I have a big site. In the good 'ol days I used to have over 5,000 pages indexed at Google. I then started using an advertising network that put up a gateway page in front of my pages. When a user clicked on one of my links, he got sent to the gateway, and then was forwarded to the page he wanted to look at. This totally screwed up my site. The spider got tangled in the gateway and couldn't index my pages any more. Google started to think that all my pages were the gateway and dropped them for duplicate content. I lost pages in a matter of weeks without even figuring what was going wrong. I finally realized it was the gateway when I only had 518 pages left in Google's index. So, I quickly changed my code and untangled it so the spiders could walk around all my site again. Now I am seing some quick improvement, but this is the weird part... my pages are showing as a cached supplemental result... with a cache date "as retrieved on 20 Mar 2004 10:29:00 GMT." I don't remeber exactly, but I am almost sure that that is the date when my site went live for the first time. This is totally weird, never seen this happen before. My only guess is that google is using these pages to fill out the space while it gets a fresh cache of all my lost pages. I am showing now 1,610 indexed pages, and traffic is slowly starting to come back. Anything similar ever happen to you?
Especially in light of their most recent patent filing, I get the impression they will always keep old caches so they reference document change. That way they can offset recent caches against old ones and see how the document (site) evolves. Then they make judgments on whether your change means it's a quality document or not. I'm not suprised to see them reverting back to the initial cache whilst waiting to get the latest.
It is just so weird seeing the pages that I used to open the site.. brings back so many memories... lol
It's a good moment to reflect on your progress... Did you get everything done you wanted over the space of those 12 months?
I've done much more than what I ever dreamed... I started that site without even knowing how to open Frontpage. I then joined Seochat and Digitalpoint and learned a lot. Now my site has top 5 rankings at Google and Yahoo, gets about 7,000 daily visitors, and puts almost $2k in my bank acount every month. Moral of the story... never quit. I felt like giving up many times, but decided to continue, and now I am as happy as can be
Let me know when you get to your goal in traffic and are ready to start advertising on your site, I can put you in contact with the networks I use so you can start earning some $$