Index Pages Not Appearing in Google Pages from the UK
Saturday, November 25th, 2006I was quite surprised to find that our index page for southbourne.com had disappeared from Google’s Pages from the UK but not the regular Google.co.uk. It has been quite baffling to say the least. For years now we have played it quite straight and not done anything out of the ordinary that would get us banned or manually flagged for inspection. All of a sudden this hits us, and was noticed after traffic and customer enquiries dropped off, I did some investigation and have not turned up anything that could account for why this happening, many theories and rumours abound but nothing concrete.
My first port of call was to check our site for anything unusual, nothing found, I checked our outbound links and could not find anything we were linking that would cause this a ban. We don’t have many outbound links and the few we do have are all relevant. A couple of companies that we create icons for and link to them, after all, they are in the graphic design business and we do occasional work with these particular companies. Another link to a Danish SEO friend, a link to W3C, some accessibility stuff, a blog we own on the subject matter of mobile SEO and other mobile web related information, this blog which is our discussion blog, and our portfolio of work and clients. It was mentioned to me because our work is diverse that the links in our portfolio are pointing to off-topic areas. This I do not believe for an instance would affect us after all we built those websites and link to them as a vote of confidence in our work and in the client. I feel pretty disgusted that we now have to put NOINDEX tags in the META, just in case…
I wrote Google through its sitemaps webmaster tools area but have received no reply as of yet.
We have been developing websites as a limited company now for 4 years and before that another 4 years totalling 8 years of web development experience added to this, are more years working for other web agencies, we are not new-comers to the land of web development. To be treated heavy handed like this and be at the mercy of another company does not sit well with us. I went to a meeting this evening with some SME’s and a few webmasters some from larger new media agencies and some from mid-sized and we were all in agreement about the detrimental effect that this could have on our line of work and given all of us now are creating sites to be standards compliant we don’t expect to be punished.
I did some Googling for the others who may have been affected by this and turned up a few URL’s there are a few words here by Graywolf Google Dropping Sites and another johnon.com banished from the Google kingdom. Again nothing concrete to pin this down, could it be a glitch in their program? I know this year there seems to be problems with their new algorithm, is something else afoot? I really don’t know, we still appear in the main index which is a good thing as it still holds the pipeline open for new business nationally and internationally, but not being in the pages of the UK has had an effect. I had a look on Matt Cutts blog for anything that might hint at Pages from the UK and the de-indexing of sites but could not find anything in the posts I read. I’ll keep checking my Sitemaps area for a reply to this… if it comes!
