Hello DP members, I own a fairly successful website(mp3 SE link is in my signature ) and was doing well until the 3rd of may when for some reason google reduced my indexed page count from over 1 million to 190,000 which resulted in a drop of about 80% of my traffic.I went through the google guidelines and as far as i can see i am not in violation of any rules set by google. The domain is over a year old. I even sent a reconsideration mail to google to which I got one of their canned replies and nothing has changed to date. Heres what happened, My site actually uses 2 servers but around beginning of may I had to use only 1 of the servers due to some issues which led to server overloading and slow site speeds( for 3 days google reported my site as being slower than 98% of the sites) and during this period google webmaster tells me google crawler got many "not found" errors (over 600).Also pingdom reported a downtime of about 4% over the 4 days but after these 4 day i got the server issues sorted out but my traffic had dropped and so had my indexed page count. Another reason i believe this could have happened is because of a site i found which has copied my entire site( www mp3ninjas com) maybe google thought mine was the duplicate content? Though i am gaining back my indexed pages as google is reindexing the pages I would still like to find out the reason for the penalty so i can be careful in the future. Any help regarding this is appreciated.I would also like to be advised on what course of action i should take. Thanks in advance
hi sarsh_11, It wasn't a penalty, the same thing happened to me , google crawled my site around the time of last PR update, server was down so google could not find my site and dropped it from the listings. Within a week,most of the site was listing again and after 2 weeks, everything is back to normal. Think of it like a dvd store ,your not going to put a cover of a dvd on the shelf if you don't have the dvd in stock, same with google, they are not going to index something that is not there.
I have heard about this happening right across the internet in general, lots of people are talking about it. My experience when this has happend to me in the past is that google does correct itself but it may take a few weeks. I really don't know why it happens and it may have nothing to do with the duplicate site or your server problems, my guess is that it was just coincidence. Give it a few weeks and see what happens but in the meantime keep building backlinks to your site
Duplicates do lead in penalties which is bad, because duplicate content reflects on both the copied content, and original content; which in my opinion is not fair.
It is because google spidered the site while it was down and found no content! The listings will reappear in time!
Hi Same thing happened to me 6 months ago when my site was offline and I am still to get traffic back to its original level.
well in my case its already been 2 weeks and nothing seems to have changed.... hope everything gets back to normal.
My site only had 30-40 pages indexed, i would expect the delay to be due to the number of pages you have.
Same thing happened to me and it's been over 2 weeks. My pages are not being indexed again and I went from page 1 results to 8.
I doubt its happening to everyone anyway if it was a penalty shouldnt i lose all my indexed pages? correct me if i am wrong
Ya it happens when the site is down for something and crawling take place it does not list and drop it but again if you are back with the fresh content it soon get listed...
it doesn't necessarily have to be a penalty where you lose all your pages in google's index. Your site could just be getting a "dampening" factor. It's most likely duplicate content.
It can be a duplicate content. If you are so much sure about penaly the submit reconsideration request. I dont think there is a penalty.