Site not appearing on Google any more ?

deadl0ck

Hi all,
My site has been around for quite a while (about 7 years), and it always came up pretty high on Google.

I've just noticed now, however, that it's not appearing on Google search results anymore.

My site is called "MAME ROM Links" and basically it links to site where people can find ROM files for the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) eumlator - the URL is http://www.mameromlinks.com

Up until it disappeared from google it was top when you did a search for MAME ROM, or was always on the first page of results when looking for "MAME ROMS", or "Arcade ROMs"

According to the AWStats program on my host the GoogleBot last crawled my site 27 May 2008 - 06:42

Day	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
01 May 2008	1375	16279	70888	188.95 MB
02 May 2008	1181	13466	58597	155.80 MB
03 May 2008	1280	11849	57625	160.98 MB
04 May 2008	1361	14288	65506	176.28 MB
05 May 2008	1141	11622	52567	151.52 MB
06 May 2008	1168	10125	51245	153.89 MB
07 May 2008	1180	9179	50390	153.27 MB
08 May 2008	1171	14478	56208	264.17 MB
09 May 2008	759	5229	25077	85.29 MB
10 May 2008	589	7916	27042	79.12 MB
11 May 2008	602	7272	23916	66.02 MB
12 May 2008	458	5725	20335	56.65 MB
13 May 2008	460	2867	13814	61.71 MB
14 May 2008	479	3310	15262	61.17 MB
15 May 2008	584	5368	17364	69.65 MB
16 May 2008	569	5548	15901	135.89 MB
17 May 2008	582	6236	18774	63.13 MB
18 May 2008	646	6577	23366	69.18 MB
19 May 2008	608	4133	18135	62.47 MB
20 May 2008	530	8335	22183	76.46 MB
21 May 2008	637	6538	22182	74.29 MB
22 May 2008	637	6905	19423	68.80 MB
23 May 2008	571	7772	23880	69.56 MB
24 May 2008	642	9198	27444	66.78 MB
25 May 2008	606	14009	35865	68.30 MB
26 May 2008	579	11383	29249	57.02 MB

You can see the drop from May 9th onwards....

I'm still appearing on Yahoo and MSNLive search, but my traffic has decreased considerably since google stopped listing it (as you can see).

Can anybody offer any advice ?

cianuro

I'd say you got stung with the completely irrelevant text links in your footer.

TLA? Or worse, DP COOP?

Looks like you have a -60 penalty. Plenty of reading on it. Remove the spammy links, finle a reconsideration request and prepare to wait it out from 1-5 months.

deadl0ck

Yep - I have TLA running on the site.

-60 Penalty ? How do you find this out ?

Moonstar

Is it possible that this happened before, and you just didn't notice it?

Google can do strange things at times, and is difficult to
predict.

Having said that, you might want to look closely at any changes you may have made in the week prior to the drop, especially if they involve potential duplicate content issues.

zAbbo

What does Google's Webmaster tools say?

deadl0ck

I had TLA and another advertieser on the site which I have since removed and I've re-submiited it to google for re-consideration.
I actually knew nothing about the google penalaties until cianuro mentioned it.

I still dunno how cianuro figured out that I have a -60 penalty - is there some way of telling ?

Google WebMaster tools says:

Home page crawl:
Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on May 31, 2008.
Index status:
Pages from your site are included in Google's index. See Index stats.
Loading...

Would it say there if I had a penalty ?

Moonstar

deadl0ck wrote: »

...
I still dunno how cianuro figured out that I have a -60 penalty - is there some way of telling ?
...

I think he means the page on Google search results that your site appears on for certain keywords. e.g. searching for "mameromlinks" your page comes up as results #66.

Ohhh I see what your problem is!
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:Xi2zyAt8t4kJ:www.mameromlinks.com/+mameromlinks

Google wasn't able to access your site the last time it crawled it, due to NukeSentinel.

Assuming the problem is now fixed, give it another week or two (or three) and you should be back in the search results nearer the top.

deadl0ck

NukeSentinel has benn on the site for over a year
Why would it start blocking GoogleBot now ??

Moonstar

I don't know, but it definitely looks like the problem. If that software automatically updates blocklists or if Google started using different IP addresses, that might have made it stop working correctly.

The 3rd review on this page http://nuke-reviews.com/index2.php?item_id=8 seems to have more details.

deadl0ck

Cool - I'll look into this later (i.e. NukeSentinel) and keep an eye on the Google Cache of the site to see if it's being blocked...