zoundman,
There are a few reasons why your page could have suddenly lost it's
place on Google. I went to the FAQ for Google, and found the page
explaining why this may have happened. For future reference, you can
locate that page here.
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#usedtobe
Page Text:
B. My web pages used to be listed and now they aren't.
1. Changes from one index to the next.
Each time we update our database of web page (about once a month),
our index shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and site
rankings change. If your site was dropped from Google and you have not
made major changes to it in the last month, we will likely pick it up
again in our next index. It's possible your site was simply
inaccessible when our robots tried to crawl it.
You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking
to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in
determining what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages
when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via
hyperlinks. To find out who links to your site, use Google's link:
tool.
It's also possible your rank decreased because other sites were
found and assigned a higher rank. You can be assured that no one at
Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site.
Google's order of results is automatically determined by several
factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our
"Technology Overview" page for more information on how this works.
2. Multiple indices
We update our index about every four weeks. If you happen to enter
the same query repeatedly while we are in the process of posting the
index at our various data centers around the country, it might seem
like you are seeing inconsistent results from Google. What is actually
happening is that you are seeing a result from an 'old' version of our
index one time and a result from a 'new' version the next. Due to the
size of our index, we can not simultaneously post a new index at all
of our data centers, which may result in this behavior for a short
period of time.
3. Other reasons
If your page does not appear at all, here are some other possible
explanations.
* Your site may not have been reachable when we tried to crawl it
because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, we retry
multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be
listed in our current index. If it was a transient problem, your site
will likely show up in the next index, which will be completed in a
few weeks.
* A technical glitch on our side may have caused us to 'miss' your
site. In crawling more than 4 billion pages, our system experiences
hiccups from time to time. Again, this is a transient problem, and
your site will likely show up in the next index. Please be patient
with us during this period, as we are not able to modify our index by
hand to add sites missed in this way.
* The contents of your page or the links pointing to your page
changed significantly and you no longer have a sufficiently high
PageRank, or your page had low PageRank to begin with and a small
change caused you to be dropped from the Google index.
* Your page was manually removed from our index, because it did
not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate
PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was
removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can
cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text
that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up
pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result
in permanent removal from our index. If you think your site may fall
into this category, you might try 'cleaning up' the page and sending a
re-inclusion request to ***** help@google.com *******. We do not make
any guarantees about if or when we will re-include your site.
There is an email address on this page where you can contact should
you have any further questions about this topic.
If this answer requires further explanation, please request
clarification before rating it, and I'll be happy to look into this
further.
Nenna-GA
Google Answers Researcher |
