Hey guys, I have a fairly new website up and a couple pages which used to be listed have been removed from the Google index for no apparent reason (They are the following: http://treesearch.org/tyreprophecy.htmhttp://treesearch.org/feelings.htm, http://treesearch.org/biblelogic.htm, http://treesearch.org/jesushistoricalsupport.htm). For example, the tyreprophecy article used to be listed but it's been off for at least a month or two now (after having been listed for a month). I wondered if it had something to do with my use of anchor links, or rather the excessive number of anchor links in comparison to the amount of text on the page, but these following pages were also removed and yet they don't even use anchor links -- which blows my theory out of the water. (http://treesearch.org/jesusscholarship.htm, http://treesearch.org/pages/salvationbaptism.htm, http://treesearch.org/jam2.htm). In short, I'm at a complete loss. I think a quick survey of the articles will show that I'm clearly not intending to cheat the system or do anything shady. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks!

It's really not true that if something you don't like happens in Google, it's to punish you. Chances are, many of the pages that dropped out of the index haven't been linked to (externally) for a very long time. There's a limited amount of space in Google's index - even if it's a huge number, it's less than the # of pages on the internet. Probably it was resource allocation, and not a guideline issue.

Thanks for the insight LearningN, I'll see what I can do about getting some things externally linked (to check that possibility). I'm still suspecting, however, that there's something more involved. The reason being: some of those pages were relatively popular, and way more popular than some of the pages that weren't unlisted. For instance, when one typed in "Nebuchadnezzar Ushu Tyre" [it brings up 10 pages of results], my Tyre article was on the first page). Anyways, thanks for the tip -- i'll see what I can do about getting linked to.
Any other suggestions?

How do you mean popular? In math terms. Does that mean you got a lot of people coming to that specific page, from the search engine? That a lot of people read it in general? Because if folks land on your home page, say it's their browser's home page, then browse to an inner page on your site, Google has no way of measuring that (ahem), and doesn't use that sort of information in their search rankings.

Google actually has a very specific definition for (link) popularity. It isn't how they sort search results, but it determines things like how many slots you might get in their index. Actual placement in a search comes from a lot of other factors, including things like if the keyword they searched on is part of the title.

So it might be something more than what I mentioned going on, but so far I don't see any reason to think so.

fairly new website.

no more needs to be said. It's just perfectly normal.

I would advice to build more backlinks to those pages that the OP claimed to have dropped in Google's index. Try doing this and let us know if it helped.

Thanks MrCat & chrishirst. I'll see what I can do about getting backlinks (heh, of course, that's always the hard part isn't it). I imagine it'll be especially hard since the pages don't show up on google (i.e. no more freebees)... I'd have to advertise or request others to link to it specifically wouldn't I?

Originally Posted by Meszanjur

Thanks MrCat & chrishirst. I'll see what I can do about getting backlinks (heh, of course, that's always the hard part isn't it). I imagine it'll be especially hard since the pages don't show up on google (i.e. no more freebees)... I'd have to advertise or request others to link to it specifically wouldn't I?

I know you dont want to hear this, but put something useful or interesting
somewhere on your site, then spread word of it to like minded webmasters
and they will link to it.

Bompa