it be that you didn't make it into the main index well this month, but are now enjoying (variable) 'Fresh' listings?

[flex55]

I sure hope so :-)
Well, next dance will tell..
Thanks guys!