Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 15 years 2 months 14 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
While browsing through the stats of some (very poorly maintained) sites of our own, I found one that had zero traffic for quite a few weeks. Visiting the site, I saw no site, and just a “Cannot connect to database” error.
A glance at the toolbar showed me a PR zero, and indexed pages in Google (site:domain.com) brought up nothing but a few wp-content pages that should have been blocked by a robots file anyway. Sigh.
Further investigation revealed that we had a corrupted database, and by restoring a WP database backup from a Gmail account dedicated to backups, we had the site back pretty quickly.
A few months ago, the site was a PR3 with decent traffic, and now, it was a PR0 with practically no pages in the index. Bummer.
What Did I Do?
Inside Google Webmaster Tools, I went to Site Reconsideration on the top left, then “Request Reconsideration” in the center of the next page.
Here’s what I wrote:
We lost our database on this rarely attended WordPress site, and although we had traffic and PageRank, now the only indexed pages are ones that don’t even belong there, like /wp-admin pages. We’ve done nothing wrong, just left ourselves hanging in the wind too long with no pages there. Might we get reincluded please? PageRank back too? 😉
Thank you for your consideration…
How Did it Work?
I’ll have to let you know. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will be back?
Hi Scott, you generally don’t need to submit a reconsideration request if there was a technical issue on your side (and not a webspam-issue that you resolved). In a case like that, we’ll generally just reindex the URLs as we recrawl them, there’s no real way to speed that up.
Cheers,
John
Thanks for the reply, John – Since I didn’t have a cache date newer than a month, I thought perhaps I could speed it along with my request. No luck yet though, so I’ll have to see what happens.
Update – Been over 48 hours now, and although the index page was re cached within minutes, not of the other pages are yet, and of course, I’m still a PR zero.
I’ve had a couple other people ask why I bothered with the request too, and I know it will come back eventually, but I figured it sure couldn’t hurt, and I thought it might actually help. Apparently not though. ;(
Something similiar happened to me, actually I didn’t renew my hosting account in time and it got deleted (dropped). (OUCH!) I didn’t have the backup plugin so all my posts were gone, I wanted to cry.
Once I re-instated my hosting, I apparently lost my Pagerank and some or most of my pages were de-indexed.
I didn’t even fathom contacting google because I know they have ‘bigger fish to fry’ so to speak and I would be wishing upon a star to get my pagerank bank especially since it’s something that gradually happens over time and nothing that google could “Push A button” and make happen.
The very first plugin I install now is the WP backup, I think in the next WP release it should be part of the base plugins for your blog, it’s very pratical and I wouldn’t dare putting posts on a blog or even spend 5 minutes on a blog that doesn’t have the capability to backup the database.
This was a very valuable lesson learned the hard way, Don’t let it happen to YOU! set your renewal on auto renewal so you can avoid this extreme head ache, and money loss in my circumstance.