Gone From Google [Archive]

ReelDealer

02-05-2004, 09:24 AM

I created a web site for a small fishing reel repair business. Everything going along smoothly. Google rank ALWAYS in the top 7 when searching on 'fishing reel repair'. Checked this AM and the site is gone. Search results from other search engines that do not use the Google technology are the same. What happened?

Thanks in advance!

Reel Dealer

www.jlreelservice.com

minstrel

02-05-2004, 09:31 AM

You're not gone - you're still in the index with a PageRank of 4.

Read through the threads in this forum about Google updates... the Google search engine results are in flux again and pages are moving up and down. If you ranked well before, be patient - you should come back in a bit when Google finishes tinkering...

Daniel Brandt

02-05-2004, 02:26 PM

You got Scroogled (http://www.google-watch.org/scraper.html), that's for sure.

It's probably not your fault, and there's probably nothing you can do. But for starters, I'd delete all "meta name" lines in your headers. The eight meta lines on your home page show excessive repetition for your keywords; some of the others are confusing (like the one for "robots"), and Google does just fine with sites that don't use metas at all.

I'm not saying it will help, but it won't hurt either. You have nothing to lose.

PCPerformanceparts

02-05-2004, 02:47 PM

I dissagree with nothing to loose, he has a lot to loose if he removes them since some search engines are only meta......

minstrel

02-05-2004, 08:11 PM

Your meta tags are not a problem in terms of search engine ranking. There are a couple that are unnecessary but they're not hurting you. Your DOCTYPE declaration isn't complete but again that won't affect search engine ranking (it just means that browsers will default to "quirk" mode which is probably fine anyway).

The page has good content. Links look fine.

I don't see anything obviously wrong here. As I said earlier, it's probably just the Google shake-up. Hang on for a few days or a couple of weeks and you'll probably see your site come back again.

ReelDealer

02-05-2004, 10:19 PM

Thanks everyone for the input. It's interesting, really. If you search on 'fishing reel service' the results are what I would expect and what I've been experiencing for the last year or so. The results for 'fishing reel repair' however are the exact opposite and the majority of Google referrals in the past were using that search criteria.

What's missing from the <DOCTYPE> tag?

minstrel

02-05-2004, 10:28 PM

What's missing from the <DOCTYPE> tag?

Yours looks something like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional //EN" >

It should look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

I'm not suggesting this is a major issue, though...

ArchieH

02-06-2004, 02:24 AM

minstrel wrote: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> "

but even tag validates even without the http part at w3c.
we have the first part on all our pages and they validate with most validators

minstrel

02-06-2004, 10:03 AM

Hmmm... That's a very interesting observation, ArchieH.

W3C tells us we need that second element and then when it's omitted they tell us it's fine without it...

I find that "passing curious" but not entirely shocking...