One common question in the groups: “I have a page (…) that has information on it that needs removing from Google’s search as quickly as possible. (…) I have removed all information from the page, and removed all Tags associated with them and re-uploaded the new page. How can I get the cache changed quickly, without just waiting for Google to re-trawl the whole site?”
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Often a blog will not be indexed properly. Sometimes only the front page is indexed, sometimes only a handful of the postings are indexed. Sometimes, visitors are sent to the front page for a posting which is no longer visible there.

There are a few issues with blogs which can sometimes be rectified with amazing results.

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There are many reasons why a site could suddenly drop in ranking in Google’s index. In the most cases, these changes are due to natural causes - most commonly because the value of the inbound links has dropped, leaving the site without enough value to merit the old indexing and ranking. Sometimes, however, there’s more to it than just that.

This list is a community effort - feel free to add to it in the comments. We’ll move items up into the list as required. Links will be provided to debugging tools and to reference (official or just wild guesses). This list should contain only items that have been known to trigger indexing/ranking issues - the rest is in The unofficial crawling, ranking, indexing speculation post and The confirmed non-issues with websites. Read the rest of this entry »

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Just as there are issues with websites that are known to cause problems (and things that are still unconfirmed), there are also issues that are known to be completely irrelevant. This list is for those items. Feedback via commenting is desired.

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The first step is always speculation, from reading between the lines in forum or blog postings or even in patent applications. What do you see as possible, unconfirmed reasons for problems with crawling, ranking and indexing on Google? Post your ideas in the comments, we’ll move them into the posting as necessary. As we can confirm or deny the items, we’ll move them appropriately to the The unofficial “why did my site tank in Google?” checklist or The confirmed non-issues with websites.

As items become more detailed, they may receive a separate posting.

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Many people have a lot of meta-tags in their pages. These meta-tags in the head-section are usually luggage that they carry around from revision to revision, only to have new tags added as friends and “experts” recognize that some are missing.

Which meta-tags does Google really look at, which ones do I need and which ones should I drop? Read the rest of this entry »

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The Google Webmaster Tools console can display the known links pointing to your site. In many cases, there will be countless links from “bad” sites like “scrapers” or web-spammers. Can these harm my ranking? Since I have noticed them in my webmaster tools console, my rankings have dropped. What can I do to have those links removed?

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Google and the other main Search Engines allow webmasters to create a Sitemap file that helps them to discover and crawl your site’s pages and content.

Many webmasters and site owners wonder how long it takes after creating their Sitemap for Google to index their sites? Well in my experience Google will not index a website unless they find at least one link to that website from another website.

This means that it is essential that your site has at least one in-bound link that Google can follow to your site.

So after you get your Sitemap up and running make sure that your site has some in-bound links from other websites - if you can get links from high-traffic, trusted websites I’m willing to bet that your site will be indexed in quick time.

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If a page is missing, it needs to return the code 404 (”not found”). With that code, the server can return any kind of content that the browser will display. The user will still be able to see that, but a crawler will stop at code 404 and not index the rest. There are some really good ideas about how to make a user-friendly 404 page on the web, it makes sense to read up on that.

The 301 redirect serves a different purpose: it moves the visitor and the search engine to a related page. The technical background to this is that it generally takes the search engines less time to process a 301 than to recognize a 404.
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Google hates stolen content just as much as you do, luckily there is an official channel to get that content removed, which outlined here.

Often if you file notice with the host of the site that has your stolen content on it, they will remove the site during their investigation. Since the site will then show 404’s for the pages while the site is down, you can then have it removed from Google’s search results.

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