All these shops are with the same shop provider and they were all excluded on the same day.
Our shop provider formed a re-inclusion request, and begged for dialog, as they have not had success with the framed guidelines. It's almost the entire webshop industry of a small country that is somewhat affected by this discussion, so I'm hoping you will give it a few minutes.
My shop was reincluded two days later (on December 8, I think), but now without any products. Can you tell me if a penalty is what standing in the way of indexing. My site is easily crawlable and my webshop is serious. This is my living, so if you sense emotion in my posts, then .. I'm only human.
Hundreds of similar shops at the same provider continue to work. For example, we lost all Christmas sales to our competitor.
I am communicating with our web-shop provider as well, and I have them standing by should I manage to get some information that can help us. If you could e-mail, I would kiss you!
We all log in regulary to check for any signs of anything that will allow us to continue our business - or give us a hint about what the trouble with our sites are.
I'm logged into my webmaster tools right now. I see nothing about exclusion or any mention of penalties.
When I see no mention of penalties in there, does that mean that there are none (behind the scenes)? I.e. can what we see in the user-interface be considered authoritive?
If there was a specific penalty, how would something like that look? Would it be visible only as an exclusion or could there be details? I did study Matt's videos, in which he mentions that in most cases google will be able to communicate violations directly to the webmasters, but it kind of doesn't mention where and I haven't heard examples of it in here. Can you shed light?
In conclusion, can I relax now and feel confident that Google isn't somehow remembering something behind the scenes, which is why I only have 6 out of thousands of pages indexed?
A couple of days ago Google did something that affected as far as I know and have seen, all web sites in Scandinavia. My daughter owns a dog site and it was sent into oblivion the other day. She used to get a couple of hundred visitors every day from Google but after their change she's getting none and it hurts her business. Like everybody have seen that gets hit by Googles updates, they don't really care because we are too small to care about, even in times like these (x-mas!) If we were Amazon.com, then there would have been no changes that close small online shops that work for their livelyhood. Why even bother emailing Google and complain? Filling in forms and stuff? Why don't they just have a "quick reply" to the forms we fill in saying the same as the canned emails we get back? This is rediculous. I posted somehwre else that I see millions on link spammers in the search results so I guess white hat is not an option anymore?
It looks like a lot of the pages are in the supplimental index. I have had my pages drop off the Google charts before so I understand how you feel. I don't think Google is currently penalizing the entire region of Scandinavia. I could be wrong as I am not an authority here.
Are you sure there isn't something you have done recently to the site which might have affected it's rankings? The site contains approximately 39,000 thousand pages and it appears that most pages has content which is very similar to other pages in the same domain.
Perhaps Google has recently tightened is policy on the amount of unique, relevant content required on a page and perhaps you were very close to crossing that threshold before the change. I do not know enough about upgrades to Google software upgrades to be able to tell you if in fact there has been a change.
Bollocks. Google has done NOTHING that affected "all sites in Scandinavia" - if it did something like that it would make the television news all over Europe.
It's more likely that it spotted your duplicate content and devalued the site as a consequence:
A site with a violation will have a message that's something like "this site is not currently indexed due to violations of the webmaster guidelines" and it will include a link to the reinclusion request form.
The message that just says no pages are currently indexed doesn't point to a penalty. When I get back into the office, I'll look into this issue that some of you have mentioned of seeing this message incorrectly.
Does this message occur in every member's page that owns a website that has a current violation? I'm not in to SEO as much as I should be, but remember reading that this type of notification and message was only being displayed to selected sitemap members; has this now changed?
