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{"id":119,"date":"2004-12-29T05:07:00","date_gmt":"2004-12-29T09:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/an-interesting-checklist-of-why-a-site-could-be-dropped-from-google-index-posted-in-webmasterworld-com\/"},"modified":"2012-09-20T06:09:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T10:09:15","slug":"an-interesting-checklist-of-why-a-site-could-be-dropped-from-google-index-posted-in-webmasterworld-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/an-interesting-checklist-of-why-a-site-could-be-dropped-from-google-index-posted-in-webmasterworld-com\/","title":{"rendered":"An interesting checklist of why a site could be dropped from google&#8217; index posted in webmasterworld.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting post in webmasterworld.com describes how sites were dropped from google&#8217;s index, whether it is because of a penalty or because of google&#8217;s own problem, this checklist describes well,<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>One of the most common themes of posting here in WW starts something like:<br \/>&#8220;Last night, my site disappeared&#8230;&#8221;<br \/>&#8220;Losing&#8221; a site can be a painful and<br \/>frustrating experience. To help ease the pain, perhaps a starting list of<br \/>potential issues might help. I&#8217;ll probably miss more than I&#8217;m catching with this<br \/>list, but at least it&#8217;s a start.<br \/>Do a site search at the SE in question to<br \/>determine if all of some of your pages are gone. Some think that their site has<br \/>vanished, when in fact an algo update or tweak has occured causing their pages<br \/>to drop. Or, individual pages have been filtered or penalized, but not entire<br \/>sites:<br \/>If *all* of your pages are gone (search on URL&#8217;s to check that), then<br \/>perhaps: \u2022 your server was down at an inopportune time. \u2022 you have a robots.txt<br \/>problem. \u2022 you&#8217;ve been removed from the index based on a perception of bad<br \/>behavior (not good).<br \/>If only some pages are gone, or if your pages have<br \/>simply dropped badly in the SERP&#8217;s, then perhaps: \u2022 you have some other<br \/>technical issue not noted above (e.g., badly executed redirects), \u2022 the algo<br \/>changed, \u2022 you&#8217;ve done something recently that the SE did not like, or, \u2022 the<br \/>algo changed and something that was previously &#8220;OK&#8221; is now being filtered or<br \/>penalized.<br \/>Here are some specific things to look at:<br \/>Start with the<br \/>basics: Was your server down recently? Server failure is always a good item to<br \/>check off your list when searching for problems. No need to start remaking your<br \/>site if all that happened was a temporary problem.<br \/>Are you using a<br \/>robots.txt file, and if so, has it changed. , Is the syntax correct? There are a<br \/>variety of potential problems that can be caused by improper code in robots.txt<br \/>files, or placement of the robots.txt file in the wrong location. Search WW on<br \/>this topic if you&#8217;re not sure what you&#8217;re doing. Use the WW Server Header<br \/>Checker. At worst, a robots.txt file can tell a SE to go away, and you really<br \/>don&#8217;t want that. \ud83d\ude09<br \/>Have you more aggressively optimized recently? Internal<br \/>changes that can lead to potential problems include: \u2022 More aggressive kw<br \/>optimization, e.g., changes to Titles, META&#8217;s, <hx> tags, placement and<br \/>density of kw&#8217;s, etc. \u2022 Link structure changes, and especially link text<br \/>changes. Updates to link text or structure, if done for optimization reasons,<br \/>can push a site into filter\/penalty territory. Look in particular for overuse of<br \/>kw&#8217;s.<br \/>Have you added redirects? The SE&#8217;s *can* sometimes become confused by<br \/>redirects. Assuming that the changes are intended to be permanent, use 301&#8217;s,<br \/>not 302&#8217;s. Be especially careful about large scale changes. If done properly,<br \/>redirects are important tools. Done without proper knowledge, they can lead to<br \/>short term pain, often on the order of 1-6 months.<br \/>webmasterworld.com\/forum3\/8706.htm<br \/>Do you have a significant number of<br \/>interlinking sites? If ever there was a strategy that might be summed up as:<br \/>&#8220;Here today, gone tomorrow&#8230;&#8221; interlinking is it. You can succeed with this<br \/>strategy. But if you add too many sites or links to the mini-net you&#8217;re<br \/>creating, or interlink too aggressively, it can catch up to you. Penalties can<br \/>range from soft filters to complete manual removal in rare cases. Even with no<br \/>recent changes to your sites, the SE algo&#8217;s can change, making something that<br \/>squeaked by yesterday illegal today. webmasterworld.com\/forum3\/4618.htm<br \/>Are<br \/>you linking to sites in &#8220;bad&#8221; neighborhoods? If ever there was a strategy that<br \/>might be summed up as: &#8220;Gone today&#8230;&#8221; linking to &#8220;bad&#8221; sites is it. If you<br \/>think that you might be linking to the dark-side, lose that link instantly, if<br \/>not sooner.<br \/>webmasterworld.com\/forum3\/8053.htm<br \/>Could you be suffering from a<br \/>duplicate content penalty? Some practices or occurances that can cause problems<br \/>in this regard include: \u2022 Use of a single, site-wide template \u2022 Use of one<br \/>template across multiple sites \u2022 Competitors stealing or mirroring your content<br \/>\u2022 Redirects from an old domain to a new one \u2022 Over reliance on robots.txt files<br \/>to exclude bots from content areas you don&#8217;t want exposed. WebmasterWorld<br \/>Thread: webmasterworld.com\/forum3\/22494.htm<br \/>Are you cloaking? Some cloak merely to deliver &#8220;accurate&#8221; pictures of<br \/>sites\/pages to the SE&#8217;s. Examples of this are sites with lots of graphics and<br \/>little text. But if you&#8217;re a mainly text based site that is delivering one set<br \/>of content to the SE&#8217;s while users are seeing something<br \/>less&#8230;umm&#8230;optimized&#8230;then there&#8217;s always the risk that you&#8217;ve been caught.<br \/>Are you using AdWords? This is pure speculation on the part of some seniors<br \/>here, but some do seem to firmly believe that if you place highly with an<br \/>Adwords listing, it might actually hurt your position in the SERP&#8217;s. Don&#8217;t shoot<br \/>me. I&#8217;m just the messenger.<br \/>IF OTOH, the only issue is that you&#8217;re not as<br \/>high in the rankings as you&#8217;d like, then a better place to start would be<br \/>Brett&#8217;s 26 Steps to 15K a Day.<br \/><\/hx><\/p>\n<p>Source: http:\/\/www.webmasterworld.com\/forum5\/4584.htm<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting post in webmasterworld.com describes how sites were dropped from google&#8217;s index, whether it is because of a penalty or because of google&#8217;s own problem, this checklist describes well, One of the most common themes of posting here in WW starts something like:&#8220;Last night, my site disappeared&#8230;&#8221;&#8220;Losing&#8221; a site can be a painful andfrustrating [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google","category-webmaster-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1621,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/1621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}