Help - my website has disappeared

by Rob P
6 replies
Hi folks,

I've been making my living online for the last five years (unbelievable considering my lack of technical knowledge). I'm in the teaching niche and my site was ranking very high (pos #1 and 2 for sevreral terms) until I instructed my techie to install an XML sitemap. Now we are non-existent for the terms we had - in fact, my site has been missing for three weeks now.

As I understand it, it can take up to 4 weeks for Google to trawl the site again but I'm getting worried we might have done something wrong. Can anyone shed any light?
#disappeared #website
  • Profile picture of the author zaco
    Do you have your site added to google webmaster?
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  • Profile picture of the author Rob P
    I'm not sure. Does that make a difference?
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    All the suffering in this world comes from trying to make yourself happy. All the happiness comes from making others happy. (GK Gyatso)

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  • Profile picture of the author zaco
    well go to google webmaster and create an account or combine it with your gmail account ( you just need to login using your gmail credentials)

    Yes it does, thro google webmaster ( after verifying your website which they will give you a file to put on the site) you can see when was the last time your website was crawled and you can submit your sitemaps and see the search queries and impressions.. all for free from google
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  • Profile picture of the author DireStraits
    Originally Posted by Robplevin View Post

    Hi folks,

    I've been making my living online for the last five years (unbelievable considering my lack of technical knowledge). I'm in the teaching niche and my site was ranking very high (pos #1 and 2 for sevreral terms) until I instructed my techie to install an XML sitemap. Now we are non-existent for the terms we had - in fact, my site has been missing for three weeks now.

    As I understand it, it can take up to 4 weeks for Google to trawl the site again but I'm getting worried we might have done something wrong. Can anyone shed any light?
    Firstly, don't worry: contrary to first impressions, technical know-how isn't exactly a prerequisite for success in IM; it might even be an impediment for some people. :p

    Honestly, I can't really imagine any reason at all why adding a sitemap would cause your rankings to drop/disappear. Unless, perhaps, some pages newly indexed as a result of your sitemap are in such gross violation of Google's guidelines that it/they saw fit to penalise your site? I think that's unlikely, though.

    Is your site still actually indexed (perform a site:yourdomain.com lookup on Google)? Sounds more like correlation than causation. Google recently (mid-late October?) implemented another algorithm update that caused yet another significant rankings shakeup and I believe there was a more recent refinement that saw some futher movement for a smaller number of people.

    It's possible that your site was a casualty of this, I would guess.
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  • Profile picture of the author fathobbitsss
    Hmm so info:yoursite.com returns nothing?

    but you're site is displaying fine when you browse to it yea?

    1. check robots.txt? if he changed it
    2. browse to your site as google bot and see what it looks like, techie might have changed something to block google bot
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  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    If you query google with site:yourdomainname.com and there are results, then you are not banned.

    If you use that query and find nothing, then you have received a temporary or permanent ban.

    The results of that query will drive the direction of any appropriate answers.
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    Bill Platt, Oklahoma USA, PlattPublishing.com
    Publish Coloring Books for Profit (WSOTD 7-30-2015)
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