Why has my site disappeared from Google?

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Why has my site disappeared from Google?

Published: March 31, 2005

This is a very common question and it happens to the very best of websites. If you're sure your website was previously listed in Google and had some value, then has suddenly disappeared, you'll need to start investigating the reasons why and how you can resolve the problem.

We'll take a step by step approach and be methodical about this as it's the only way to truly determine the blame and hopefully resolve the problem.

Step 1 - How do I check if my website is listed with Google?

First of all, visit www.google.com and type your website address into the search box, then press search. If you get a result, you're in Google. Move on to Step 3. If not, then chances are you've either misspelled your domain name, so check carefully, otherwise, you're banned. In this case, move on to Step 2.

Step 2 - Help, my site has been banned from Google

The very first thing you have to do is clean up your website. If you have any of the following issues, remove or deal with them immediately.

Was your website down during Googlebots visit? If so, consider another hosting provider.
Duplicate websites are also dismissed. Check for your content on other peoples websites. Google may have favoured them over you.
Check and remove any hidden tricks or spam. White text on white background is common. This is likely to be the main reason for being banned or dropped. Check for hidden elements, doorway pages, client sniffers sending different content to different users etc.
Although you can't ulmimately control your inbound links, avoid bad neighbourhoods such as massive link farms, spammy directories full of adverts etc when seeking links.

Once you're sure your website is clean, write an email to Google explaining your circumstances. Tell them your website is now tidy and full of important information, there are no hidden tricks employed and that you have learnt your lesson. Also provide full contact information. If you have relied on a search engine optimisation company to promote your website, it is recommended to provide Google with their information too and it helps them get a better understanding of the tricks employed and how to provide a better service.

If done correctly, Google should respond and start to include your website within a few weeks, however, be prepared to wait.

Step 3 - Why has my Google rank be dropped?

First of all, is your site new? If so, you could be trapped in the highly controversial and theoretical "Google sandbox". Whether this really exists or not is unimportant as the symptoms most certainly do. The sandbox is like a probationary period for new sites. It can take months to climb out but if your site is under 6 months old then use this time to publish content rich information, articles and the like as well as getting some quality links from other relevant sources and directories. Be patient and keep watching results.

If your site is well established, been around a while and suddenly disappeared, then you'll need to check your inbound links. You do this by running a character check and entering "+www.yourdomain.com" into Google, then noting the results. This isn't the number of links Google associates with your PageRank, but the actual number of website pages that has your domain listed either by hyperlink or plain text. Write down the number of results.

Next run a link check. Enter link:www.yourdomain.com into Google and write down the results. This lists the number of sites offering value to your site that Google knows of so is very important to get as many as possible.

Analyse the results

Now, analyse the numbers. If you have no character check results, you must start getting inbound links to your website. Read up on my SEO article on how to start a marketing campaign.

If you have character check results but no link check results, then the links you are getting are the wrong ones. Download the Google Toolbar and monitor PR of the pages your links appear. There are many ways of linking to websites and those that link to you must do so properly.

Rule: Your link must be a proper hyperlink and not a redirect through an ID. No JavaScript, Flash or other such links either. Proper hyperlink or nothing at all.

Another thing to note is make sure you see the location of where the link will be placed. It must have a PageRank value. Remember the Google Toolbar. Quality and quantity equals results.

If you have character check results and link check results then basically you need more of them. Remember, quality and quantity.

OK, so you have tons of links, both character check and link check. It's not your marketing that's the problem, it's the SEO side of the coin. Search engine optimisation consists of document structure and correct keyphrase placement. I'll refer you back to my SEO article to get started there. Google, as do many other search engines, constantly shift the posts as to what they deem a relevant website which is why results and positions constantly move about. This makes things extremely difficult to keep up with but it's important to stick to certain rules to be as consistent as possible.

Google will take time to display the changes you have made so be patient. It could well be that the competition have simply squeezed you out which does happen, however you'll know if you've suddenly taken a hit in the listings as it can be very immediate.

Ultimately, follow the steps laid out above, be methodical and be patient. If you're still stuck, then post your website domain here for others to see and we can all take a look at it. SEO and marketing are dark arts that no one person has a grip of. Everyone has a different point of view but stick to the fundamentals and don't submit to tricks like the one I posted earlier. Seen here (Maybe inactive if still running the experiment).

Useful?

Comments

murray says:

Hi there. My site has been in the no 1 spot for "carpet cleaning hampshire" for the past few months, but in the last 3 days has vanished totally.
Please help me. This is effecting my business.
Thanks for your time
Murray Whelehan

Ed says:

It appears you've become a victim of duplicate content. Your web designer has duplicated your website and Google has favoured their version of your site over yours.

