Google: site gone from SERPs, back in 1 day, then gone again?

[Prospector-Plastics]

Last December we fumbled our 404 error page with a misconfigured server and broken links on the page.

Needless to say, our site dropped into an abyss - for 4 months. Yesterday we appeared again in our regular placement (actually stronger placement). Our site has been around since 09-Jan-1999 and has been a highly regarded site with good link structure and solid content for engineers.

Then today we're gone again. Yesterday morning we had 125,000 pages indexed with Google which grew to 187,000 by late afternoon. Then this morning we're nowhere to be found and only 21,800 pages are now indexed.

We've been working with Bruce Clay Inc through an SEO site audit doing several updates to improve through good seo practices. We haven't made any changes to the site since last Friday, April 13th (maybe the unlucky number has something to do with it....)

Any ideas, insight, suggestions???? Thanks!

[Everett]

Nathan please see my response to this question in the Private Q&A section. In short, I don't think this has to do with Google's goof-up a couple weeks ago, or with some of the other shifts, but I do think you are in violation of some of their guidelines on a pretty massive scale, although unintentionally and with good reason. I'll go ahead and paste my answer below, but the Private version includes links and other information that could identify the site.

Hello Nathan,

There were some pretty major shifts on the 16th, 19th and 24th-26th so the time-frame raises a red flag. However, with the little information I have (basically your indexation count) I think you may have a problem that isn't related to any of the recent algorithm shifts.

Assuming you are talking about ####.com, I show 462,000 indexed URLs from that domain. Nearly half a million URLs is quite a bit to index and you can imagine that Google might want to thin that out a bit and focus only on the ones that are important and original.

If you have 460k + pages, but most of them are duplicate content or significantly duplicate content, and most of them have no external links, this would put you in danger of being affected by several different algorithms/filters/penalties put in place by Google to keep such pages from bloating their index and outranking what they think to be "better" content.

That can be a hard pill to swallow because you know your content is good and people like what they find there. But let's look at this from the perspective of an impartial machine...

The following EXACT phrase appears, word-for-word, on about 22,800 different pages, most of them from within your site: "PHRASED REMOVED FOR PUBLIC VIEWING"

The following is typical of the "Related Terminology" section of your pages, which could be interpreted by Google as being keyword spam: "You may have searched any one of these terms to find this product: Keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5, keyword6, keyword7, keyword8, so forth and so-on for a few dozen keywords".

A lot of these pages, possibly most of them, have very little unique/exclusive content. Instead, they list out features and uses from a database. Because of this you have many thousands of pages all with the same potential pool of words, each choosing to show more or less the same words in various orders and combinations. Furthermore, it is obvious that the pages are generated by a machine. Looking at this example, a "better" page would be one that has an introduction telling the visitor what "Polybenzimidazole (PBI) is and what it's used for in paragraph form, in addition to the list of features and uses: http://www.###.com/###/ . I'm sure most of your users will know what PBI is for if they search the site for it, but remember we're dealing with machine algorithms designed to detect spamming attempts, such as article spinning, which uses pretty much the same technique of switching around the order of words to generate hundreds or thousands of "articles" from a single original.

I wouldn't venture to provide specific advice on how to fix these issues without knowing more about your business. My suggestion is to look for a reputable outside SEO agency who can help you overcome these issues, which may involve removing a lot of pages from the index, allowing more content to be seen on each datasheet, or some other measures.

Good luck!

[Prospector-Plastics]

I hope they make the same mistake again - our website finally returned to normal positions in Google SERPs that we were at prior to our 404 error page mistake back in Dec. 2011.

Then yesterday, once again we've gone missing and are baffled at why and what to do... We did notice our site:www.ides.com raised from 21,800 pages yesterday to 124,000 today.

www.ides.com

[KeriMorgret]

No, it's Google has work to do, they admitted it was their fault and something went wrong in their classifier.

[Boodreaux]

If my site was mistaken for a parked domain.....then I have a lot of work to do.  lol

[KeriMorgret]

It might actually have been Google's fault this time. They misclassified some sites as parked domains and they dropped out of the index. See the Search Engine Land post at http://searchengineland.com/dropped-in-rankings-google-mistake-over-parked-domains-118979.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Our representative at Bruce Clay Inc just replied with the following info, so something's up...

"We’re pretty clueless too. The whole Internet went a little crazy yesterday because of a big shakeup in Google’s results, and there are a few theories as to what exactly happened. From the forums it looked like a lot of sites lost all their rankings."

They are looking into our Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics accounts to see if they can pick up any clues.

[Boodreaux]

We disappeared for about 16 hours yesterday completely from the SERPS then last night it popped back up and we were ranked higher for all our keywords.  I deleted one duplicate page on a directory but I am not sure what transpired to cause the events. Hopefully someone else will have some input and let me know if this is a common occurrence.