Google Dropping Sites
November 7th, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Interrupting our regular programming for an update. John Andrews had his blog dropped from Google recently. That makes the fourth site I’ve seen recently that has very similar conditions to one my websites being banned. I still don’t have a good answer for what happened. Did we hit the leading edge of some new filter? Are the data centers ferfluky? Why are will still showing the Google toolbar pagerank but not in the index?
Sphere It
November 7th, 2006 at 11:41 am
I’m willing to bet the ferfluky route. Seems pretty odd for this to happen so sudden.
November 7th, 2006 at 11:59 am
funny thing is 3 of my sites lost index/cache in google but have increase in pr, some jumping to pr 5 on like 20 datacenters
November 7th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
I imagine you know this, but toolbar PR is served from an outdated set of information (4 months old, or something) while the crawl/SERP is updated all the time. It’s not unusual for them to be out of sync.
November 7th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Every site I’ve had before that was banned totally lost toolbar PR. Not sure if this a new way things get banned or not.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
On Oct 20th half of the 3150 articles I had on a site over the last 4 years were dropped completely from the Google index and I would do deep linking so they wouldn’t fall wayside.
Yet the pages still maintain their pr2-pr4 on the toolbar.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
I’m in the exact same boat here.. had around 4K pages removed for one site, but all retain their PR (homepage has a PR6 even).. Even loaded the site into Goog webmaster tools about 2 weeks ago, and loaded a site map, and still nothing. Part of me thinks that Google is treating this site as new, and needs to re-index everything..baffled though.
November 7th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
4k of pages of what? spammy articles that are used to own a niche? can I get a look at these sites please I do not see anything of value on my sites dropping off…
November 7th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
“4k of pages of what…”
I agree Aaron, but that’s why I’m curious about my blog. It’s online since July, just a WP blog, and has a decent readership via RSS and SEs.
I, too, have seen nothing but success on my SEO’d sites. It sure seems you are in a crap shoot with a standard setup these days, as opposed to an SEO project (I know, the party line for SEO, but not everybody agrees).
November 7th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
John - Could it be extreme competition? Just in case you haven’t noticed; Rand, Lee and others are throwing an encyclopedia of keywords at the engines. Every single post they make has targeted intentions, this makes it hard for those of us who do not strive for attention.
For instance if I do an “interview with rand fishkin” why does Lee Odden show up for that phrase?
Well, you get where I am going with this…
November 8th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
RE:keywords
Ahh…I don’t agree every post has “targeted intentions” or perhaps they are just not trying hard enough, lol. But getting banned is not the same as not winning a competitive SERP. Getting banned is about making mistakes that trigger filters or winning in competition with Google (the hand ban - they hate to lose on their own turf). When a WP blog gets banned it’s important to check what’s up in case it’s a new thing… as Michael pointed out it’s new to see a ban that leaves TBPR in place as well as back links.
I’m thinking I should plead an apology to Matt Cutts for the Cuttletts post, or perhaps an Apology to Google for a few of those a-Google posts
November 9th, 2006 at 4:19 am
It is my experience that my only site which was banned by Google was the one where I used some black hat techniques like using sneaky redirects. Google also banned my other site which linked to that spammy site. But that was my fault.
I think it is natural for some old pages going out of the SERPs especially if those pages are from forums or blogs - as older pages will move away from the root.
November 9th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
If this was anything like what I have seen on my sites this looks very mcuh like data loss on their side. A few of my spammy spammy sites have been dropped - but then all of sudden returned in a few days without me doing anything about it.
November 25th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
I’m in the boat too with one of my clients–a totally legit site that was doing nothing heinous at all. They were using the bruce clay “linkmaps” tool and just a few high-pr rented links, but I can’t imagine that being enough to get the site thrown out of the index.
Pr is still showing, inbound links are still showing, reinclusions were filed, but for whatever reason the entire site with hundreds of pages of unique content have been thrown out entirely.
Ferfluky indeed.