Google will always try to eliminate copies as it has enough on its plate anyway.

If you search for carpet cleaning hampshire you'll find your site listed at position 4 on page 1.

www.uk-carpets-upholstery-cleaning.quickonthenet.com

This is a very good result had it returned your domain.

My initial task would be to ask them to add a 301 redirect (permanent) from the root of their subdomain to your website.

Once G and Y! have picked this up you should start to see a return in results.

As a rule, if a web designer has a clients website on their own site (very common) it should at least be password protected to steer the robots away and protect the content until launch.

Steve Orr says:

Hi Ed,

Thanks for all the tips given in your day job capacity, I've implemented the changes recommended with some success however I've noticed recently that Google is no longer 'caching' my site - any ideas?

Kind regards

Steve - Silverhill Domestic Appliances Ltd.

Ed says:

Hi Steve,

I'll be needing to see you again very soon and will be in touch. I did have a look at the site and there has been some changes since the recent Google update that have affected domain duplications.

I have noticed that your site is mapped on the following domains:

Both of the above are showing the same content.

The first task is to get the site correctly mapped to a single domain, preferably www.vacuumbags2u.co.uk, so Google doesn't start to eliminate certain areas of your site. This normally isn't a problem if the mapping is done correctly but it's better to be safer than sorry with search engines.

I just had a look and the last Google cache was on the 18^th of May [seen here].

It may not always show the cache link on listings and there's no rhyme or reason why they do that. It could be down to the fact they have recently re-indexed and you have made many changes to previously still pages. I'll investigate further prior to our meeting.

With regards to rank and inbound links, you have 15 internal links listed. What you need are those all important external links pointing to your website. I'll start off by adding your site to my promotional section. I'll forward it to the www.vacuumbags2u.co.uk domain as it's the most likely single domain to map.

As soon as Google re-indexes the links to you, even those in this article, I'll measure the changes in terms of the keyphrases you're aiming for.

Chelsea says:

Thanks for all your information. Maybe you could let me know what happened to my site. I sell books and when I would type the name of most of the books I sell, unless it is a really popular book, my site would come up first, second or third usually. All of a sudden after several years of this, my site isn't even coming up on the 1st page and sometimes not at all. I'm wondering why this might have happened all of a sudden. I'm hardly getting any orders anymore because of it. For instance, when I would type in "Runkle Geography" my site would come up 2nd, right after the officle Runkle Geography site. Now I'm toward the bottom of the 2nd page. I am the publisher for "Real Learning Education in the Heart of the Home" and I use to always come up 1st, 2nd or 3rd. Now I scrolled through 5 pages and didn't come up at all. If you have any suggestions for what I need to do to get back to the way it was, please let me know. Thanks!

Ed says:

Hi Chelsea,

My first concern when I checked your website and it's rank was that your category listings were getting preference over your product pages when searching for a product. This indicates that the product pages, despite having more keywords relating to the searching terms, are not gaining rank from the top level pages that point to them.

If I were to create 3 tasks to start me off I would:

Add more keyphrase descriptive content to the product pages and start to employ a more useful document structure. What this means is where you have "Runkle Geography" as a main heading, actually use the correct markup for a heading which is <H1>. This lends more importance and creates a focus for the page. While we talk of focus, make sure the <TITLE> tag also repeats the main header for each product page.
I know you use dynamic pages to build the categories and products but investigate using a different addressing system, easy on a Linux hosting server using mod_rewrite. What this means is instead of .com/seriesresults2.cfm?strSeriesCode=Runkle you would have .com/seriesresults2.cfm/strSeriesCode/Runkle/ as search engines see this as a static page instead of a dynamic one and are more inclined to deep crawl the site. This isn't always true of heavily linked sites though but some of your addresses have spaces and other tag info included which won't help.
Instead of getting links to your homepage, try to get more links directly pointing to your level2index.cfm page instead. This will mean that a search engine will crawl deeper into the site. Again, the above addressing solution will help no end.

Ultimately though, the fact that "runkle geography homeschool" puts you on the bottom of page 1 and "runkle geography" puts you in the middle of page 2 suggests that the recent Google update has let the competition squeeze you out rather than penalise you for something wrong with your website.

Let me know how you get on.

Gavin says:

My website's been established for more than six months now, and most of it's traffic came from google. Key phrases got my top google positioning with keywords like "drawing and sketching", and "free art lessons", but now my site is no-where. If I search by the main domain name "artgraphica", I am no longer no.1 but quite low down in the ranks, and haven't the faintest idea why, even after reading your article.

