hmm Julia seems you might be onto somthing... any more examples of this ??? , maybe I am being penalised for UNrelated links.
my website is for web design company, 3 years ago I started SEO and promoted it and did link exchange with many unrelated websites. Shopping, ringtones, legal, travel, etc. Now I have about 4500 IBLs pointed to the website according to Yahoo, however G sees and counts only 250 of them... So I deleted all unrelated links from my site and sent explanation to the websites owners. I did what depended on me. But there are hundreds of links to my website from strange domains, I don't know their purpose, maybe it's something like doorways or keywords spammy sites, I am not familar with this. It looks like they grab content from link pages of other sites and place it as their own content.
Yeah alll the factors you pointed out are good reasons why they drop pages. But since you didnt give your URL its hard to say.
Hmm Julia I would agree with that in pricipal however with one of my sites it seesm having unrelated links hasnt affected it, do your rankings keep improving? ben
I too am suffering from this issue, the first thing I did was cut the co-op and I am not being indexed but I am being found for more terms by google. I am going through a very strict evaluation of sites I link too and trying to remove links from unrelated sites. However I find it annoying and dangerous to think that some body could spam you from a bunch of crap pages and destroy your goole cached paged count (If bad links really are the issue) I am getting really pissed with all this crap from GOOGLE over the past year. Hoever I am sticking strictly to thier code and creating quality pages of useful content for my users and gaining links from quality, related sites. I hope this all pays off for me as I have hit a real plataue with regard increasing traffic numbers and its reflecting badly on my buisness and my stress levels. Here is hoping Jamie (ps my sig block is going as well on all forums except those related to my industry))
OK..., site:mysite.com picks up even less pages now than ever (600), yet my google adsense money maker has shot up 300% the whole week (7 days now).... my ad views are way up yet site: still doesnt work properly... interestingly, even when I had 6000 pages I wasnt getting as many ad impressions.... very weird though I like it! I still am missing quite a few pages theoretically in the index... lets see what happens.
You can blame this all on Big Daddy. Google hopefully will fix it. But it seems stupid how you can lose pages for bad links? I could buy a few bad links for my competitor and he would lose pages and possibly go down in the SERPS?