I installed Mint the night before last to track stats on my site and I saw quite a number of visitors were coming in by various Google searches. Yesterday morning I checked out some of those searches, so I know for a fact my web site was indexed and coming up.

Searching for "Twisted Melon" would bring us in at number two and adding anything like "apple" or "mac" or "remote" would bring us in at number one each time.

Sometime yesterday afternoon Google dumped 100% of our indexed pages from their site. Going by the stats in Mint, it was no more than 18 hours ago. There doesn't seem to be anything you can search for to bring us back as a result. Sure, you'll get a thousand or more links to the site from elsewhere, but no matches for the site itself.

Likewise trying "site:twistedmelon.com" brings up nothing. WTF? Has anyone ever seen this happen before?

I re-submitted the top-level URL and a plain-text site-map (list of all html files/directories) to Google last night using their Webmaster Tools page. They can't even explain why something like this could happen in their documentation. Everyone knows they get super sketchy any time they have to say anything about their indexing. Not even so much like they're trying to protect secretive algorithms, but as if the people writing the documentation have no idea what black-arts voodoo is actually going on.

It's possible that Google is just borked. If I do my standard "all three link forests" query, Google doesn't show any empegbbs.com pages. If I search for "three link" site:empegbbs.com I get my complaint, but not the original (pre-Creative patent) post. If I search for "three link forests" site:empegbbs.com I get nothing, even though the search for "three link" clearly shows "forests" as the next word.

Peter

When Google first introduced those "site:" searches, I thought they were great. In the past year or so it has not worked a single time that I've used it. I've tried very broad searches but have not gotten a single result.

Remeber those rought looking guys that came by your site the other day asking for "Protection Money"? Well, it must have been them.

Just Kidding. I've seen this kind of thing happen too. I think they just loose stuff every once in a while.

This happened to the empegbbs.com search results a few weeks back, and I never heard a good response on what happened. Right now, I see 137 anonymous users on the board, so likely the spider is really trying to reindex everything again.

I'm tempted to just block google in the future if the drop the index on a regular basis. Whats the point of letting their spiders eat a ton of bandwidth if no good end result comes of it?