I am still in google so haven't been mistakenly banned, and I don't think I'm in the "sandpit". My inbound links are quite good, page rank reasonable, and keyword set up with optimisation and header tags etc all taken advantage of to the max. There's no website duplication either, so I'm thoroughly confused!
Any expert advice would be much appreciated! :)

Ed says:

First of all, what a cracking site you have there Gavin. Really good to look at and informative, in fact, the sort of site that should be at the top of Google.

You're right about the keywords on the page, document structure and PageRank, they are all good and will provide a solid base but I have identified the main weakness your site has and why it's likely to have suffered during the previous update.

It's happened to a few people I know and every time the results were the same, the anchor text of the inbound links. I can understand why your site is at the bottom of the first page for "artgraphica" as you have very little in the way of keyphrases for that word but "free art lessons" should give good results, apart from the fact that few, if any at all, of the links that point to your website actually say "free art lessons".

A previous client of mine has a website selling art on behalf of local artists and was particularly aiming for the phrase "buy art online". Good PageRank, good content, medium results. We started by focussing the phrases a little and working on inbound links with the correct (descriptive) anchor text with excellent results considering the level of competition.

www.hastingsarts.net

There is huge importance on anchor text as it's a means of identifying what a website represents and it's something that a website owner has little control over, which in theory gives it it's relevance. If you sell "shoes" and everyone links to your site saying "boots" then a search engine has to query your sites content and adjust the results accordingly. In a binary world, anchor text of inbound links offers a human touch so it's a very important criteria of their algorithms.

RULE: Inbound links should be natural in their variation of keyphrase as well as descriptive of the resource they point to.

I'll start by adding your website to my promotion section using "free art lessons" and then monitor the index.

Gavin says:

Hi,

I came online this morning and found a long and detailed reply! I'm very grateful for your swift and lengthy reponse. :)

Have the requirements actually changed for anchor links? Less than a week ago I was number 1 for "artgraphica" in google.com and google.co.uk and held that position for months. Suddenly it's virtually vanished!
It was the same for "free art lessons" - I was almost at the top of google for months, and now nothing, which makes me wonder if google have changed their algorithm recently. Whenever I asked for a reciprocal link it was always to include 'free art lessons' in the description, but perhaps this phrase needs to be in the hyperlink itself? When I check similar websites that have not been dropped, their inbound links and keywords are really no better than my own.
I almost wonder if google has gone through an update, and my website has been down at the time (although the uptime is very reliable with the server I use), and this might have caused it to suddendly, virtual disappear from google in a single night? I have a free statistics counter, and it shows where people have come from. Where once it was filled with google queries, there is now nothing, only MSN, Yahoo and links from similar websites!

I see hastingsarts.net has a good ranking, and was keen to take a look, but unfortunately it seems their server is down as my browser comes up blank.

Have a great weekend, and thanks once again for such a helpful and prompt response,

Gavin.

Ed says:

It's typical that an example site goes down when I refer to it.

Since you mentioned that less than a week ago you had good SERPS, I've spent quite some time looking into this and have even contacted Google because for the phrases you were consistent for, I still didn't find you, even on page 50.

Check out the following results:

There can only be a few explanations for this.

Your server was down or giving incorrect HTTP messages to Googlebot but this is highly unlikely despite your site being hosted on IIS. I'm sure Google knows when a server is down and must come across it every 10 seconds when indexing on a global scale. Recent cache dispels this anyway.
You have tags or robot/.htaccess information steering Google away. Again highly unlikely.
Google has dropped your site from listings as a glitch within it's algorithm which is something they had suggested in their response. Answer is to wait for Google to sort itself out which it often does.

In light of looking into it, all you can do is wait a while and see when you get picked up again. My site gets hit by Google nearly every two weeks so will find the links to your site shortly.

Here's some homework.

Task: Check logs daily (if time permits) for Googlebot and see what it crawls.

Task: Check Google referrals and the keywords used to hit you, if any.

I always like to hear peoples experiences of search engines, especially when things inexplicably go horribly wrong, as these are the most intruiging. They also serve as the best source of identifying their weaknesses.

I'll be keeping an eye out but I wouldn't be too concerned. You've great content, inbound links are counted, you're not pointing to any blacklisted sites and your host certainly isn't blacklisted. There's nothing a competitor can do to affect your ranking and Google certainly isn't picking on you, although it can feel like that.

Give it two weeks, I'll see if there are any reflections in the index and let you know.

