Hi, My website is about two months old. Google indexed me about a month ago and ranked me fairly well (there is not much competion for the key words I am targeting). Then about 10 days ago, Google still indexed me, but I could not search for any content on my web site. This only lasted about a day. However, the same thing happened about 5 days ago and I have had the same problem since. Previously if I quoted some unusal text e.g. "unsual text unsual text unsual text unsual text " google would find it - or if I entered 3 key words which again were slightly unusual, google would rank it quite highly. Now the only way google will find my website is if I enter www.mywebsite.com or mywebsite.com/webpage.html It is if it has lost the cache of all of the web pages on my website. There are no page desription for the pages either. My web stats show that I am being visited regularly by googlebot. Any clues? Is this happened to people with new website b4? Joe
Google is updating it happens every 3 months or so: more here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=59164
Thanks for the link Stu, I have read through many pages of that link and am not sure that it is relevant to my problem. That post seems to be all about the update affecting PR. My PR was 0 and my problem is not really about ranking, it is that google has no chached link of my site. Is this a sign that google has dropped me? The only record that google has of my site is 8 web page adresses and no content. Is this a bad sign that google has chosen not to chache me or do u think this is something to do with the update? Joe
Actaully if I use the key word checker tool at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ it appears that I am still ranked by google - I orginally thought that the tool must have been using an old chached snapshot.... but when I check today, it says that my ranking has decreased by 4 positions in the last day. Could it be that I am using a different google data centre to what http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ is using and that the update may be affecting me extremely because I am a small / new site?
A lot of the web pages are php pages that come from a database and are made to look static. So yes, a lot of pages may look very similar. I have about 100 result pages. I am working on adding individual content and so far have about about 30 results that are very different. The only have about 20 words in content of which maybe only one word is different Is this likely to be a reason for my site not being cached - I realised that this might be a problem and that is why I am making all pages more individual. If this is the problem.... how serious is the problem?Should I take down the similar pages and would this allow google to resume as normal or am in bigger trouble than that if duplication is indeed the problem. I assumed that google would only not index/cache the pages that were similar rather than penalise the whole site... About 15 pages of my web pages (non db) are completely different, and about 30 db pages are very different Google is not caching any of my pages Joe