I'm all for getting some press on this. At least that way Google will be forced to make SOME kind of informational statement explaining all this. Their ostrich-head-in-the-sand approach to business is not sitting well with me at the moment.
I noticed a huge drop in my pages. I had 900 pages indexed, then google showed 10,500 (I only had about 1200 total) now down to 600. I have added about 1000 pages over the last two weeks and my indexed pages dropped. I just can't figure out what is going on. On top of it I have roughly 13,000 incoming links of which google only shows 70.
Yet more examples of perfectly good, informative and useful web pages with good ranking which are being penalised by Google at its whim or by its irresponsibility.
Suggestion: Why don't one of you (whoever has been following this issue the most) start a thread on searchenginewatch (ie http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forumdisplay.php?f=34 )? Point to this thread, point to the countless other threads in this official Google group, ask for advice, feedback, etc. Be ready to list several (as many as possible) 100% clean sites where this has happened, with as much evidence as possible.
This thread by itself is worth nothing to the press - there are no really big names here (ok, I don't know them all, ha ha, excuse me if I missed you :-)), there is no indepth-analysis of the domains that were hit. It would look to the press like a collection of weekend-webmasters who are complaining that "nobody explained the rules to them" (no matter that there are no fix rules anyway, lol). If the likes of Danny Sullivan were to post a confirmation (or whatever), then it's something completely different.
I don't see any more "Google hurt my site" postings on the other forums than are usually found there all the time anyway. But I know I don't frequent all the right places, so perhaps I'm missing something. :-). My test sites have been more or less stable for the last month or so; so have some of the trackers for other peoples sites that I accidentally left running.
Go ahead, post it! Let's see what the pros say, we'll either learn something new or open their eyes :-))
> Lost 6300 of 7000 stable ones over the weekend/Friday. > They converted to supplementals. > 100% white hat site. 9 year old site.
That's appaling!
If this is a screw up, at least we can hope Google can fix is. If it is deliberate, Google deserves everything it gets. I'm sure they'll find a welcome home in China when no one else wants them.
My website is small, about 300 - 350 pages... It's a template and as I'm no SEO I can't change my dynamic urls so I've been working on getting internal links to my pages so Google can find me (I made a sitemap xml file but I have no way to upload it). I had managed to get about 114 of my pages indexed a few weeks ago then they all disappeared but 20 of them. I'd just like to know if this is still part of an update or whether I should be working on something else? At least if anyone notices that their pages come back it might give me a glimmer of hope.
Can anyone who has lost pages confirm/refute that it is not random pages that are being dropped, but pages beyond a certain depth (clicks from the homepage)?
I would guess that what a lot of people are seeing are Pages that are at depth 2 being dropped. I.e. pages that are two or more clicks away from the Home page.
If, as I suspect, this is the case. Then this is either a deliberate, permanent, and woefully misguided move by Google that will innevitably screw up the Web for years to come...Or, it is a temporary glitch, that will gradually recover as the spiders do their slooooooowwww laborious work.
Unfortunately, the self-styled "mega-brains" at Google are impossible to predict. The chances that this is a stupid mistake by design is just as likely as it being a stupid mistake by mistake.
