Wow – I didn’t know about the cache search on google. I see that the page in question hasn’t been spidered since the 9th of November, which is very close to when it disappeared from the serps.
I can also see, from my stats, that google’s spiders have slowed down somewhat on my site, and through the cache I can see just how bad it’s gotten. Egads 😮 .
Ok, so I’ve found a few good reasons why this has happened, and it’s a wonder I get any free traffic at all!
Here’s one thing that has made google unhappy with me – I didn’t hard-code the links on every page, yet I had moved many pages into topic-specific folders. I didn’t realize that the footer on each page had href=”./blah.html, rather than “http://www.casinogeek.net/blah.html”, If you see what I mean.
When I started this website, I was absolutely new to online publishing, html, SEO, and everything in between. And I was churning out the pages like crazy. As I went, I learned new things all the time, went back to correct, add, amend, etc., but missed pages here and there. Sloppy as hell. I’d advise anyone who is starting to get it right the first time!
I don’t know whether it’s best to hard-code internal links or not (put the entire url in the link). If you do, you can’t easily work offline, so I do all my changes online. Let me tell you, I’ve had some tense moments when I messed the script up!