Why websites are being de-indexed

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Why websites are being de-indexed

google, index

centreurope

11:54 pm on May 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hello,
About one third of the websites I manage have recently been de-indexed by Google and to a lesser extent by msn & yahoo. Some were long established websites with PR 5 or 6.

I would appreciate your thaughts on why those websites were de-indexed and mostly on how to have them indexed again, on the top of the reinclusion process, which gave no result in my case.

Here are the common points of those websites :

- No use of black hat techniques. Just some visible keyword stuffing for most of them (removed)
- All used to use the same template. I changed it today for one of the websites, in order to see if the problem comes from that.
- All sites located on different ip addresses & different whois info (except the contact email)
- All have an .htaccess file, which may not be perfectly written
- No activity for the last months at least.

Thanks for your help!
david

[edited by: tedster at 6:15 am (utc) on May 31, 2007]

tedster

6:23 am on May 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

Do you have a Webmaster Tools account for any of those de-indexed domains, david? Sometimes there can be clues in those accounts.

centreurope

4:26 pm on May 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

thanks Tedster for your answer,
yes I have an account for each of these websites. The interesting thing is that google lists my pages there. But not in its index, so I get 0 visitor from Google.
david

jimbeetle

4:40 pm on May 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

What are your linking strategies like as to common reciprocals, interlinking among sites, etc.? Does each site have a large set of unique inbounds?

pageoneresults

4:44 pm on May 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

- All used to use the same template. I changed it today for one of the websites, in order to see if the problem comes from that.

Were they also similar in nature? I mean, were there multiple sites set up to promote the same product and/or service?

Tidal2

4:48 pm on May 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

Is there lots of cross linking on the sites that lost traffic?

If thats the case, I think Google may treat heavily cross linked sites as a single site so a problem on one site (say a bad neighbour on a shared server or loads of other things) may be causing the problem.

tedster

5:10 pm on May 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

...recently been de-indexed by Google and to a lesser extent by msn & yahoo.

Would you clarify what you mean by de-indexed "to a lesser extent"? If you are seeing problems with all three major search engines, that makes me very suspicious of server troubles, or perhaps the htaccess file you mentioned.

proboscis

7:05 pm on May 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

All have an .htaccess file, which may not be perfectly written

I would make sure those are all perfect right away :/