Why has my site disappeared from Google? continued...

Just a follow up to say, about a week or two ago, google seems to have reindexed my site. I'm back high in the google rankings and getting many more hits as a result. Very strange that the site disappeared for a month or two!

Hi Ed,

My site disappeared from Google on 8/7/05. I am a novice and was trying to build my site properly. I have had my site with a company called Zoovy for about 1 year. They also have another site for me with the address sundaros.zoovy.com that is identical and is still showing up in Google. I also recently used a company called Links4trade but have discontinued that because I thought it might have been the problem.
Could I have been removed from Google because of using Links4Trade or because of duplicate content?
Also, I have several other domains registered with godaddy that forward to www.sundaro.com (ie. www.sundaroaccessories.com and www.sundaros.com).
I have sent an email to google but just have received an automated response.
I hope you might have some advice for me so that I can correct any other mistakes I have made.

Thanks,

Monica

Hi Ed

Firstly can I just say what a great website. I think I've learned more in the last two hours reading through it than I have in the last 18 months as my own webmaster stumbling through the quagmire!

Ok, Google - hmm. As all of the above, my listing has plummeted. I check every day and usually I'm in the top 5. Now I'm gawd knows where. I am in there, but sometimes page 12 or a lot worse. It will take a very very specific phrase to find me. Go to Yahoo or Ask and type in CBT Bournemouth and voila - there I am, all nice and well ranked. Google suddenly doesn't like me. I hadn't changed a thing.

I knew nothing about Page Ranking and what is needed to make sure I get a good one. Now I do. Checking my backlinks it seems I have none. Oddly my newly aquired Google tool bar says my index page has a reasonable PR, which confused the heck out of me. So, I've simplified the Titles I use and given a good description to each page (rather than having the same for all). I have also updated the index page to show a little more content (like where we operate from and what courses we do).

Infuriatingly my competitors are still as they were and some of their sites are awful.

Now, over a week later Google has re-cached a few of the new page layouts but my ranking is still near Mars.

Any tips?

Best wishes,

Richard

Ed - I bow to your sagely wisdom once more!

Thanks loads - fingers crossed.

Richard

Dear Ed
My site is PR4 and has been live for nearly a year now, while I understand my main keyword Party Supplies is not the easiest to get on page one I had been slowly moving up the ranks. The saving grace I have had has been that more specific searches have been working well on google. For example "Noddy Party" and "Noddy party supplies" were both at number 3.
Yesterday 17/10 just about everything fell through the floor party supplies dropped from 41 to 356, and noddy went from 3/3 to 144/69. The only traffic I was getting was off MSN. Any ideas
Clive

Ed
Thanks for the advice, guess its time to do more than add to the directories
Thanks
Clive

Would anyone have any idea why http://www.highereddegrees.com would have been entirely removed from Google's index? I am completely bewildered. The website dissappeared in its entirety from Google about a month ago. Previous to that the website was very popular for over a year.

The website was designed following Google's "Guidelines for Webmasters". And I have not participated in any SPAM or underhand linking strategies.

Any ideas?

Eric

Hi Ed

I was wondering if you could shed a little light on the problem I've been having with my site. My site has been up for a little less than a year now and it was doing quite well with the search engines but it vanished last week. My site is entirely done in flash so I put the content at the botom of the page. I used a trick where I used the same colour for the scrollbar as the page background to give the illusion that there's nothing there. I don't know if google picks up on this or not. Any advice will be much appreciated including any ideas for searches on flash files.

thanks

Thanks, Ed. I'll get onto it right away.

Hello, I have been working on a hobby site for a while, and it was #10 in google for the keywords "every last penny", but I got dropped completely last night! I was working on the site last night and checking the web logs, when all of a sudden I noticed that Google had begun crawling my site - so I decided to sit back and watch. Over the course of the next 5 minutes (literally), here's what took place:

1> I was #10 on Google
2> Google started to crawl my site
3> Google finished crawling
4> *poof* The site was dropped from Google all-together

I'm completely stumped... Can anyone provide me with some insight as to what might be happening? There is no trickery on the site like white on white. If I'm doing something that Google doesn't like, I'm not aware what it could be!?!

HI all,

My website has done many rep links and we did it too quicks about 50-60 per weeks. Also, we had a coding at front of the keywords. So our ranking in Google disappear. But some keyworks such as Rackmount lcd, rackmount KVM, Open frame lcd, panel mout lcd is coming back on first page. But google doesn't pick up another other keywords. Can anyone help me?

