Hi there

I 've been writing a blog on Blogger since last April - it's subject matter is Strange Games (unusual party , childhood games etc). I have been posting 3 or 4 posts per week. After a month it was on the 3rd page of google search for the words Strange Games - I was thrilled, and carried on writing it - gaining a few links from like minded blogs etc. From about August it started to appear on the first page (position 10 or so). Slowly it rose, spending ages at no.2 until at the end of December it reached no.1 in Google for the search Strange Games (It was already that number for Yahoo and Msn)

http://strange-games.blogspot.com/

My visitors (still low by normal standards ) were pleasing to me - about 50-70 per day - many from Google and quite a few from the many links and blog directory listings i've built up.

Then.....about 5 days ago, for no reason I can think of, it seemingly dissapeared from Google (only) - it is there if you really search - about 15/16th page - and appears well below listings of it in Bloglisting, Feedburner etc. Obviously visitors all but ceased.

I'm only writing it for pleasure - but I am bemused by what has happened.


Any thoughts/ideas greatfully received.

Also, it may be unrelated but since its drop, the site is regularly visited - up to 15 times a day by a particular address which spends 0 time visiting and arrives not from a search or link

the address is 38.98.19.# (Performance Systems International)
Performance Systems InternationalLocation Continent : North AmericaCountry : United States (Facts)State : TexasCity : Fort Worth

I don't know if I would worry too much right now.
It could just be an algo shakeup

Give it a few more days or a week and check again, in the meantime keep doing what you're doing

Lots of questions here, which means you'll get your answers scattered in chunks. But the main answer is that there are only two people who know why you dropped off the SERPs ( God and Google ), and they're both pretty tight lipped. But we can at least speculate, because there are some really smart folks who've learned a lot about how these things work, and while they don't know the answer for your site, maybe they can point you in the right direction.

Randomly, I'll deal with the static IP address that hits your page 15 times a day for zero seconds per. That's a robot. Maybe Google's, although I wouldn't think Texas. Do you have any reciprocal links, or is there a reason someone would want to spider you?

Now more to the point. Another user posted a thread about a week ago called "I was clobbered" or something like that, where his page dropped off the Google radar, people offered some tips, and then his page reappeared while he was carrying them out. So my guess is Google has a hiccup every now and then, maybe one of their servers dies. Hopefully somebody who knows more can come in and explain this.

VanGogh would or will recommend putting a link to your site in your forum signature here. Google likes sites with a lot of other sites linking to them, although it won't count forum posts very highly. Still, it's more important what the anchor text of those links is, and you can control that. What you want is a link like this: Strange Games.

This tells Google other sites think you're a good resource when it comes to strange games, instead of just in general.

thank you for the responses so far - hopefully as you say its just a blip and will move back up. I'm fairly sure I've done nothing wrong.

There can always be a lot of reasons, but I think in this case I think I found the reason for the drop and it will need to be fixed before your pages will be ranking again.

If you do a site: search for your blog or click that link you just read past since I did it for you, you'll see most of your pages are in the supplemental index. The supplemental index gets used if there aren't enough good results in the main index, but that's not going to happen for most searches.

Usually getting placed in the supplemental index comes from either a duplicate content issue or because of a lack of trust in your inbound and outbound links. If you've been engaging in link exchanges with unrelated sites or link out to a lot of junk sites then linking id probably the issue. If you're linking has been good then it's probably a duplicate content issue.

I think it's the duplicate content issue. One url I see as supplemental is:

strange-games.blogspot.com/atom.xml

which is the url of your feed for that page. I'm not sure why Google can't figure it out, but instead of indexing your real page they throw both the page and the feed into the supplemental index and neither will rank.

I had a similar problem with my WordPress blog going supplemental last summer. I don't think my solution will work since you don't have access to the server for your blog as it's hosted through Google.

I think you'll need to sign up at Google's Webmaster Central if you haven't already and add a Sitemap for your site. You should be able to tell Google which pages you do and don't want indexed through Sitemaps. Once you do you should see your traffic come back.

thanks for that Van Gogh

I've been careful with my links - so I don't think that can be a problem - although I had a strange situation recently on the MyBlogLog site ( a blog listing/networking site) where from nowhere a site about House Music appeared on my page as being authored by me - it wasn't

I will try the sitemap suggestion - and get back to you

I still don't understand though why this has all happened so suddenly

That authoring thing was a hole in MyBlogLog. You weren't alone in being asked to co-author a blog. I got the same one too as did half the blogosphere once the exploit became public. As long as you didn't click to accept it your name won't be there as co-author.

I found about the exploit at Shoemoney's blog if you want to know more.

I may well have accepted being a co-author - I really can't remember. I have since deleted the site as being owned by me, obviously. Could this be the source of my problem?

I don't think the two are related. I did find this earlier at Marketing Pilgrim about potential issues with blogger pages being dropped from the index and thought it might be relevant.

Seems like there's a problem in blogger templates inserting noindex code into meta tags.

