[scratt]

Earlier today I was doing my usual rounds of my web sites.. Checking ranking, seeing which pages need to be updated and so on...

Anyway, I have a site which ranks consistently in the top 10 results for quite an important topic on Google. It has done so for the last 5 years..

Today it was missing from Google.. Not dropped a page, not dropped a hundred pages. Gone!
This was bad! Very bad! It's kind of a flag ship page for a flag ship site, and brings me a lot of traffic.

All the sites that usually surround it were still there, and as far as I could tell their content, and SEO was still the same.. As was the content of my page, which had totally disappeared! (Annoyingly DMOZ, which I normally out rank had stolen my place!)

I did a quick check on MSN, and Yahoo, and so on, and nothing had changed there. My page was still there, in fact even higher.. Recently several of my sites have been shooting up in rank on Alexa as well..

So why would this page disappear from Google!!?!? All my other pages were still on Google, no change at all.. Just this one page seemed to have ceased to exist!

I started looking at new ways to re-work the page, check the SEO and so on.. But even this emergnecy update and change could take weeks to register on Google.

I then decided to see if I could contact someone at Google, to ask for advice... They are not that easy to contact (understandably). I bet they get a zillion people a day asking them why some site or other has gone up or down a place on page 'x thousand' of a search.

I also went to see if I could find any recent news articles on a Google algorithm change.. I have been through a few of those, and everything can go pretty wacky for a while when that happens. Nope, nothing of note..

Anyway, whilst I was getting new graphics ready and looking at content to try and maximise my SEO on a replacement page for this I sent a message through one of Google's 'Report a problem' pages. Not expecting much, although I have to say Adsense from Google, and many of their other services normally do get a real human to respond to you within 48 hours. They really are quite good at that, bearing in mind how huge and diverse they are as a company. And most of their replies do actually make sense, and you can tell that someone has actually read your email, and thought about a reply.

To cut a long story short.. About an hour later my page popped back up on Google.

I really do doubt it was as a direct result of my message to Google... Perhaps some glitch, or indexing update going on, and my page just popped out for lunch for an hour.. Who knows..
But then again, perhaps someone saw my message, quietly checked something, and sorted it out.

At the end of the day I love Google! Even if it was a temporary glitch, it did remain a temporary glitch, and I am back in business.. And if they did actually respond to my message, well more power, and more credit to them.

I love Google!