Thread: Site deindexed by Google

So i noticed traffic to one of my more popular sites going down and started to investigate. Found out it looks like the site was completely de-indexed by google. theres no errors in webmaster tools, no complaints nothing - just completely deindexed.

It was weird the site went to PR2 then gone in 2 weeks , 8 site links and all.

Any suggestions or ideas - i'm stumped.

That does not sound like fun!! Sorry that I have nothing to suggest.

I have a site that appeared to come under some scrutiny from Google a couple of weeks ago. I noticed an unusual high traffic pattern for 4 or 5 days (200 - 300 page views on a site that usually goes 15 - 25 per day). I looked in analytics and found that most of the traffic was direct traffic. Closer inspection showed that the traffic was coming about 20% from Mountain View (Google home office) and the bulk of the rest coming from a place called Shasta Lake, California (a resort area Northeast of San Francisco and MV). Digging deeper I noticed that most of that direct traffic was using Chrome browser on Linux OS. A quick search showed that Google started a switch over to Linux in May 2010 on all of their company owned PCs and Laptops. Checking today I see that the site is still one of my better indexed sites with ~24,000 pages indexed (it has an article directory populated from SYA, and is still well indexed post Panda). I am hoping that it was just some internal joke like 'Can you believe any idiot would put up a site like this?' and not an official investigation. (theclosetonline.com if you have any interest in what the idiot put up)

I have another site that Google pulled ads from a couple of months ago because of language and images of a plastic doll, but it is still well indexed and I see steady search traffic to it. I do miss the few dollars of Adsence income that it produced, though.

Maztech - How OLD was the domain? And were you aggressive about building links FAST - or using high numbers of low-ball link blasts? Just curious.

I just had a site get deindexed just prior to the 6 month mark. Every single keyword coming from Google instantly, totally, completely dried up overnight - and now it's just Bing/Yahoo pretty much. (and not much else!). I've had that happen before to a site that's now 3+ years old - and Google has never let it back in over the past 2+ years. BUT I DON'T CARE. I simply registered and built a clean, new site around the exact same niche - and it's doing great.

The lesson of the story here: I didn't waste my time begging for reinclusion, or thinking I did something 'wrong'. I just cut my losses and started fresh rather than try to 'fix' the past for reasons I don't even know. Bottom Line: If you know you got a profitable niche, just build a new site from scratch (no copying old content!) and move FORWARD.

P.S. Is it a WordPress Auto-Blog? I don't run any myself, but I've noticed late this summer, Goog is yanking PageRank and deindexing some of them quite severely as of late.

Hey Mac,

Not an auto-blog, the sites been running for 4+ years in its current state. No auto content all hand updated. Not really sure but yes was ranking for 5 different key search terms and then poof. 1/2 traffic was gone overnight. Yes i still get good yahoo and bing traffic too. I asked for reinclusion but have also registered a related domain and will be rebuilding as you did.

Scarey though that for no 'explained' reason its just gone.

sounds like you got sandboxed for linking to fast - how have you been building links?

rk - the site has been active for over 4 years with only 1 or 2 new posts per week that get listed on the social media site ie. twitter, facebook, stumble etc. Nothing out of the ordinary.

That's a scary thing. This happened to couple of my sites but after 3-4 months those sites recovered. Same thing no messages about in Google webmaster tools or anything.

If there are no messages in webmaster tools then you might recover in couple of months. Don't stop working on that site. Add content regularly and build links.

Sorry to hear that..., that happened to me on few of my sites....never hear a word from G why, also never find out why that happened, my suspect is that competitors filed my sites to google spam team.
The best way is to rebuild that site and start over again (as soon as possible) and let that old site still,
because sometimes after year or two google might re-index your site, also happened to me.

