site appears and disappears

[stgma]

Hello

I have a website (http://prv.gr) which showed up on google with 5 or 6 indexed pages. Then the pages disappeared and only the index could be found. Then after 3 days I could find the pages again (using site:prv.gr). And now I can only see the index again.

Any ideas? Is it that I am using ?p=page on my urls?
My sitemap is at: http://prv.gr/?p=googlemap
I have submitted it a month ago and I think google looks at it around once a day.

thanks

[g7submit]

Hey Stgma

I had another look and can say Google is still kind to you :cool: . Check your site again by typing: site:www.prv.gr (http://www.prv.gr/) and you will see your 5 listings. However, you have to remember that Google.COM is more relevant with English versions. If I were you, I would optimize my website for higher ranking in the Google.GR to max my results through language relevancy.
BTW
I checked on google.GR and saw your FIVE listings intact:
http://www.google.gr/search?hl=el&q=site%3Awww.prv.gr&meta=

Wish you peace of mind and all the best - ;)

[TheWizardofSeCA]

May I suggest that you, just to make sure, 301 redirect http://prv.gr to http://www.prv.gr

You might also want to look into making sure all links to your index page are the same to prevent duplicate issues.
Examples are:
http://www.prv.gr/?l=el&p=home
http://www.prv.gr/?l=el
http://www.prv.gr/

To be sure, I would change all those links to '/'

For the English language you have:
http://www.prv.gr/?l=en&p=home
http://www.prv.gr/?l=en

I would at the very least make sure both links are the same, though personally I would use keyworded static urls anyways.

I hope this helps, above fixes are quick and harmless.

[stgma]

Thanks a lot for your detailed response.

Instead of fixing those duplicate URLs, would it help if I included them in robots.txt such as:
Disallow: /?l=el
Disallow: /?l=en

Also, in the google webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html they say:
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

Is that specificly for the parameter name 'id'? And if yes why did they choose this one?

thanks

[TheWizardofSeCA]

Thanks a lot for your detailed response.

Instead of fixing those duplicate URLs, would it help if I included them in robots.txt such as:
Disallow: /?l=el
Disallow: /?l=en

Considering you have a fairly small website, it is much smarter getting your website as SE friendly as you can possibly get at this stage, as you don't have a lot of backlinks or a major presence in the search engines yet. In the long run the short amount of time spent making some changes will be worth it, and you will avoid some potential issues in the future.

Anyways, as for your suggestion to Disallow in robots.txt - You only have a few pages on your website, and changing some links from to '/' isn't a lot of work. (It's a one minute job for your website.)

Fixing an issue properly is always better then avoiding it!

Also, in the google webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html they say:
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

Is that specificly for the parameter name 'id'? And if yes why did they choose this one?

thanks

The parameter 'id' is very commonly used for session-ids. If you visit a website using session-ids, they identify your "session" through an id-parameter. This means however that different visits generate different urls, causing a huge amount of different urls for the same page. If they would index pages with the id parameter, this would cause some large problems as normally can't directly access a page with an id parameter that hasn't specifically been assigned to you. Imagine googling for something and getting mostly links that don't work at all for you as search results :)

Dynamic urls are maybe not the *most* search engine friendly thing in the world, but they are indexed fine as long as there aren't any other issues with the page.

I hope this helps. :)

[SEOBrains]

Your mixed results could have something to do with this

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?p=76036#post76036