Ed-

I came across your site looking for an answer that it appears many people have. My situation seems typical: used to be in the index, now it's not. However, mine has a bit of a twist to it. I built the original site when i was 15 years old (8 years ago!), and have since become a professional developer. I then rebuilt the site in October and November, and have been constantly adding products and making minor changes here and there. My site is totally web-standards-compliant and uses no tricks or spam or gimmicks, and I have SEO'd it myself.

As a result of my efforts, Google deep-crawled the whole site and I was getting about 50 hits a day from Google because I had over 10 number ones, 100 top fives, 200 top tens, and almost 500 top 50's for many many search phrases. This happened about a month after the site went live. Then one day around the first of January, I got zero hits from Google. I went to check and noticed that the only pages Google had in the index were the pages from my old site, which happened to be eight years old. To this day, Google has kept all of the old pages (almost 200 of them, none of which are valid) in the index and has wiped all of the nearly 300 pages of my new site from its index, even after having crawled them and cached them.

Every day, the Googlebot hits my site and crawls anywhere from one to 50 pages, and is actually the most effecient visitor in terms of hits on the robots.txt vs. pages crawled. I've not had this problem with MSN, as it, too, crawls my site every day but actually has a lot of my new pages crawled (and it finds new ones I add within a day) and I'm at the top of many MSN queries. Unfortunately, my MSN traffic, which is considerable, does not match what my Google traffic used to be, and understandably so because of its popularity, or lack thereof.

Is there any fathomable reason that you can come up with as to why Google would continue to keep all the old links that don't work and haven't been recached in over a year and wipe all of my new pages from its index after having been there nearly in entirety?

I'll be submitting a sitemap to them shortly, but who knows if it will do any good.

Thanks for reading this ridiculously long post and for answering, if you do.

Jason

This is very interesting . we moved to a dedicated server a month ago and Google had most of our search words coming in at page one, the main phrase for us is "uk fishing tackle" and this used to get us number 9 spot. I have checked our listing in Google and all the pages are there but the funny thing is that when i type my company name into Google i get an old title tag in the Google snippet when the result is served.
But my big concern is why have so many of my pages dropped
ps: the googlebot spiderd the site yesterday 14/02/06
am I suffering the Google valentine massacre

Hi Ed, fantastic site! I wonder if you can give me any advice here. My website, www.1st95thrifles.com was appearing on www.google.com and .co.uk when I searched for the words '95th Rifles' or '1st 95th Rifles'. For some reason, it has dissapeared completely.

Is there any reason for this which I can address? As I am at a loss as to why this has happened.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Hi Ed,
Our www.tax.uk.com website is hosted within a folder called "tax" at www.websteraccounts.co.uk

Hence if someone types www.tax.uk.com/accounting.html, they are actually redirected to www.websteraccounts.co.uk/tax/accounting.html

Is this bad practice? Also, with the redirects in place for over 2 months, our page ranks had steadily risen back to their old values from zero when we did the shift. However, as of yesterday, they have dropped back to zero.

Seeking you guidance.

Thanks

Lets see if you can help me figure this one out. My site has been around in some way or form since 1998. As recently as March 06 my website and subpages had been consistently ranked at the top of Google, for terms like "free midi files". and artist searches like "maroon 5 midi files".

Then April 06 came and Google dropped my site completely. I figured it was Google just reindexing so I resubmitted my site and the homepage got indexed but only a few of my artist pages did (it seems it was only the artist pages that were directly linked off the homepage).

I have been trying to use every avenue available to find an answer to why I was dropped. I tried Google forums, regular forums, and everywhere in between. I even tried adding a Google Sitemap to help, but Google is having trouble accessing the xml file. I do not have any logic in my .htaccess file nor my robots.txt file that would block a Googlebot.

So now I am plum out of ideas. I read one of your comments made to a user about removing duplicate listings, so I went ahead and removed a duplicate listing of my site from my old URL. So that should be gone too.

Thanks

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone knows of a quick fix for getting a .com site listed under "pages from the uk"?

I've scanned through the above but couldnt see anything.

