I was doing some snooping about a somewhat shady Real Estate company and their relationship to an unrelated field. A couple of months ago I did a Google search of the company and a key phrase to the unrelated field and got about four pages of hits. When I went back this weekend and typed in the exact phrases I got zip, zero hits. I’m not a “Grassy Knoll” kind of conspiracy theorist but it seems odd that these hits would vanish. Can someone ask Google to drop hits?
Would Google just drop a search if it is not popular? I do find it odd that not even one hit would come up. What Up dopers?
Does the phrase in question still exist on their site? Google re-indexes everything periodically (more often for larger sites) and so if the phrase is no longer there, it will no longer show up in search results.
Another possibility is that the company started serving up different pages to search engine robots than normal users. That does take some technical sophistication, but not much.
If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can request that Google removes various links or directories. I recently relaunched a site and had more than 3,000 dead links still in the Google index. I managed over the course of a month to get that figure down to 0 by using Webmaster Tools in conjunction with the robots.txt file. This might be possible to do with an entire site too.
Another possibility is that Google removed the site in anger, precisely because the company was engaging in shady search engine practices - this is what happened to BMW Germany in 2006, which was delisted completely.
Yea, it’s a very common, I hate to be so vague but I’ve been trying to write something about it and would like to break the story. It has to do with state government subsided contracts unrelated to Real Estate.