Site Penalized?

A little over a month ago my webhost moved several of my sites to another server and broke my blog. The blog software, Serendipity, has a forum and there was a thread that some files are often deleted when a site using it is moved.

Anyway; the site was completely down for about 2 weeks. It's again up and running on another server with a newer version of the software and some other changes that were intended to improve SEO and PR. PR has never been a major focus but I did hope to finally have the individual blog entries get some rank. (The two entries that did so well on Digg and have been linked to from many sites have no page rank just like the entries that have no incoming links.)

When the site went down, it did have a paid and followed link in the footer; now it does not, the advertising period was up anyway and I felt the revenue was not worth it in the long run.  I nofollowed the links to the script, the template designer and W3C. Also, in an attempt to help put the focus on the individual entries I nofollowed and even noindexed some of the other pages of the site.

Now with the latest PR update I find still no interior pages are ranked but even more troubling is that I no longer rank on Google for my site's name - Blog About Crafts.

I realize that when it comes to Google, it's often anyone's guess as to why they do things but I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions here. Google is showing over 200 indexed pages and one of those Dugg pages does rank for the title of the article but ranks after quite a few of the pages that link to it.

Do you think the loss of position was simply caused by being offline for those couple of weeks or something I may have done? I'm beginning to wonder if nofollowing footer links shouts to Google that the links are paid (they aren't in my case) and is their new way of finding evil link sellers?

Any thoughts?

Hi,

I noticed that people copy past complete blog posts from my site and post them on their own site. It could be possible that this copy cats get ranked in google if the original is offline for a while.

Really strange is that you can't find your blogs name anymore...

how about the organic traffic? does this traffic went down too?

Interesting enough, of the sites I looked at that linked to mine according to Google, many wrote their own articles and simply linked to mine or only quoted a line or two at a time. (Several of the links were from Digg or similar sites)

Looking at today's log, there's only one visit via Google from a site: search. That is definitely not the norm for this site. It's never had tremendous traffic but it does/did rank fairly well for a few terms that brought me visitors every day.

Yahoo seems to be unchanged and has sent me a few folks today.

Maybe you are just off because the bots couldn't crawl your site for so long and in that case you need to wait untill a SERPs update.

A few questions:

1) Did you changed URIs in the new version of the site?
2) Have you tried to get some incoming links after the site got working again?
3) Have you posted anything to your blog after the downtime? If so does your software pings popular services? (this would help to "remind" google that your site exists)

The URLs are all the same, I have gotten some new links (including last blog post here) and have written a few new articles that I submitted to several social networking sites.

I did wonder about the impact of it being down and this supposedly being only a PR update but wouldn't none of the site be indexed if that were the case?

I'm sure that a downtime longer than 48 hours has affect on websites which are visited frequently by the google bot.

I remember me some proxy sites with great organic traffic they stopped getting traffic from google after a short while because the site was more offline than online...

2 weeks is very long...

"2 weeks is very long"

Yes, it is indeed. When it didn't seem to lose any of its rankings during that time or once it was back online I thought I might have gotten a break. Oh well. Guess I'll just have to wait for the next update and hope that things get back to normal at that point.

I have had a site down for 1-2 days and something similar happened to it
Dropped out of the SERPS and visitors from google stopped coming
(because the thought the site was down)
It will be back to normal (mine did) in a matter of weeks

I suggest you help google out with some link from social networks !!!
and try to clear all 404 errors that your site might be giving to the googlebots

also look in the google.com/webmasters for any reported problems

Ok, first for the good news - Google seems to love Webdigity!

On Olaf's suggestion I used Google Webmaster Tools to see what's going on. It doesn't report any indexing or spidering issues but I did notice something that seems curious.

When looking at the "pages with external links" list it seems the only links included are those gained after the outtage. Of the ten (yes it is wrongly showing only ten pages with links :( ), most were in the form archives/xx-post-name.html with only one having index.php?/archives/xx-post-name.html

Most of the pre-outtage links were in the form index.php?/archives. Both versions seem to go to the same place. Once on the site, it is using archives/xx... without the index.php? added.

Google seems to be indexing the shorter version except for the one listed on Google's tool.

So, those of you with more experience with this tool, does it only report recent links? How do you think the filename difference could be impacting things? Should I change it to use the longer version? All the links generated from the 2 front-page Diggs use the longer form and those two entries are not among the ten being shown. I also had a page that was much talked about among crafters and that is not showing in the list either.

What would you do if it were your site? I thought I had set it up exactly the same for the URLs. Unfortunately since both versions of URLs bring up the right page I didn't notice the change.

As to Webdigity, the links from the latest post feature appear to be quite well indexed and represent the vast majority of links that Google is showing.

I think that Google has to recrawl the old links in order to give you back your rankings. In other words the downtime made google think that this is a new site now.

Webdigity is loved by search engines because besides the age and the popularity of the domain many sources are syndicating our content including some top sites like forbes.

Anyway the only thing you can do now is getting fresh links. Something that could help your site get indexed would be a recent posts widget in your sidebar - which is cool anyway for new visitors in your blog - plus a "related posts" widget at the end of each posts. This way each new crawl will get more pages of your site. But even if you don't do these I am sure you will back in SERPs soon.

when our site went down on the hosting site we dropped back a long way in google but it did come back over time,your site been down will effect your ranking