I think you absolutely right. I've lost over 80% of my pages, they all were PR3 or higher. I thought it was somehow my fault, but now I know it wasn't!
You may have the same issue as your mate above you with your <title> tags...Google likes those alot and each should be individual and specific to the page...helps set the theme/topic.. When looking at Google and web pages sometimes it helps to look at it as a librarian... your site is a book... the pages are chapters, etc... books have table of content for readers...you should have a sitemap for users.... just a few different correlations for your consideration...
In and out, and in and out....... June 27th, out with a crasch not knowing WTH hit you! Then 2 months of frantic checking of the site, fixing some errors, trying to figure out WTH Google tries to index/crawl pages that are years old and haven't been used for years (where did they find them and decided to use them again???) Pages went supplemental wich cache date 6-8 months old..... August 16th. Started getting traffic again and it lasted up until September 15th when they decided that the site wasn't good enough again! WTH???? Today, October 16th the site is still in the shits when it comes to Google. Thanks God for Yahoo and MSN!! If it wasn't for these 2 SE's no traffic would ever get to my site. I have seen othe posts here in this thread that the dates I have are not the same for other sites. Some did not come back in August and had to wait another month.Not sure about the significance in that
@MikeSwede, If you keep bouncing up and down dramatically in Google's SERPs you should seriously look at on site factors that could be causing this. While I've seen lots of reports from people (including myself) where they dropped in Google's SERPs for a month or two and then recovered, I haven't been seeing all that many reports of people yoyoing up and down in the SERPs. If you are using something like the COOP network, get rid of it as you may be occassionally linking to "bad neighborhood" sites.
the coops is somthing ive never participated in , always freaked me out , however freaked out now anyway, just gotta motivate myself to actually start trying to recover it.
Just to keep everyone updated, my site made a full recovery today. I think in part to a re-inclusion report through Gooogle.
When did you submit your re-inclusion request? Is you site absolutely clear? No link buying/selling? No coop? No blackhat?
I am not using the COOP and not linking to any bad neighborhoods. After the June crasch I made changes, removed pages that might have been considered duplicate content, change titles and other meta tags and everything else I could find. When the site came back in August I thought everything was fixed. It lasted for a month and then the next crasch happened. So now what?
I'm noticing a lot of changes in serps for a sort of competitive keywork. Luckly Of my 4 sites they are always somewhere in the top 5 I pwn that niche
Well here's the deal, after several months of exhaustively fixing everything I could, I finally figured, what the hell and submitted a re-inclusion fix last week. I explained the only thing I could find in the whole site was one page with several display:none style tags. It was never done intentionally, it was done to create a blog aggregator where if you clicked on the title, it would open up the post. Needless to say, I said it's not worth it if it's causing problems. So I sent them a re-inclusion explaining things and then a couple days ago, it was like a light switch had turned the power on. Traffic tripled. I don't know if that one page had anything to do with it, or if Google just took the penalty off because they thought I was nice, or what. But I'm grateful the craziness is over and people can find the page. (Thank you Mr/Ms Google Engineer.) Yes it's completely white-hat, no tricks.... obviously I had made a mistake, but it wasn't intentional. I think I'll steer clear of making and changes to that site anytime soon. Oh and stay away from that display:none...
ascensions, thank you for your detailed explanation. I don't now is it really display:none style issue or something also, all from us having different stories. But it looks like one of my penalized site was recovered as well. What I did just after penalty till now: 1. Jun 20 - I have noticed first drop of the traffic and indexed pages 2. Jun 27 - Traffic dropped to 1/10 of the my average values and indexed pages dropped to 600 from 1.5M pages 3. Jul 3 - Coop was removed 4. Between Aug 1 and Aug 10 - Re-inclusion request 5. Between Sep 1 and Sep 10 - All titles, description and keywords tags was assigned with uniques values (not duplicated over the whole site) 6. Between Oct 1 and Oct 10 - Search by site name moved site home page to the 2 page, it was at the 6 or 8 before 7. Oct 20 - Search by site name moved site home page to the first position 8. Oct 21 - Site returned to the serp for targeted competitive keywords to the 1 or 2 pages (it was 1 or 2 position before) But I can't see any large traffic increase still. I think it's because of not all pages indexed by google and googlebot requests about 1000 pages each day, but it was 10-15K before. Here is my story. I hope it will be helpful at least for anyone.
If you did not receive a reply from Google then that was not the issue. To be perfectly honest I would seriously doubt a that a bit of styling was what effected your stance with Google. Afactory Link coop - Articifical link building - nothing more needs be said. you also mentioned some other things and I am wondering if the biggest issue would be the 1.5 million pages????...you would need to be a huge retailer, large news group for this to make sense....what is your business if I may ask. The other issue is one site wide header file, (single title & metas) kills more sites and sends them off to never never land than most other issues.. Peace
Well I noticed there was a "deep crawl" and site re-cache around the same time. Honestly I'm not sure what caused it to get fixed, but as long as it sticks, I'm happy.
well an update from me site:mobile-heaven.com Results 1 - 10 of about 726 from mobile-heaven.com for site:w ww.mobile-heaven.com[/url] Results 1 - 4 of about 30 from ww w.mobile-heaven.com its increased, anyone know how to sort this problem, I know its a big error the ww w.mob vs mob any tips? they both seem to be increasing slowly however need to catalyse the whole thing
Use the "Google Preferred Domain" option within Google sitemaps. It sorted the issue within 2 weeks for me that way.
They happen usually by people building links to your website. When that happens it dilutes the PR of your site. You maybe able to find an isappi rewrite rule?? much like Unix cannonical url rewrite for use on your windows server or perhaps use the Google Preferred Domain as mentioned above.