Hi guys, I have had my site up for a few years now, but haven't done much to the site, in about november last year I rebuilt the site with a content management system, and began using google webmaster tools and analytics to monitor my site. Here is my question. For some reason one of the pages on the site which is linked to on every page of the site, and is included in the sitemap xml WAS indexed, but now has vanished when i search "site:www.mydomain.com" Any reason why it would have it listed then more recently just remove it completely? Thanks
Try searching for a quote on your page, and then use the site search. I have found in the past that the links feature on Google isn't as comprehensive as it could be. i.e. "words from the page I am hunting for" site:www.mydomain.com/ Check the WebMaster Tools area and see if Errors are coming up on your sitemap. Take out blank lines before and after the xml listing (I have found that these don't pop up as errors, but some times it affects the reading of the xml file anyway), google isn't perfect. Uclue.com (the place all the Google Answers Researchers went ), just opened up a Private Question feature, so now you can ask questions and get answers without telling everyone in the world as well. Start Looking for them on YouTube soon as well.
Thanks for the suggestion, I regularly check in the webmaster tools for any errors etc and it isn't listed in their, I think it may be due to duplicate content? I at one point have very similar text on the page in question and on the home page, I have since changed it just to make sure, I have heard google penalizes pages with duplicate content, but I didn't realize it may disregard the page completely, could this be the case?
They use to simply disregard the whole site, so maybe they are getting soft. I haven't been a Researcher with them for over a year, so I'm not up on the 'latest' with Google any more. It is quite possible however that they aren't indexing a page on your site that is exactly or near exactly like another page. Also, there are other reasons they "miss" a page, such as shadow text and other little tricks people like to try to use.
I have seen this happen, as well. I have had pages drop out of sight in the Google index, and then reappear two to five day later, like it went out for a drink and forgot to come home. Try using a bot emulator -they're all over the net. Is your page there? Are there any errors at all in your crawl as indicated in Google webmaster tools? Or you could wait five days for your missing page to wonder home hungover and disheveled...