Google loses its index

Seems like Google has lost a section of its index again, especially for newer pages.

I’ve been very busy launching a couple of new forums over the past couple of months, and I’ve seen Google come in and index some of the pages - then waited for the deep crawl to grab the rest of the site URLs.

Instead, all the pages have completely dropped excepting for the forum homepage.

For example - I was watching the indexing of a webhosting domain I’ve had for a while and decided to really push as a forum.

Now it’s lost most of its pages - having gone from just 35 indexed forum URLs at the end of March, to just the forum homepage at present.

I also reported a couple of weeks ago that another new forum I was developing on a domain was being indexed by the AdSense mediabot.

That site is also now showing only the homepage URL - the AdSense spidered content, then updated indexing of a few dozen URLs is also gone.

Now, new sites are esepcially vulnerable to quirks and technical problems - what is more disturbing is when older and more established sites also see the effect.

For example, a site command on Google showed only 280 pages indexed for the Platinax forums - a section of the site that is search engine friendly and contains a couple of thousand useful idnexable URLs.

None of this looks like a penalty to me - just another problem Google has been having with its index, which so far as I can tell has actually been happening since around February.

What would be really interesting is if this really is related to Adsense Mediabot spidering, and of Google having to abandon that process and restart with a new index.