Gavin says:

Thanks once more for the reply - you are starting to ease my paranoia! My site may not be generating a huge amount of traffic (I'm still working on promotion), but I used to get over 200 hits a day, and it is now below 100, so it's fairly significant to me.

Yesterday I changed my host as it coincided with my yearly subscription coming to an end, and webwizhosts.net could no longer support my monthly bandwidth allocations (well they probably could now I'm out of google ironically!) :) I'm now at Jodohost.com who have a very good and reliable reputation.

I do have a robots list, but I created it since day one of launching my site, and it has not changed, and doesn't exclude anything relating to artgraphica. I'll keep an eye on the logs and will let you know if google picks it back up.
Again many thanks for your really helpful responses!

Gavin.

p.s. I was reading the rest of your website, and I was 5 or 6 years old when the brand new Commodore Vic 20 was bought by my Dad! I was writing my first computer programs at 6 back when efficient coding was the only means of achieving anything of signicance! Nostalgic memories!

Michelle says:

Hi there,

Same deal here, when I typed in Quality Nik Naks in google was 1st place, website is only a few months old. As of 3 days ago it's not listed. I have no ranking and I presume I am still in Google somewhere. Anyway can you tell me what I did wrong? Or is it possible it is just google? I am a beginner at all this and just don't understand how within a month you are ok then suddenly gone from Google.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Ed says:

Hi Michelle,

Google has definitely indexed your domain but no content whatsoever.

Seen here:

site:http://www.qualityniknaks.com

As always, links rule, and you have none. I can start off by linking to your site with the keyphrase you're aiming for:

Quality Nik Naks

This particular article is ranked in Google and is crawled frequently so this should be your first inbound link. The downside of this link is that the copy of this page isn't relevant to the products and services you supply so there will be less potential value than a relevant link.

What happened to you happened to me when my site started out. They find your website, read the content but don't dig too deep. Then they put you on probation and start to see if anyone is pointing to you. If not, then you start to sink in the results.

The first thing I would do is submit to Dmoz.org straight away in the appropriate category. This will also generate inbound links from the likes of Google Directory, Alta Vista and Excite as well as feed many of the major search engines.

Once Google has found those other links pointing to you it will start to reflect this in your rank position.

The good news is that the phrase "quality nik naks" has little in the way of online competition. You also have plenty of pages to your site and the products have plenty of descriptive text about them.

Get to work on those links though.

william ballester says:

I keep searching for answers, for the vanishing of my site in google, mid April, it is a 5 year old site, run by my wife, mostly is to do with female stuff, we were in very good positions for a few keywords, we had about 80 backlinks and a PR 5. Now there's no PR and no backlinks, and site not found in Google, there are about 5.000 other sites that have www.fortune2000net.com that we don't link to them.

I have been going to forum after forum, trying to get answers or how to get re-instated in google, I have sent emails to help@google.com, at support@google.com, at webmaster@google.com, and and email adrress that the famous?? googleguy sugested, the only thing I get is an autometed answer and that's it.

I need Help please, can someone look at my site and tell me what's going on, we tought ourselves html 5 years a go.

William

Ed says:

Hi William,

I've got a feeling you're not going to like what I'm gonna say. After running a few checks on the big search engines, MSN is the only one that has listed you to any degree. Yahoo has indexed the homepage only and Google has kicked you out.

Maybe the following link will shed some light:

"www.fortune2000net.com"

The majority of your previous inbound links are from prime, blacklisted sites such as pharmaceuticals and gambling. The majority of your products are the ones every internet user gets in their inbox daily by the hundreds which to a search engine shouts "SPAM".

Now I'm not suggesting you're a perpetrator of this. Your products represent a multi-million pound/euro/dollar market and it's a great industry to retail in so if I were after long term consistency in terms of business, I would serious consider the following:

Ditch the domain name. It's a spammy name and not representative of your business. Plus the fact too many blacklisted sites are pointing to it.
Shift hosting provider before the IP address gets blacklisted too. Hosting is ten a penny so shouldn't be a problem, although migration always is.
Don't worry about the relevance of inbound links when acquiring new links for your new domain. Think quality.
Get listed in the Dmoz directory when your site is up on the new domain.
Think about structure of your website too. An example is www.fortune2000net.com/exercisers.html which lists adverts before content, something a search engine has to wade through. Content first!
Lower the level of affiliate links per page and put more focus into the products. I know you're making a living and affiliation is a viable business model but less advertising and more content is what the search engines are striving to deliver.

Unfortunately it's not good news. Have a look at the long term and successful competitors in your industry and use that as a guide for your business.

Hope that's constructive and helps.