Just continue to build quality whitehat backlinks to the site from high PR sites. It will come back, dont stress

As Nemanja Said, just focus on new one. Same thing I have done when Google has de-indexed one of my site and reason of obvious, a lot of backlinks in shorter times. Well that was my initial days of IM. So build a fresh one same as your de-index domain rather to have a useless fight with Google. They are not going to listen anything, believe me

It seems a sandbox situation. Maybe you were creating too many backlinks in short time, altough is the domain is old, i do not think that is the case.
Maybe some backlinkscome from xxx, illegal, gaming sites. Just keep doing manual backlink from autorities sitesand your site will be at the top again hopely in a short time.

Just leave that site for 2-3 months as it is and in the mean time focus on a different one...

It might get back into index after sometime

Any news??
It's been 2 weeks since you posted this.

I've heard it sometomes happens to websites, but after a while they're reindexed and soon back to the PR and listing in google SERPs.
No idea what the reason for this could be.

Andre

I have just had something sad like that happen to me. My site wasn't deindexed but it disappeared from searches completely, while before it ranked for 5 kw and was bringing nice traffic.


I have 2 hypothesis

1. it was 2 weeks old site and I submit it for link drip feed, it was getting 3-4 links a day, don't know if that would be so harmful. I used this service before on new pages(not new domain though) and it worked great.

2. I "borrowed" 2 pics from a youtube vid with Print Screen+Paint. Strangely enough the day my site disappeared from searches that video appeared as top position, and before it wasn't even close to first page. Hmmmmmm. Im wondering if the owner of that vid could have reported me and ask for my site to get penalty? Is that possible?

3 - 4 links a day won't do much harm, unless the service you signed up for was suspected by Google already. A good limit (without using proxies) is 100 to 150 links a day. It could be the image as well, but I am pretty sure the owner of the video would have asked you to take it off your site first before doing something that drastic. Can you think of anything else you may have done on the site?

Originally Posted by pagerank7

I have just had something sad like that happen to me. My site wasn't deindexed but it disappeared from searches completely, while before it ranked for 5 kw and was bringing nice traffic.


I have 2 hypothesis

1. it was 2 weeks old site and I submit it for link drip feed, it was getting 3-4 links a day, don't know if that would be so harmful. I used this service before on new pages(not new domain though) and it worked great.

2. I "borrowed" 2 pics from a youtube vid with Print Screen+Paint. Strangely enough the day my site disappeared from searches that video appeared as top position, and before it wasn't even close to first page. Hmmmmmm. Im wondering if the owner of that vid could have reported me and ask for my site to get penalty? Is that possible?

Whenever you put up a new site, Best practice is to create site, put 3-4 pages and then leave it online for at least 2 months...

After 2 months start doing Backlink and more posting... 99% you will not be deindexed or sandboxed...

Well, as a matter of fact, it was a lame 1 page site, with no design at all. Simply <html> and <body> tags, little bit of text and 2 CB links. He couldn't have contacted me cause there was no link for that. Intriguingly enough one person came to my site after the site took the plunge. He wasn't referred by a search engine, as I saw in my statcount report.

Basically this site took me by surprise. It shoot to top page the next day after I created it, wasn't expecting it, I just threw some content in it and was planning to let it age a bit till I put some more, just like Jalanbk suggests. I was thinking noone would see it in that state, but once it was on first page people started coming. I was too lazy to write more on it, but was greedy to get on 1st place :P

Originally Posted by Nemanja

Any news??
It's been 2 weeks since you posted this.

Unfortunately No. I did go ahead and ask for reinstatement but only received a canned response from Google stating they are looking into it. I did find some of the pages from the site are still generating some traffic from google as well as the google social bookmark links. The Yahoo and Bing traffic is keeping it at roughly half of what it used to be.

I don't think they are looking into it with any interest of reloading it. You should concentrate on your new one but still keep in touch with Google and try ti dig up the cause. Many sites have been de-indexed without any reason. I got one de-indexed a long time ago but I was careless then also, so never looked into the cause again but things are going smoothly with me now.