I don’t think i’ve mentioned it before on my blog, but I spend a healthy part of my free time as the moderator and all-around tech guy of a website called Calgarypedia.
About a month ago, Calgarypedia’s domains expired due to a miscommunication with the sites owners and the registrar of the domains. Because of this, a domain-scouring bot picked up the domains while they were in internet limbo and gave them those awful “what you need, when you need it” domain parking pages. (Side note: Whoever wrote those pages obviously has no idea what I need or when I need it.)
During the time that Calgarypedia’s domains were taken over, it completely dropped from Google’s index. It took a while to clean up the mess and when everything was rectified and the domains were back online, I could find the content of Calgarypedia back in Google’s index by doing a site: search. But keyword searches, even for the site’s name, came up with nothing. And still come up with nothing a month later.
Now I’m starting to worry that the site has been penalized in some way for messing around with its domains. But it’s hard to tell sometimes what Google sees.