I had the same thing happen with my sellsharewareonline.com site - I was literally the first search result on "sell shareware online" for a few weeks (about a month after putting up the site), and I was on cloud nine!

Now I have a lot more content and traffic to my site, but I can't even find my site on google unless I enter the full url in the search field.

One thing I noticed is that when I started advertising using Google Adwords, my site dropped off the first page right away. I guess Google figures "why should we list you on the first page if you're willing to pay us for a listing?"

Since then I've turned off Adwords for this site, and then I guess Google figured "fine, screw you then".

I'm obviously just guessing here, but doesn't it all seem a little odd?

I guess we can't all be on the top pages of each search result... not when there are millions of competitors hoping for the same slot.

As much as that does sound like used car salesman behavior, and we know that Google is in the business of making money, I don't think they're connected.

Every time Google discovers a new site, the search position changes. And it seems like they've recently devalued a lot of types of links, including from directories. I think these are more likely the reason than Google trying to fleece you.

Rick it looks like you have a supplemental index issue too. Check a site: search on your domain and you'll see your pages are supplemental.

thanks Van Gogh - I checked the source code when google displays the site and it did have the meta tag generated as:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />


I have hard coded the metatags into the Blogger profile, overwriting the <$BlogMetaData$> element as follows

<meta name="verify-v1" ........
<title>STRANGE GAMES</title>
<meta name="verify-v1"
....
....
...
<meta name="robots" content="ALL">

If the bolded line above is still wrong - please tell me . Im no expert in meta tags.

If this is the reason that my blog was de-listed then I am really shocked that the move to beta version blogger could possible cause something like this to happen.

If the above change solves my problem then I owe you a pint

The meta tag looks good. I hadn't seen that as a problem with blogger and then I was just reading Marketing Pilgrim and came across it and had a feeling that's what was going on with your site.

Seems like an error in the new beta version, which will probably be corrected soon now that the error is known. If it's anything like the issue I had with WordPress you should start to see your pages come back in a few days and maybe all back in a week or two.

Glad to help.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Rick it looks like you have a supplemental index issue too. Check a site: search on your domain and you'll see your pages are supplemental.

Thanks for taking time to check that out.

Sorry, but could you explain what you mean by "supplemental index issue"?

Originally Posted by RickPlmr

Sorry, but could you explain what you mean by "supplemental index issue"?

VanGogh is a lot more knowledgeable than me, but probably busy at the moment. But if he comes back and gives an answer that conflicts with mine, he's the one who's right.

Anyway, being in the supplemental index is the issue, aka problem. The suppdex is sort of like the showers in jail right after you drop the soap - it's where you don't want to be. If any of your pages are there, it's a problem.

The "supplemental index" is pretty much what its name implies. It's the "extra one." The red-headed step child. It only comes out to play when you find a gap in the regular index. If you did a search for "iced cream" and there were no sites in Google's (main) index, it would look to the suppdex. But since there are more sites than I can count about iced cream, it will just return those and not look at the suppdex. If your pages wind up here, you can basically expect them to never turn up in any search.

And then the other problem, aside from being shot dead, is Google doesn't refresh pages in its suppdex very often, no where near as often as it refreshes its cache of the main index. So anything you change on these pages will take an eternity to show up.

Sounds nasty.

Any ideas/suggestions on how to get out of the supplemental index?

If you check out some of the recent threads here about how to get into the supplemental index, you want to do the opposite. One reason that's not mentioned is if you have more than two or three query string parameters, Google has a hard time indexing these pages.

Anyway, once you take care of whatever put you there, I think you need to apply for re inclusion.

Sorry I jumped in here so late...I just saw the thread today for the first time.

andymac63, you've got an issue of duplicate tags. It shouldn't affect your indexing at all...it's just something that could easily be fixed:

<meta name="verify-v1" content="L48XNhTMhqtiFS0v74XdWzkVYnxqD2ZbsniPAb+8OYk=" /> 
  <title>STRANGE GAMES</title>
<meta name="verify-v1" content="L48XNhTMhqtiFS0v74XdWzkVYnxqD2ZbsniPAb+8OYk=" /> 
  <title>STRANGE GAMES</title>

You only need one of each.

Looks like a cool site other than that, though, and it looks like you're trying to build for your users first rather than engines.

RickPlmr: all I see in your site is a bunch of affiliate links and promotion of things such as iNeedHitsUpsideTheHead that really shouldn't be promoted. If you're struggling, it's because you're making the same mistake millions have made before you and trying to promote affiliate products/services under the guise of being a user of said products/services.

In other words, you're not doing anything unique or original.

Originally Posted by vangogh

I don't think the two are related. I did find this earlier at Marketing Pilgrim about potential issues with blogger pages being dropped from the index and thought it might be relevant.

Seems like there's a problem in blogger templates inserting noindex code into meta tags.

Thanks steve. I have been seeing an increasing drop in pages listed in google from my blogs on blogger, which of course lead to a drop in traffic, I was wondering why. I just looked at the source of the page, And there it was, The noindex/nofollow tag.

One question.... What the hell is blogger thinking?