Cheers,

David

ps. please visit my home page and use the contact form =D

Hello Ed,

I had come across your Blog (http://blog.tn38.net/ ) and found some excellent information that I had not seem before. I myself have a question for you, so here it goes. Approx. a month ago I bought the domain name www.calgaryweddingphotographer.ca so ( I thought) when someone searched calgary wedding photographer, viola my site would come up.....not the case. Anyway my problem is that I was ranking in Google, I would type my name into Google (Gabe McClintock) and calgaryweddingphotographer.ca was the 1st link...all seemed okay. And then about a week and half ago, it all dissapered. Even when I type www.calgaryweddingphotographer.ca directly into google, nothing. Any suggestions I could give my web guy, as he says he really has no idea and is not sure what we can do to rectify this. I have other sites that are all the same (www.perspectiveye.com and www.perspectiveeye.com ) So I am not sure if this would cause the problem. I also tried your suggestion of typing +www.calgaryweddingphotographer.ca directly into google, however nothing , again, comes up. Ed if you could help me out it would be greatly appreciated as I would estimate 30% of my business comes from Google searches. Once again I thank you for any help, suggestions or solutions that you could pass along.

Cheers,
Gabe

Hi Ed
I hope you can help me too :-)
My site www.bohofashionjewellery.co.uk has up until now been climbing up the google listings nicely for a UK search on fashion jewellery, settling at around page 19 (which hasn't been too bad for a relatively new site) I check the sites position everyday, and today I discover it's no longer in the listings for my keyword anywhere? I've no idea what it is I might have done, I have been trying to track down whether I have a dodgy link partner, as I've started to notice my site address being spammed in blogs (not by me, but claiming to be by me) and so have contacted webmasters wherever possible to ask for these listings to be removed (I'm not sure what to do about the blogs that have no contact email address?). Have you any ideas why I've been penalised?

Hello - After many months, my website finally made it to page 1 of google results. The other night, google crawled my site, and now my site is nowhere to be seen in the results. All my links are relevant, and all my SEO has been by the book. Why would I disappear, and how can I get back to page 1?

My site www.whereincity.com count on google has gone down from 40000 to 723 on google. Its ranking has suddenly gone down from 9000 to 50000 over a period of days. Though we changed the server location from one hosting to another, but I am not sure if it should impact the ranking.

WE are getting panikcy here. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi,

My jr. high schooler is our website designer. We have had higher ratings in the past; however now our rating has dropped to a zero. I notice that google doesn't pick up any of our backlinks. I'm studying about keywords and ways to improve our ranking and rating. How do we correctly make a backlink with another website? I.e., we've made backlinks but for some reason google doesn't see them. We are currently redesigning the website to fill it with key words and headers (the new pages aren't uploaded yet). What's funny though, is one of our older websites (which we don't even really use but it still exists) has a higher rating than our current website! Would sure appreciate help! Thank you :) Susie

Our website: www.trunorthmusic.com
the old website with a higher ranking:
http://www.trunorth.lake-roesiger.net

I was dropped by Google in April, and then cleaned up the site after some over enthusiastic keywords, I was back in within a few weeks after email thm direct. But yesterday I found I have been dropped again, can't understand it now.

Hello Ed,
I just found this forum and have found it very helpful! Our website used to be on the first page for terms such as "baby gifts" and "new baby gifts" now we are nowhere to be found. It is a well established site with a page ranking of 5. Can you please shed some light on what is the problem? I don't know where to begin to fix the problem.

Hi,

I recently submitted my website to the top search engines. For a while I had the website ranked on the google, but now it does not show at all. but it does show up on yahoo.

Can you please let me know what I can do to get relisted on google

Best regards,
Amol

Hi Ed.
We've been in business for few months now, constantly working to optimize our site following Google guidelines. We've reached some result, but we're still astonished by how Google seems to change the listing position on a daily basis.
We're PR 7, pushing the site mainly for the “license music” keyword, together with a few more.
For that keyword in particular, we seem to go from a second page position to disappear completely for a bit, to then reappear again after a few days and so on. Same could be said for other keywords we're working on like "free indie music": the listing position change greatly in few days.
One more strangeness: when we check for back links in Google with link:www.oursite.com, we always get a fix number (22) even if we’ve sure to have much more than that.
Any light on this two?

Thanks for your help and keep up the good work!

Hi,

My site has been online since October 2005. Recently I have been looking at improving my natural listings and have discovered that there was some hidden text on some of my pages. However in spite of this hidden text (which I have removed) yahoo and msn have crawled my whole site. However google refuses to go past the home page --- is this a penalty for the hidden text? Now that the hidden text has been removed and I have optimised the page is google likely to crawl deeper on my site -- or is this just a way to keep me using adwords???

