My company site has a few high ranking pages for respective keyphrases in Google, Yahoo and MSN for more than 2 years. But 3 of them were gone in Google a few weeks ago. The other pages still rank high in Google and Yahoo and MSN love all our pages as well. We did not do anything on these 3 pages since they came online.
If I search some specific sentence that only exists in one of the pages, Google returns no result. I know page may rank high or low at any time, but it seems that these 3 pages are not in Google's index any more.
We lost some traffic and enquiries from such problem.
How come Google may drop the 3 pages of 2 years old completely ?
Are there enough links pointing to those pages? If Google sees the number of inbound links to a page as an indication of how 'important' a page is, maybe Google thought those pages weren't important enough to keep.
It does sound to me like it may be a link problem.
A few of my old sites had a similar problem as they were using methods of reaching these pages that weren't search engine friendly.
For example, old articles may not be reachable via standard anchor links and the user may be finding the content by searching for them or selecting a category from a form menu list?
The content is still reachable by a user but search engines won't reach the content and therefore may remove it from their index if there are no links pointing to these pages.
It certainly doesn't sound like Google banned them if there's no problem with the rest of the site so I think hooperman's suggestion is much more likely.
This is obviously just a broad assumption given that we haven't seen the site but I'd assume there are problems in the way that spiders can access these pages?
Does the link to this page exist anywhere else on your site other than in the footer on your homepage?
If there's only the one link and that link is at the bottom of the page then it would be sensible for Google to believe that this link wasn't all that important.
It's also in a colour that doesn't have a great deal of contrast between the text and background colour so could possibly be ignored by Google as an attempt to use keyword stuffing.
If you include it within the overall structure and navigation of your site then it should have more chance of being indexed.
Obviously you could attempt to create backlinks to this page but I'd personally look at the onsite factors you can do to improve the chances of it being relisted.
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