Dropped from google after using metatag

[Kinderegg]

Hello everybody!

Days ago something strange happened to my website. I wanted to check why some websites had a description under the URL in google results and my website not. Well I looked for the source code of one of these websites with description and I found one meta tag description saying the exactly description of the website. Well I used the same metatag in my website with my own description but since this day my website was dropped from google and even if I drop this metatag from my script the website still don't come back to it! And worse: the googlebot crawler that always appeared in my website stats don't come anymore even if I submit my URL to google again. Does anybody can explain me what happened? And how can I fix it? :confused:

[seobook]

under most cases the meta tags are not usually going to be the problem...did you tell a robot to not index the page or did you make any other changes at the same time?

link into any shady sites recently?

[Kinderegg]

Well, as you said yes, I´ve changed the main (Index) page and there's one thing to observe. after I put the metatags the site was dropped from google and after I've changed the Index the googlebot crawler stopped to visit the website. I used to observe its visit at least one time per month. Well and there's one important thing: I am checking now the stats of my website and in the section "HTTP Error codes" - 404 Document Not Found - 58,3% and when I check the documents not found I can see it: URL: /robots.txt - Hits: 84 !? robots.txt? I didn't put this file there. And who is trying to check this file? crawlers? I've read that some crawlers use this file to index the pages. And the last thing I observed: I've been reading google documents and they say that - My web page was dropped from google! What happened? And the answer was: Maybe the crawler is trying to visit your website but it can't for any reason. maybe because this robots.txt?

[Marcia]

Added meta tags wouldn't cause a site to be dropped, but you might want to run the pages through an HTML validator. HTML errors can cause problems.

Crawlers that behave respectably check for robots.txt - but lack of one does no more than create the error message, though some have expressed concern over not having one.

Just upload or create a file that's robots.txt (plural,not singular) - and leave it blank if there's nothing you want to exclude. That will end the 404's - and if you do put in a robots.txt that has exclusions, make sure and validate it so there aren't any errors.