I had that a few months ago when one of my sites went supplemental. Pages that I deleted in 2004 and early 2005 were showing up as indexed again. It was bonkers. I did a reinclusion request as GG suggested on WMW and it went back to normal later on.
That is something I can't completely explain in this post, it sounds like a restoration of a backup or something. Which brings me back to an older thread about Google purchasing AMD chips... and specifically, my speculation that they had gotten some Intel machines with floating point problems. Why else would you restore a backup unless data had corrupted to an unrecoverable state? Eric Schmidt says "Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis." Perhaps they took a bunch offline, swapped out, and put them back up with the same data on the hard drive later? I would not sweat the coop, recip links, etc. until they can get the known obvious problems in their own house fixed. You cannot tell the transmission in your car is broken until you fix the flat tire and try to drive it...
I have lost hundreds of pages just overnight and old, very old pages, are showing up in the SERPS. Restored an old backup? Google is just so f$%d up right now so we all should DENY Google to index our sites and cache them!! Then they can sit there with a spam sites with scraped content
I think Matt Cutts is giving us BS information IMO. I've said this before but Matt Cutts lives in an unrealisitic world. Maybe some of that indexing info is true but I find most of it just to scare the living heck out of us.
ok, now I am convinced that nothing has changed since jagger. Just like the end of last year, the same crap is happening to me. No sooner than I decide I have had several pages de-indexed, half of them just reappeared on one site. it is the same irritating crap that has been going on for several months now.
Okay...I re-read the original post and then slogged through the (at current) 184 comments on that post -- did he completely backpedal from the original explanation? At first, it seemed like poor IBL would hurt you. Now, (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/#comment-27735) they are just ignored. At first, off-topic was considered poor OBL and could hurt. Now, it can continue to be off-topic, but must be non-spammy. At first, don't artificially get inbound links. Now, (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/#comment-27717) a few more IBLs are suggested. My take? Not entirely sure. I understand that this is his job, so I have to cut him some slack. However, there are some pretty mixed messages coming out of this.
I fully support that all of you guys are taking your sites off google. That could really help my ranking
BUt you'll end up in a bad neighborhood with all spam sites in the index and get booted off of Google just because of that, so what's left in their index is Google Pages, Google Health and all other crap they think they can make money from and Google will be playing in their own sandbox for years to come!
It comes back to the old argument. If an irrelevant link is detrimental to a site, what's to stop someone pointing lots of irrelevant links at a competitor and affecting their SERPs?
Indeed. As a couple of others have said, that particular blog entry by Cutts is not one he should be proud of. It's an exercise in Public Relations that would make a politician proud. It's insulting.
Cutts has a disclaimer. Which really just puts his comments in the same credibility level as many other interested web masters. If he is not stating official Google policies then, I'd rather read opinions from many other people who have no bias or alternative motives to state their views. I think the last 2 months for Google have been very hard. They are not providing good search results and they have spent a lot of money trying to do so. Spam is really stopping their goal.
The whole inbound links issues seems to get murkier and murkier (or more murky?). Buried deep in the comments, Matt responds: “Sounds like Google is now actually penalizing for poor quality inbound links.†Mike, that isn’t what’s happening in the examples that I mentioned. It’s just that those links aren’t helping the site. David Burdon, no, off-topic links wouldn’t cause a penalty by themselves. Now if the off-topic links are spammy, that could cause a problem. But if a hardware company links to a software package, that’s often a good link even though some people might think of the link as off-topic.
That means nothing. That's just Google protecting itself in case he goes off on a rant and embarrasses them. It's like a parking lot with a sign that says "We are not responsible for your car, or anything else - we just want your money".
Or my all time favorite, posted in most Canadian federal government buildings: "In case of fire, do not panic."
But my point was that he is just expressing his opinion most of the time. I'm sure he drops words like "digital" and "link" to scare people away from joining up with the Coop. They don't know how to handle that problem which involves their page rank and text link part of their algo. There are too many black hats. The Coop is a challenge for them I think for obvious reasons. Matt Cutts can't reveal too much about Google but he can really influence people to do or not to do things...
Yes, and by telling people Google is fine and it's the webmasters faults he is influencing them to make drastic detrimental changes to their sites and I'm sure some are.