3 replies to this topic

[train99]

About 3 years ago one of my websites vanished from Google. It was just a site where I shared pictures of my trains with my collecting friends around the country so I didn't care much. I had been getting some affiliate income by linking to eBay auctions for the trains i was talking about, but eBay changed their program and that dropped to about $20-30 a month.

In May I started trying to figure out why google had dropped the site. I'd never added it to google's webmaster tools so I added it. It turned out there was a robots.txt file blocking crawling or indexing of the entire site.

I don't know how that got in there, but I removed it, and figured the site would show back up in Google after a while.

Nothing had happened by August 17th - I'd placed some links to the site on my other sites, and I assume people linked to specific pages I'd written earlier on forums because they have been doing that since I built the site.

I did a re-inclusion request on Aug. 17th. A few weeks later I got a reply that said my site didn't meet their quality guidelines. I have other sites I make money on so I just dropped the whole matter.

Today I was searching Google for something else, and my site is back in their listings. I haven't done anything. Only the pages with more than 5 external links are showing up on the first page of Google.

Fascinating.

[Michael Martinez]

Might just be a fluke but here's hoping that your site is back in. I've linked to a few collectible train sites in my time. They can be quite interesting and creative.

[train99]

Back in the 1990s there were a bunch of us who built websites to show off our trains. Most of them are gone today, and replaced by a whole crop of new ones. Two people I know actually took their sites down compiled them CD and then sold the CDs on eBay.

One of the sections of my site is now first on google for the searches. It always used to be first in the serps because it was the first definitive in depth content about those trains placed online. Many people who wrote about those trains linked to my articles.

I never did any link building on the site after 1999, as the links just came naturally. I don't do much link building on my sites today either, instead I just put articles up and assume people will link to them. But in most cases it's not like in the trains.

Google shows a bunch of broken links and missing pages on my site. I know it's a mess. I'll work down the list of crawl errors and fix them which should be enough to keep me indexed.

[Mikl]

... A few weeks later I got a reply that said my site didn't meet their quality guidelines.

It's a pity that they told you that it didn't meet the quality guidelines, but they didn't tell you why. For that matter, it's a pity that you had to submit a re-inclusion request to find that out.

Presumably, Google have an automated process which tests a site against the quality guidelines. Maybe there should be some system whereby anyone could run their site against that process, on a self-service basis. The result could only be an improvement in the overall quality of the web.

Just a thought.