search ranking sabotage?

sneakyimp

i maintain a website. until i checked today, it was the top-ranked site at google for a particular single word search.

today, it's NOWHERE to be found in the entire google search index.

I believe someone has sabotaged our google ranking by excluding us from the search there. our site has been rising in the rankings for roughly 3 years now. i contacted help support at google and they told me that you could tell if a URL was excluded by doing a search for the fully qualified url (e.g., http://mydomain.com/default.php). i've done that and the home page of my site IS excluded. So are most of the main pages accessible from the top-level naviation menu.

I have complained to google about this. I AM FURIOUS.

I would like to know if there is any way to determine outside of google why it may be excluded. I know that google lets you exclude pages by using META tags, by entering links on their site, and by using a ROBOTS.txt file (http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html#B3)

Is there any thing i can do to find out why/how my site has been excluded?

Elizabeth

I assume you've already checked Google's reasons why a site may no longer be included and if none of those fit, the only other way to remove you is through robots.txt. My understanding is that even if you submit a URL to be removed, it will basically just grab the robots.txt file from that site, preventing someone from just arbitrarily typing in URL's to be deleted. Are you showing up in other search engines? Has your robots.txt file been messed with?

(on a side note, were you the one worried that someone was using your computer late at night? I tried to do a search but I couldn't find that thread :mad: - if it was you, perhaps the two are related! :eek: )

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Elizabeth
(on a side note, were you the one worried that someone was using your computer late at night?)

No, that was spighita.

(Hehee - dug up an old thread before dalecosp did! Time for me to shut up and get back to work.)

sneakyimp

no that wasn't me. i did contribute to that thread though.

and yes, i've searched the reasons why a page no longer gets listed. we have not changed our page recently, there are no meta tags, and there's no reason to believe that any pages that link to us have altered those links.

i believe there are 2 other ways
1) robots.txt - this is not out of the question as we have an uneasy peace with the people hosting our site.

2) url exclusion form - i seem to recall google has a page where you can exclude URLs if you purport to be the right representative. it's not unlikely that the someone from the cosmetics company that is also vying for the top spot might have done this.

I'm in touch with google, but they have little or no incentive to help me aside from their goodwill. I doubt we contribute much, if anything, to their billion-dollar bottom line.