What the hell is Google doing. I've lost 2000 pages in the last 2-3 days!!!
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What the hell is Google doing. I've lost 2000 pages in the last 2-3 days!!!
Hi Jack
do you mean that you have 2000 less pages in the Google index than before?
Google is showing 30,900 pages in their index for your site.
yes Mel
It was over 50k before and this is driving me nuts. Please help!
HI Jack;
There are those who say that Google has dropped a billion or so pages from its index recently but I doubt that as a Google search for the returns about the same number of results today (5.32 billion results) as it has been for some time. I wonder how Google is able to report more pages in its serps than its supposed to have in its entire database (3,307,998,701 pages) unless those search results include those search results marked as supplemental results and come from an additional database.
For sure there have been more or less continual changes going on at Google for nearly two months now.
Not sure what to suggest for you, without more information.
Are you able to identify the pages which have been dropped? If we knew which which pages were dropped we might be able to see what similarities there are, which might give us a starting place.
First, which site are we talking about? I'm assuming http://jacksretail.com, right?
Second, how are you determing which pages have been dropped? and what are those pages? I assume you do not have 50,000 separate pages on your website so I'm guessing you mean pages linking to your site, aka "backlinks"?
For backlinks, entering +"jacksretail.com" into Google just now I see "about 42,700" entries found. However, if someone else does that or I return in hald an hour and try again, I'll probably get a somewhat different result - or at least that has been my experience in the recent past.
Google has always emphasized that they only provide "a sample" of backlinks and rumor has it (emphasis on the word rumor there - I don't think anyone has really confirmed this) that Google is making those results even more variable than previously to discourage excessive checking by site owners and SEO operators.
Add into that the changes Google has been making in recent months that may have meant that some very low or questionable pages linking to you in the past have dropped out of sight in the database or been penalized and dropped altogether, and what this means is that in truth you may not have lost anything that was beneficial to your site at all.
Of course, I had to make two assumptions about the question you were asking so I may have been addressing either the wrong site or the wrong question about that site...
Sorry guys I'm getting so upset it's hard to think
It is indeed Jack's Retail I'm talking about. I found this out by using the allinurl:jacksretail.com
Previously it was listing over 50k pages on my site. Yes this is a lot of pages, the main reason so many is beacuse for my datafeeds each product has it's own page. So if a datafeed has 2000 products that's 2000 separate pages
Minstrel:
My last check for backlinks at Googled showed 96 so this is a major major difference. What did you use to check? Just links:jacksretail.com?
Unfortunately I don't know what pages have been dropped? Is there a way to moniotr this and/or keywords that have dropped?
I used +"jacksretail.com" which tonight shows "about 39, 800"- links:jacksretail.com will only show you a very small sample of actual backlinks.Originally Posted by jackson992
You should get a similar result using allinurl:jacksretail.com which tonight shows "about 38,800".
But remember: neither of these is necessarily a complete list - Google has never claimed it was. It does NOT mean that your other pages are not indexed - Google only provides a "sample" of those links, whatever that means (and what that means, as I said above, seems to change more from day to day lately than it used to). I'm not sure you should be jumping to the conclusion that Google is "dropping your pages".
The actual bottom line is in your server logs and accounting books- are your visitors dropping? where are your visitors coming from now and has that changed? are your sales dropping? if so, you'd certainly want to be looking into factors that might be responsible but a lot of those could have nothing to do with Google or any other search engine.
Minstrel:
I'm at about 1000 less visitors a day. This has been that low for the past week so I just assumed something must have changed
Hmmmm.... yet you still seem to be pretty well indexed by Google. Have you seen a drop in any of the referrals from Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN, etc.?
I assume you've ruled out the obvious - it's just after Christmas and people have already spent all their disposable income? I know that in January I'm typically only making esential purchases until I pay down credit cards, etc.
I'll tell you what, Jack. This thread actually started with a different question and a different poster - I'm going to split if off to it's own thread and maybe someone with more experience in your kind of business has some ideas.
You have a PageRank of 4/10 (approximately).
Why does both the title of your page and the first title/heading you see at the top of http://jacksretail.com/ say "Valetines Day: Silver Oaks 1993-1998 Napa Cabernet Sauvignon Vertical" and how long has it said that?
First, Valentine's Day is spelled wrong, isn't it? Second, the page title is exactly the same as that heading and both are very specific and I suspect unlikely to be entered into a Google search box by most of your potential customers. Basically, you are wasting what is sometimes called "prime real estate" here.
What are the MOST LIKELY search terms (phrases) that someone would enter who was trying to find a site like yours? THIS is what you want to highlight in your title and on your home page - you have lots of good keyword-type content on that page but the first things that the spiders and visitors might see are a turn-away: first you have what looks like a spelling error in both (not very professional), there are also some spelling errors in your page content and the spacing is odd at least at 800x600 resolution (again not professional looking), and then you have a reference to a holiday people probably haven't started thinking about yet.
The fact that that page heading is also your title may be a problem - because I assume you don't have that title the same all year round - my preference would be to devise a good SEO title and leave it alone - then change other things on the page as the seasons change because that will keep the spiders coming back looking for new content.
I have already commented on the title tag - you need to redo that...<title>Valetines Day: Silver Oaks 1993-1998 Napa Cabernet Sauvignon Vertical</title>
<meta name="description" content="We offer the finest Valentines Day gifts featuring ">
<meta name="keywords" content="valentines,valentine day,">
I can already see the comments popping up here about how Google ignores meta tags, so once again let's get that out of the way - I'm not convinced that's 100% true, although I do concede it doesn't carry much of the burden of SEO for Google - even at that, there are also visitors I assume who are reaching you from other directories or search engines so it's worth having them and it's worth doing them correctly. Your description tag is brief and incomplete - not going to help you much at all. Your keywords tag is useless to you as it stands - "valentines" and "valentine's day" must produce thousands of hits on Google - you need to expand these using 2 and 3-word phrases that are a lot more specific to what your business is about.
Whatever Google may or may not be doing, I think there is some work you can do on your home page here to at least increase the chances of people finding you... I'd start there.
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