Hi, I'm in charge of about 50 small or medium websites that are relatively old (5 to 10 years) and with page rank (4/5). Yesterday, about one third of them have disappeared from Google's index. Has anybody experienced the same problem ? I don't think it's a problem with my websites, as all are on different IP, with different whois info and all are totally ok with google guidelines (see for example: music-law.com, lesmeilleurs.fr, objectifgrandesecoles.com, democratie-electronique.org). I got this problem in the past with more minor websites, and I've never been able to find a solution. I asked google for a reinclusion (google.fr/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843) but it has never worked. Any hint will be much appreciated. thanks david
We had the same thing happen to a really quality site last week. For our top ranking term we just feel off the planet. We are letting things settle to see if it comes back as there is definitely something strange going on with them. did you do a site: and inurl: for some of the domains to make sure they are still indexed?
I did some looking around at all the forums and this is getting worse by the day. Quite a lot of well established sites either disappearing or dropping in rankings BIG TIME. And with some I've looked at (and my own) there is no rhyme or reason. One person said it reminded them of the Jagger update and I really have to agree. Unfortunately Google will never say they screwed up and might not even tell anyone there's an algo change so we are going to have to wait it out. The one thing you DON'T want to do is knee jerk react until we see what happens. I've seen people start changing stuff when something like this happened and when things straightened out they had damaged themselves.
I have this now and have had that before, not on many sites at once but each at the time sort of speak. But it always looked like some kind of short (overnight)absence while the update was taken place. The stranger thing I am facing now is no cache for one of my websites ( home page and subpages) and still, it's ranking as before: top 1-3 for many keywords. And the page rank went up this April to.What is going on? Is google saving on resources or what.
The SERP issue is affecting several of my sites, but they still have pages indexed, in fact they all seem to have more pages indexed than they did before. All have dropped 100+ positions for everything on the SERP though, including their own domain names. The sites are totally unrelated and are on different servers. One of the sites is nearly 10 years old with years of stable positions on the SERP, all from natural backlinks accumulating over time.
Things are changing a lot again! What can you really do? Focus on getting links that actually generate traffic. You'll never win the Google game in the long term. Google is beholden to the almight dollar and it's shareholders. In one way or another the people with the money will have the rankings. They are thowing in a lot of "extra" stuff at the top of competitive pages effecitively knocking down the Organic listings to as few as 7 on the first page. Google is the big player we would all like to score with, however there is still a good amount of traffic to be gained by focusing efforts on the "other" players and getting good links. If you search the listings for your niches you'll probably see that old domains that have the keywords embedded in the primary URL position "www.keywordhere.com" (quotes to prevent clicking) seem to be doing a little better than usual. There is inherent trust in this because it's a rarity and if you want one of those domains in today's market you're going to have to buy it. There will always be a 1 through 10, nobody complains until they drop.
Take a look at your awstats....if the Google bot has stopped crawling your sites, they may be banned. Usually Google bot only visits homepage of banned sites.