Hi Ed,
Reading through your blog you seem to have a lot of experience with how google works, so I thought I'd see if you can shed some light on an issue. I've setup an SAT Prep site at www.satprepplan.com and have been dutifully asking related sites (like guidance counseling sites) for links. I've collected about 30 so far over 3 months, msn shows 27 of them if you do a link:www.satprepplan.com search. However, google still shows no results for link: and the page has no pagerank. Does google update PR and links at the exact same time, and does this take 3 months or is something else going on?
Cheers,
Kyle

Hi Ed.
My site was listed in google and for some reason has dissappeared, i have quite a lot of sites linking to me (and ive checked them all and im there, but this doesnt seem the case when i do a link check)
Im on page 1 on both yahoo and msn, but really need to get on google, so any advice you can offer me would be much appreciated.
Thank You
Danni

Hi,
I am helping my dad to sort out his site so we can get his site listed on Google.co.uk (page 1 or 2 would be nice) as he paid several companies (not at the same time) to do some SEO work and all they did was to add some links to the bottom of the page which redirect the user to HTML pages that was written in MS Word that contained so many HTML errors.

Before I started, no Images had ALT tags, incorrect title, description and keywords. His site was listed on Page 1 of Google using keywords "Quad Quads" but these keywords is not what we wanted, so I have made several changes to the site.

The site sells Quad bikes, so one of the keywords that I want to use is "Quad Bikes" but he site is not listed in google (it there but on on page 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc).

Just woundered where I am going wrong.

Many thanks

Paul Phillips

My site is not appearing in google. It was update very recently (before 15 days). Another site updated in the same days appearing in google but this not(funhomefinder.com). Can anybody help me .

Hello..

Our site has been consistently listed in the top 10, generally between 5 and 8, for the search 'extreme sports' on Google.
This is a genuine ranking as that is our business subject matter.

We have been going for years, and never dropped out of this position.

Today we are nowhere to be seen on Google for that search, however, all our other pages appear to be ok, and all the usual sites that surround us are still in their positions.. I did notice with some interest that DMOZ appears to have 'stolen' our slot, after consistently ranking lower than us and refusing to list us for several years, without explanation.

We are still in the top ten on MSN and Yahoo.

But going through page after page of listings on Google for the search 'extreme sports' doesn't even list us until about page 5 or 6, and for our blog only..

Can anyone explain why this has happened?

Thanks.

Hi Ed, my friend says her site's ranking on google drop from number 27 to 85. I search the work "quinceanera" on www.google.com, it shows on 85, but when I typed in it's ip 64.233.179.104(got it from my router's log), and search again, it shows on 27 now. Any idea??? Thanks a lot.

HI,

I read your Blog and I would like to know why my site is not having any inbound links. I do have a good number of related websites which links to my website but they are not showing when i am typing link:www.bepenfriends.com. for this query i am getting only 21 sites. But i am sure i have more. My referer logs show more than that.

Can you help me to find the problem. More over some two days back I found a strange thing that only 81 pages got indexed. but I have 13,000 pages in my site. Mostly the dating profiles which are URL Rewritten. Can you help me where I am doing wrong.

Thanks
ALbert
http://www.bepenfriends.com

Hey there, first of all, thanks for the great article on Google.

im hoping you could shed some light on my situation, basically, the site has been very well listed in Google for the past few months, if you searcehd for the movie reviess that i do, even "Superman Review" used to come up first page, but now all of a sudden, its no where to be found. I AM listed in google, and i have 9000+ pages spidered in the the index, but i no longer come up for the search "Teenfront" which i used to be at the very top. I have a PR4 and some decent in bound links, any help?

We used to list very well for images if you searched for "wedding gowns singapore" or "divine couture". We still list highly in the text section but all of our images have dropped off. I am guessing google now objects to alt tags on images but not sure why. Have you seen this ?

Thanks for your help! I discovered why I was dropped from Google!

I was getting hack attempts from IPs in Asia, so I decided to block the whole range of IPs from Asia. Turns out this was a very bad idea, since Google has crawlers all over the world - I had blocked the Google Bot along with all the hackers!

Unblocking the IPs fixed the issue. I just have to live with the hack attempts...

Thanks again!
Chris