Disappearing and reappearing in google index

[RafeTLouis]

Hello.

I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages.  They probably weren't as unique as they should have been.

Suddenly, they all disappeared from the rankings and I freaked out.  Then, two days later, they all returned.

Is this a bad sign?  Should I be worried? Why would they drop out of the rankings and come back in?

Let me know, thanks.

[EGOL]

At any given time Google has lots of different indexes.   They are always testing different algos and using different vintages of data.  All of this happens on thousands of severs at multiple data centers worldwide.   So, if your pages are relatively new then they might be in and out of the the search results that you see depending upon which of the many servers responds to your query.  The newer the pages, the more volatile they might be.  The weaker your website, the longer it will take them to stabilize in the search results.

That is a partial answer to your question.   (Read the book "In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" by Steven Levy.  Very interesting, helps you be a better SEO because you will understand how they think and work a little better.)

I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages.  They probably weren't as unique as they should have been.

If you did this Google will probably index them and start displaying all of them.  Then, if Google decides that some of these pages are not as unique as they would like, some of them will be filtered from the search results.  To find out of this is happening go to the very end of the search results and on the last page you might see something like.....

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If your page can be found in the "repeat the search.... " then you will know that Google thinks that the page is too similar to other pages on the web (on your site or on other sites) and they have filtered your page from the search results.

If you have lots of these pages then google might think that you have a low quality website and their Panda algo will get you.  That will demote the rankings of almost all of your pages for almost all of their relevant queries and your traffic will drop suddenly.

If you really make them mad with this stuff they might consider your site to be even lower  than low quality - meaning spam - and deindex lots of your pages or your entire site.

So, that is the stuff that can happen.  Don't publish a lot of cookie cutter pages or just change place names and insert synonyms.  Google has been slapping people for that stuff for at least ten years.

Also see here and here for good responses to similar questions asked by you and answered by Patrick Delehanty.