Don't you just hate it when ...

Most readers know that I've got a site about the Euro 2008 tournament. It used to rank #3 in Google UK for that term, but know the homepage has disapeared, there's no cache and it obviously no-longer ranks for that term.

So I obviously wonder why it's no longer there and why it's happened to other people in the past.

The important thing to do, if this has happened to you, is to look firstly look at:

1. how your site is created - if you use a blogging tool (like I do for that site), when you update it, does it take pages down and then re-create? Well Blogger does this. If you try and load up your site when you're rebuilding it often the pages will be temporarily deleted. If this happens when Google are crawling, the pages will often be removed from the db.
2. Did the site go offline due to hosting problems. Well I've no knowledge that it did go offline. It would be easy to say: "well, I've still got internal pages listed", but if you don't have great Page Rank (as the site doesn't), it won't be crawled all that often anyway.
3. Has the site been scraped? Well using CopyScape I don't think so - but there may be a problem with using RSS news feeds from the Eurosport site. I know it's being anal, but with the way things are with Google you can't say that they don't think there's duplicate content.
4. Is there too much duplicate content within the site? Well this has been my biggest concern using Blogger and the way you create labels. Content appears on both the homepage and the pages you categorise. I've already rel="no follow"d my archive pages to prevent this issue. The only solution I can think of is to reduce the number of posts on the homepage, but this reduces the range of keyphrases the homepage would rank if it were just a Googleblip.
5. Some bugger has reported the site for not-complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines. The site is far from being "Black Hat" so I'll tentitively rule that one out.

Top Tips for a suspected removed site.

1. Use the Google Site Status Tool to see if your site is being crawled. This should be the first thing you look at to see if you've got a ban.
2. If you value your site you would have already made sure you've got Google Webmaster Tools activated on your site. So it's just a case of doing a couple of things. Firstly, check to see if Google had any problems accessing any of your pages (this will appear when you first log-in). Secondly check the crawl rate, if it's dropped it may indicate problems and will also cause it to take longer to get back in.
3. Check to see if there are any pages left in Google by using the site:www.mydomain.com "word used a lot on your site". If there's no pages, you're buggered.
4. Use CopyScape to see if there's any sites stealing your content.

What do you do if it has been removed.

1. Change underpants
2. Spend a couple of days just making sure that you haven't done anything overtly wrong
3. Also get some content added to see if you can break out any possible duplication issue.
4. Try getting a few more fresh links in
5. Wait

If waiting doesn't work. Try a reinclusion request.

Then wait some more!