Before we launched last week a search for 'makers-online.co.uk' would return http://www.makers-online.co.uk as the #1 result. However after we launched Googlebot came and indexed some 200 new pages and shortly after that the whole site disappeared from the index. Google's webmaster tools report that the site is not indexed having previously reported that it was, but the reason why is not clear. This is bad obviously. Is it normal for new sites? What can I do?
Okay, good to know. What's the actual reason for it? Is it better to launch slowly by adding a few pages at a time?
Yes - depending on the size of your site it may be better to add pages slowly. Google may consider it suspicious if you come out of the starting gates with a hundred million pages, but I believe that 200 is well within the realms of normality. It's more important to add links slowly. If you were overly aggressive to start with you may be sandboxed for a while but you will eventually bounce back proving you haven't done anything overtly dodgy.
Thanks TheCrabb. I'm still kind of baffled though - I didn't add too many pages and have hardly any incoming links. I guess all I can do is keep going and wait for Googlebot to return and see what happens then. It's going to really suck if that takes months though.
Once a new site disappears in SERPs after couple of day of its launch, then the real hard work starts to get it back to that position. Sometimes it take ages to achieve that.