I am not sure how many of you even noticed, but the homepage for seOverflow has been mixing from Google’s index since we launched the new site in early February. As you can imagine this was a bit disconcerting being that we are an SEO company and all. Really there was no reason for the index page to be missing. We quietly watched as the number of indexed pages for the site went from 3 to 9 to 15, to 20 …… All the while the homepage was completely missing from Google’s index. Not only that but some of the sub pages were actually ranking pretty well for their targeted keywords.
Next we noticed inside Google Webmaster Tools we were being told the last visit to the homepage was April 30, 2006!!! Holy crap. This had to be some type of penalty though I didn’t know why the site had been penalized. I purchased the domain from my good buddy Everett who runs a brand comparison site among other things, and happens to be one of the best SEOs I know.
Should we file a reconsideration request even though we couldn’t fess up to any wrong doing or provide any juicy details to Google? After speaking with a couple of other trusted SEOs including Mary Bowling and Andrew Shotland we decided to file with Google.
Whaddya know? About a week later (with no direct communication from Google of course), the homepage is back in the index and we rank #1 for our name among other things including our most important keywords. Now I am not going to sit here and complain since the process didn’t take all that long and we received the end result we wanted, but Google could improve the process by opening up some communication lines. Thanks for letting us back in Google, we appreciate it!
Congratulations Mike. You now rank for your own name and thus qualify for SEO god status:)
Thanks Andrew, It feels good be an SEO God!!
Actually though since that page was recincluded we saw a
significant spike in our rankings and several new leads. I guess
that is what being a god is all about!
Mike
Mike, it’s amazing that your reinclusion request worked so quickly.
Congratulations on your SEO problem solving skills! Mary
Thanks for the link to CTB Mike!
By the way though – I want to clear something up. I was not doing any blackhat stuff, or anything that should have caused the home page to get dropped from the index. I’m not sure what happened, but given that ever other page was doing just fine I’d have to guess it was some sort of indexing glitch.
Either way, congratulations. I’m glad to see at least ONE person had some luck with a reinclusion!
Had a similar issue back a few years ago, it took us nearly 2 months to get our ranking back. We were also “clean”, but something happened and a Google engineer flipped a switch.
How do you know if your site is being penalized by Google? I am an avid blogger who knows very little about SEO, especially “black hat” seo. I have several blogs and my most active blog has fallen completely off of Google’s radar.
It used to have a PR of 4 and rank well under several search terms. About four months ago, after ranking number 1 for the term “dietary supplement blog” for a prolonged period as well as my name of course, it fell completely off Google’s radar for any search term as well as my name even. I have old blogs that I’ve written one or two posts on that rank on page one for my name still.
I can’t imagine that I’ve ever done anything to get penalized. I mean, it’s a wordpress.com blog and I don’t sell links or promote an affilate program. The PR of my blog is still 3 for now, but it still doesn’t even rank on a search for my name except on page 2 on the odd occasion.
Is there anything that I can do to fix this?
Hi Jarret,
Do you have a Google Webmaster Central account? That is where I would start. Also what is the URL of your blog with the issue? I can run a couple of quick tests to try an see anything ‘obvious’.