Google has you by the balls
What to do when google decides to hide one of your pages.
There you are, following the rules you have decided are true. Write good quality, unique content, generate a few backlinks and hey presto ! Your site will be found and rank in the search engines for the keywords you have targeted.
You are generating traffic (and income) then all of a sudden, wham! Traffic dries up. No search engine traffic. When you do a search for your pages, you discover – to your horror - that the pages in question are now buried in the search engines in the back of beyond on page 750+. They are still indexed, but do not appear in any search term. For no apparent reason. You didn’t pay for any links, you didn’t do any spamming, you didn’t do any plagiarisation and everything on the page, with the exception of the text in the Amazon capsules, is original.
So now what. It doesn’t take you long to discover that there is no way of contacting google and asking them about the problem. Advice varies from, “Well, you just didn’t get enough backlinks,” to “You have been penalized for duplicate content for the text in the Amazon capsules.”
Neither of which is acceptable.
These are the two pages in question:
And the only thing I can say about them is that this is a nasty shock when it happens to you. I spent hours wading through a bunch of webmaster’s forums to discover I hadn’t done any of the things one usually gets penalized for – like keyword stuffing, paying for links, or mis-tagging or any other “black hat,” techniques.
So, what’s the answer? A glitch in the algorithm, you will just have to create some more backlinks and wait. Great. It is things like this that make you realize you are at google’s mercy. If they screw up – you pay. Simple as that. Caveat Emptor. 
KG Lew | April 9th, 2008 at 2:35 am #
It seems these days that google will sometimes penalize websites having you wondering what you did wrong… and if you try to follow up with them, they are usually too busy to look into it so they will respond with a generic answer that doesn’t really tell you anything…
Mark Knowles (Post Author) | April 9th, 2008 at 3:11 am #
Been there, seen it, done it, got the T shirt. Only one option - wait and see.
Jesse | April 9th, 2008 at 3:18 am #
google is always in a constant process of indexing millions of pages. so i guess, the SERPs are always affected. do whatever u may but google will not admit its shortcoming.
Mark Knowles (Post Author) | April 9th, 2008 at 3:22 am #
Too true. On mistake on their part and you are losing money. Response - “Too bad.”
I am learning.
Jesse | April 9th, 2008 at 5:33 am #
if u have noticed, when u type in a search item(say MUSIC) in the search box, the result page displays the stats as to how many millisecs it took and how many results(2,190,000,000 is wat it shows) r related tot it. but beyond the 50th page it doesnt go furthur. per page its 10 results. so in effect we r left with 500 results. so what about other 2189999500 results or web pages? mind boggling. aint it?
Mark Knowles (Post Author) | April 9th, 2008 at 10:23 am #
Scary too.
Mark | April 15th, 2008 at 9:39 am #
Google always rights itself when pr update is done its hassle waiting though