Why is my blog disappearing from Google index?

[Silkstream]

My Google blogger blog is about 10 months old. In that time i have worked really hard with adding unique content, building relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, and done some inbound marketing.

2 weeks ago I updated the template to something cleaner, with a little more "wordpress" feel to it. This means i've messed about with the code a lot in these weeks, adding social buttons etc.

The problem is that from some point late last week thurs/fri my pages started disappearing from Googles index. I have checked webmaster tools and have no manual actions. My link profile is pretty clean as its a new site, and i have manually checked every piece of content published for plagiarism etc.

So what is going on? Did i break my blog? Or is something else amiss? Impressions are down 96% comparing Nov 1-5th to previous 5 days.

site is here: http://bit.ly/174beVm

Thanks for any help in advance.

[TopFloor]

I've only begun looking into your issue however I noticed something odd when looking at the source code of your home page. I did a search for a couple of snippets of code (noindex, meta data, etc..) but when I searched for nofollow, I found a few links that seem to have a fair amount of text associated with them. However I do not see the text on the actual site.

The first instance is in line 1406 of your source code, there is a link to smnt.co.uk and some text about private vehicle registrations yet that link and text is not visible on the home page.

You may want to look in to that, while there may not have been a manual action against you, it's possible that your pages are being caught in Google's algorithm.

Hope that helps

[TopFloor]

Also, your robots.txt is disallowing "/search" which appears in the URL for all paginated pages on the homepage as well as in your "browse posts" category URLs. I would advise that you remove that line from your robots.txt. If you want to prevent search queries from being indexed, replace that with the following line:

Disallow: /*q=

That should prevent search queries from getting crawled or indexed.

[Silkstream]

That line of text is from the fourth post down "Sales Stats Confirm the UK Still Loves Cars", its truncating the posts to show "read more". However the source code, for some reason, shows all of the post.

Could there be something missing from here? I did delete the code that shows number of comments per post as i integrated Google comments late last week and the numbers didnt add up.

[Silkstream]

Thanks for this. I knew i needed to stop search being crawled for duplicate content and the disallow "/search" operator seemed to be the way a few others had done it. I will update that line to show the new query instead, presuming this is relevant for blogger blogs?

[TopFloor]

I really think the main issue is with the robots.txt. If you think about it, all of your blog posts that are not featured on the home page would be inaccessible to Google (since the pagination at the bottom and the main navigation URLs to browse posts all contain "/search"). So once the posts leave the homepage, you're telling Google they shouldn't see them anymore.

I only brought up the issue with "cloaked" text because the second link I saw was to a credit company and a red flag went up in my head screaming SPAM! But it looks to be legitimate.

I would advise you update the robots.txt and create an XML sitemap for all your posts/pages and submit that to Google Webmaster Tools. Should clear things up!

[Silkstream]

Thank you. That thought process did occur to me at the time of adding the robots txt, however that was back in March and the impressions drop has happened this week.

I have updated the robots.txt to show the new disallow command rather than "/search".

I also just installed my last back-up which was just before i added Google comments.

Thanks for your help!