Help me get back on Google.

October 29, 2005 10:23 AM

The large majority of hits to my food website come from Google and about three weeks ago I became unGoogleable. I was told that when Google was doing its indexing my server was down and it missed me---that it should right itself soon. But it's been three weeks and my traffic is rapidly dropping. What can I do?
posted by adrober to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Are you sure? Did someone at Google tell you that? I mean, it takes a long time for Google to purge a site or page entirely from its cache. I've had long-gone pages still be in the cache up to six months later. Your site looks clean, but you didn't participate in any kind of link-spamming or any kind of untoward scheme like that which might get your site punished, did you? How long was your server down?
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:32 AM on October 29, 2005

Yeah... that sounds kinda silly. There's a lot of speculation about how the google search engine actually works... but yeah, let's be honest. None of us really knows.

Anyway -- have you checked out google sitemaps? That should pretty much solve your problem.
posted by ph00dz at 10:36 AM on October 29, 2005

About three weeks ago, the "Jagger" update started. It's quite possible your PageRank has dropped and you're no longer anywhere near the top for the queries that used to drive traffic to your site. Things are still sorting themselves out for this update, so it's possible your site will migrate back to the top as Google continues to recalculate it's index.

I'd make sure that Google can actually find you with a site:yoursite.com modifier, and then try out Google Sitemaps like ph00dz suggested.
posted by nmiell at 11:43 AM on October 29, 2005

If that happened to me i would of course pursue all possible avenues for re-inclusion but i would also run adwords ads for all my top keywords, setting the CPC so that i got the #1 spot. This would probably help alleviate any losses as a result of the de-inclusion.

good luck.
posted by libertaduno at 11:45 AM on October 29, 2005

nmiell, the result Sorry, no information is available for the URL domain.com means it isn't in the index AT ALL, not that its PageRank dropped.

The first troubleshoot has to be double-checking your robots.txt file.

Here's how Google recommends that you block their spider. Make sure you are not doing this.
posted by dhartung at 2:21 PM on October 29, 2005

The robots.txt file looks fine, incidentally. I'd third the sitemap solution. If it's truly just a Google mistake, that should take care of your problem.
posted by Mo Nickels at 4:19 PM on October 29, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks everyone---but can you explain to me where my sitemap file is? I don't know what to enter on that Google page. Can someone help?
posted by adrober at 4:22 PM on October 29, 2005

This happened to me a couple months ago. I had ranked within the top 10 for a popular single word term for months and months, and all of a sudden was nowhere to be seen. No changes had been made to my site whatsoever, it hadn't all of a sudden become irrelevant to the term or anything - Yahoo still had me at #2, MSN at #6.

A few weeks later I found my site re-listed at pretty much the same place as it was before. I suspect all you can really do is wait it out.
posted by danwalker at 4:43 PM on October 29, 2005

Google isn't pulling up anything from your site.
posted by Count Ziggurat at 9:08 PM on October 29, 2005