lo fellas, ive had a look at the forum and sandbox issues, but none seem to relate directly to my website. in november, we had aroud 400 pages in google, we were happy, then when we came back from christmas holidays, we had about 10, and since then the pages dissapeard one by one until now we have 2 pages left. at one point, we had 3, an archive page, an index page and a survey page. not long ago, the index page dissapeard from google completely so we only had the archive and survey, after sending an email to google, the index page came back but the archive page dissapeard like the rest. (seemed rather suspicious) (all site searches were done with the "within 3 month" option) at one point google was crawling over 90% of the site but not indexing a single page, and now, the last cache page was on the 29th of april and weve not seen google bot much at all. is this a feature of sandbox? or is it possible something else has occured? Paul
someone move this or am i going insain? im sure i put this in Search Engines -> Google --- edit --- (nm, i see, i posted in the wrong place, my mistake)
The sandbox relates to google waiting a period of time before your links are counted. If your site is over 6 months old and has gone though some major change, you can pretty much rule that out. Dropping pages is nothing unusual for google. I do not think your email to google had anything to do with it the index showing up. The google bot will spider sites with a PR5 and up more often. It also likes sites that have new content. On one of my sites, Google has presently gone back over a year for the cache, even though it has cached at least six never versions. All inner pages get a new cache every week. It's just google. Do your pages show PR? No hidden text or other blackhat SEO? Hard to say without a link.
thanks for the quick reply, so if its not sandboxing then i guess i have other problems. i just installed the google tool bar, and my index page has 1 / 10 pr. no hidden text or anything like that at one stage it almost seemed that anything that was php driven with a ?id= etc wasnt indexed even though it was crawled over, but any normal pages ie, index.php, sitemap.php etc were crawled over. the dissapearing page was a bit odd becase its almost as if they stripped one page, realised they stripped the wrong one when we sent the email, put that one back and took the other one out. but if this is normal behavour ill accept that. (sorry i cant post the site atm)
It used to be that the bots had problems crawling anything after the "?". I don't know if this is still a problem because I use mod_rewrite to change those into more cleaner url's. I would suggest getting more links to increase your PR1 and experiment with mod_rewrite.
Also - how many pages link to your site? I'd work on increasing the number of links and thereby the PR and ignoring this problem - (there's nothing you can do about it, anyway) - Google will start valuing your site more...
From msn, we have about 6 or so pages linking to us, from google, we seem to have 0. although there are some in there. i just did a search, and now we have 15 pages, half of which were cached on the 24th april the rest from the 14th and 15th. you would think that thoes that were cached on the 24th april that show up now should of shown up on/before the 13th may when i posted the first post (well i think so anyway) but this is google afterall. regarding the "?" issue, at one stage it crawled over all them with no problems, but since the first time we lost most of our pages, i rewrote some links to see if they would get crawled over using mod_rewrite, but even thoes links didnt get indexed thanks for the help