How large websites disappear from the SERPs

Johannes Beus
In the last weeks and month, two projects ceased operations, which, until then, had quite a presence in the SERPs: lycos.de and lexikon.meyers.de. I was curious how quickly Google would react in adjusting the SERPs for such extensive sites. At Lycos.de they removed all content from www.lycos.de and replaced them with a placeholder-page (with a correct 404-Not-Found-Header) including a searchbox. Successful parts of the domain, like iq.lycos.de and shopping.lycos.de, are sill available through their own subdomains ever since. As far as Meyers is concerned, their procedure is similar in principle, though there is a potent difference from a SEO-point-of-view: the placeholder-site, which is being shown for all articles of the former dictionary, returns the status-code 200 (“Everything is fine”). Here the SISTRIX VisibilityIndex for the hostnames www.lycos.de and lexikon.meyers.de:



We can see that, for both domains, their visibility went south relatively quickly after they ceased their operations. At this time, Lycos.de can not be found for nearly any keyword and Meyers.de is also on their way there. I find it interesting how quickly and meaningfully Google detected and filtered the compulsory duplicate-content that was created by the status-code 200. The sites are still in the index but they are not being found anymore and they will probably disappear from the index completely with the next new clustering.
Johannes Beus - on Sun (04/05/2009) at 15:36 PM

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