I'm seeing significant recovery on all DC's for the site: command for one that was hit late. It used to have 130,000 indexed... dropped down to 500 for weeks. Was back to 900 yesterday and today is up to 11,000 on all DCs. Traffic started increasing from G yesterday.
I saw a lot of my pages re-indexed last week so I thought things were back to normal but this weekend I lost huge amounts of pages again!!!!! Anybody else seeing this? WTF!!
and when you see lots of pages, delve into it. I saw my # spike, but then I looked and after the first few hundred they are supplemental and from august 2005.
Thanks for the warning; I checked and none of them are supplemental. I did get a good trusted IBL for it so it may have been that and not any sort of improvement with G.
same here, I still keep getting pushed back to an index of cached pages from a year again. These pages haven't been on the site for a year!
I just spotted an improvement! Instead of listing more pages that haven't existed for months, today Google listed a page which I thought didn't exist but I forgot to delete. It's an orphaned page - no links to it except from the other non-existent pages Google keeps wanting listing. I figured I might as well take advantage of it so I've just turned the orphaned page into a mini-sitemap - let's see if Googlebot is smart enough to at least follow the new links. I swear googlebot has got to be heavily into some really bad drugs lately.
I always like a search engine that suggests pages that SHOULD be on someone's site. Actual existing pages be damned, show me what I'm missing!
It's here (modified version): http://forum.psychlinks.ca/hot-topics.php If this works, I'll just get a list of all the other pages Google thinks I should have and recreate them as doorway pages. (Note: This is another page that was last updated a year ago, May or June 2005, and disappeared a couple of months later in a site redesign. It was inadvertently left on the server but, other than the other nonexistent pages in Google's index, as far as I know had no incoming links left.)
Now we're talking! Minstrel, please let us know if it works, I've got plenty of old pages showing in the results that I can rebuild... and it's easier than copying a site that HAS been deindexed into a subdirectory of a site that HASN'T been deindexed (works pretty well I understand, but with possible long-term duplicate content problems to keep an eye on). Doubles the size of the internet of course, but hey who's counting server space?
I'm still down to 555 out of my 30,000 I had before...I wonder how much longer it will be until I'm fully re-indexed =/
Its now been so long since the site command stopped working its clear to me that its gone the same was as the link: command. My prediction is that we will never see accurate results with the site: command again.
Not show the total # of pages doesn't bother me. It is the fact it is showing old pages from mid 2005 for pages that do not even exist. This is what I am witnessing and that is just absurd.
Interesting idea there. I'll resolve to using Yahoo! and MSN for the time being to get a better idea of actual pages being searched after.
if the site: command no longer works, how can people who use google search as their site's search function work properly?
I've simply given up on google. Like so many here I'm seeing my sites showing old pages in SERPS and the site command. It's just insane. I hadn't visited here in awhile, and I hate to say this, but I'm glad to see others here that I know do better SEO work than I do, and yet they're suffering the same fate. I've lost hundreds of pages. All WH. All clean as a whistle. Or at least I thought they were. But even setting that aside I can't see why I keep getting hits for pages that no longer exist and haven't for months. Old blog pages (PHP) have been hit especially hard. Google simply refuses to deindex, yet at the same time they won't index the new one. They even deindexed my google XML sitemap page on one of my sites. And they won't put it back! Now how in the name of blazes do I fix that??? Uuugh. I give up. Screw'em. At least Yahoo shows a more accurate index count than google does. They may be slow, but at least they're accurate.
The other thing I'm seeing lately is that Yahoo!Slurp is going nuts indexing the pages Googlebot is ignoring, like 30-40 bots at a time. You snooze, you lose, Google.