Eddie.

william ballester says:

Ed Thank you very much for your advice, I think that you are right, you have been the only one after many forums, that has given us a full answer of what is wrong with the site, we will follow your advice, we have 5 other sites and that are younger than fortune2000net and don't produce hardly any income, ($5.00 a day) we will look very carefully at who links to us, and the products we will sell, or the merchants that we join.

I was just wondering how people that work in google and yahoo will feel, if suddenly all the phone companies in the world decided to stop them because of spamming the phone lines (googleads on 1000's of spam sites, directories and scraper sites all around the world), well I suppose that it will never happen.

We have spent all our savings and on monday I have an appointment with social security for some financial help until I find some work.

But after my little complaint I thank you again for your time and advice

Ed says:

Quote: I was just wondering how people that work in google and yahoo will feel, if suddenly all the phone companies in the world decided to stop them because of spamming the phone lines (googleads on 1000's of spam sites, directories and scraper sites all around the world), well I suppose that it will never happen.

Since Google has applied for patents the technologies have been exposed to a certain degree and traffic is a major factor. You can bet that if a site generates a lot of income, from say Adsense, then it's unlikely Google would apply their filter and block it.

You would have to ask yourself does Google favour making money over delivering content and the answer isn't clear so if it is money they hide it well.

Another factor is Google tracks a searchers IP address, reads the phrase they are aiming for and tracks the page the user ends up spending more time (before returning to Google) as this will indicate useful content on that site which increases rank. This is why content is first as it keeps the user on the site a little longer.

Google is certainly a puzzling search engine.

James says:

Hi,

Thanks for your very helpful pages.
My website (www.apexhydraulics.co.uk) has recently (Last 2-3 weeks) seen a massive drop in Google search ranking's for my keywords. I haven't changed anything for about 3 months and the site had been runing fine for about 2 years. I ran your link check and found 2 links, but I know of more links that were not listed ie. www.kellysearch.co.uk.
What's happening?

James

Ed says:

James, you can shed more light on the number of links that point to you by doing a character check like below.

"www.apexhydraulics.co.uk"

After scanning the results of that, the majority of the inbound links are from search directories, link farms and sites with little or no rank themselves.

It appears that a few of my recent clients have also suffered heavily within the last few weeks due to a shake up at Google. Sources suggest that there has been a huge leap in the definition of marketing and natural links.

This is where sites with good quality natural inbound links are still flying high while sites that obtain every possible link going through directories and exchanges are sinking fast.

Whatever the circumstance of any particular site though, links are everything. First things first you'll need to define a quality link.

A quality link should contain a concise and descriptive phrase of the destination and be located naturally in the flow of a document, not a list or farm of links.

An example would be: Hydraulic & Pneumatic Cylinders because it appears mid paragraph and to a search engine appears more natural. The links on the right of this site will be less valued because a search engine can define them as lists of links.

The problem with links are whether Google changes it's mind down the line and decides that natural links are all that valuable either, then what?

This is where you have to play it safe and acquire a variety of links that follow the quality criteria.

The link above will start you off. Discussion groups and articles form great resources that get linked to so get writing content, reviews and articles and work on those quality inbound links.

Google has been very jumpy of late but don't worry long term, it will settle down.

James says:

Ed,

Thanks for your time & help (& Link).
I don't quite understand why Google doesn't like all lists of links, some can be very useful, but I suppose if that's all there was though, the Net would be a very dull place. Good directories are just that, dull but very useful, are all directories links rated in the same way?
I have already started working on quality natural links after your advice and it is easier than I first thought. I'll work on it when ever I get a spare moment and let you know the long term effect.

Thanks
James

Ed says:

Good directories are just that, dull but very useful, are all directories links rated in the same way?

A directory is just a resource locator and as such is a means of a search engine finding websites rather than ranking them. Depending on the perceived quality of that directory, there will be value but nothing beats quality such as natural links and authority sites such as .gov and .edu domains for example.

Isaac Hacamo says:

Hi,

I'm having problems to index my website to google. For a while I had the website ranked on the google, but now it's not available. I've the website on the yahoo. It's: www.hacamo.com.

Can you help me on that?

Best regards,

Isaac Hacamo

Ed says:

After checking your listing I can see that Google doesn't even know or show you in their index. The second link shows that no other web resource Google knows of knows you either.

First thing to do is start getting those links pointing to your website because without them you won't assume any rank whatsoever.

Since your site is Portugese, I would locate the relevant category in DMOZ and submit straight away.

Start here.

Ed says:

To continue posting on this article, please continue to:

blog.tn38.net/.../why_has_my_site_1.html

Thank you.

Why has my site disappeared from Google?

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