Lost My #2 Google Position

[judyo]

My Oak Lawn site was down because of an url problem (my current host showed it as expired although the place I originally bought it from didn't). Somehow got lost around Christmas & my host (Point2) couldn't be contacted over the holidays. The site was offline for at least 5 days.

Of course, Google & MSN spidered it & it showed "page not available" or something in the description but still ranked. Now it's gone from Google and is no longer cached nor is it even in the index. Looks like it's been spidered & re-cached by MSN as it has the description again.

I'm still not sure if this is another Point2 mistake. I believe I purchased the url originally through Wild West as that was who Point2 recommended before they started selling their own domains. But when I called Wild West they told me I had to speak to Point2. The last I talked there was still a descrepancy between expiration dates but it's live & Point2 didn't call me back so I'm assuming they fixed things.

Will Google pick the site up again? I'm assuming I won't have to start from scratch but how badly will this hurt me? It's not a huge thing since this site doesn't generate that much traffic to begin with. But it was nice seeing my couple years of work put me in a top Google position, right under Homegain. And I do get contacts from it, so I will be losing out until it gets back into Google.

I'm just wondering if I'll be able to reclaim my #2 position & how long it will take.

[David Abernathy]

Judy,

My hosting company was down for 4 days this past fall During that time, Google, Yahoo, and MSN all searched my site and found no sites In my case I was fortunate and it only took me a couple weeks to regain most of my former placement in the search engines.

I was really happy that I did not have all my sites hosted by the same vendor. I now have two accounts with them on seperate servers in addition to other sites hosted by various website vendors to try an limit the exposure to problems.

Best of luck - keep us posted on your experience.

Dave

[kensmith]

You should get your placement back.

[pcdoc]

Will Google pick the site up again?

Probably, I'm seeing varying results on a daily, if not hourly basis.

[judyo]

Thanks, guys. Since this has never happened to me before I didn't know what to expect. We shall see.

[pcdoc]

Judy,

Where's

http://www.oak-lawn-real-estate.com/sitemap.xml

[judyo]

I'm editing this as I realize you're talking about a Google sitemap. I can't add that to my standard Point2 site. However, the site itself has a sitemap feature that can be used (although it isn't in real-time as I added several pages yesterday that aren't being shown).

I had turned it off when my main url was down as I was using a default url. However, even though MSN shows a bunch of pages cached, Point2 has changed the way listings are now shown per site. If it's a "shared listing" (all members can post other member's listings on their own site), we now have a "no robots" command as these listings were bringing up supplemental results.

So the bottom line is that I truly have less than 50 pages on the site so I have no worries about even the need for a site map as my Point2 sites have never had a problem getting spidered. But thanks for the reminder to turn the site map function back on as I need everything possible to get re-indexed.

[Tim7332]

yeah I'd think you'd get your placement back too. I'm sure high ranking sites crash quite often and google has a system for recognizing the site was just temporarily down.

[thataway61]

Hi Judy,

I think Point2 had a server down or slow service anyway, last July. We disappeared for 3-4 weeks and then showed back up. We were in sandbox at that time, but did return to where we were and then moved up later in the year. Lets just hope that a situation like that doesn't start the sandbox over again.

Seems like you will probably get the same result that John Sabia did right before Jagger. He disappeared, then came back, then Jagger hit. Haven't heard much on the forums from John lately. Was wondering how yours and his REW sites were progressing/performing?

Anyway, hope that Oak Lawn Real Estate comes back #1.

[judyo]

Hi Cal,

I just wish I knew who was at fault for this happening. IMO it shouldn't have occurred in the first place. And I'm still not sure about the Wild West & Point2 domain name connection.

My REW site is too new for Google but has many #1 positions in MSN (although truthfully it did before the transfer). Just the other day I checked Yahoo where it appeared on the 3rd page & was surprised to find it on page 1 so it's progressing there, where my Point2 site was dumped (still in the index but was #1 - now not top 100).

Somehow all of my Resource pages lost their cache on my REW site (I think it was something to do with the transfer & spidering) but most have been picked up again. They were still in the index but just not cached. We added a Google sitemap plus I put my Resources link in the footer instead of just on the home page. The other day only about 3 were cached & now the majority are, so that's good.

How is your site faring? I think I read you've reclaimed Google positions but are still not back in Yahoo, correct?