Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?

[semoney]

I had a new site that was ranking on the first page for 5 keywords.

My site was hacked recently and I went through a lot of trouble to restore it. Last night, I discovered that my site was nowhere to be found but when i searched site: mysite.com, it was still ranking which means it was not penalized.

I discovered the issue to be a .htaccess and it have been resolved. My question is now that the .htaccess issue is resolved , will my site be restored back to the first page? Is there additional things that i should do? I have notified google by submitting my site

[semoney]

Any help will be good?

[semoney]

How can i verify if it's penalized or a Google dance? Because its too coincidental that the entire site got de-indexed after the site got hacked. What can i do now? I still believe that it is still getting indexed by Google but GWT told me that Google have already indexed it. Maybe its because i just refused to believe the hard truth. What can i do now?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

There are many types and degrees of penalization. Very very few penalties result in total de-indexation.

Most of the time, if you are penalized, your rankings will simply drop for most keywords, but Google will often keep most of your pages in it's index.

Additionally, Google will only send messages about unnatural links via webmaster tools if it's a manual penalty. Algorithmic penalties, like Panda and Penguin, usually are not accompanied by manual notices.

Here's a really good article from Ryan Kent about the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

There's one final possibility: Nothing is wrong with your site, but for some reason Google is devaluing your backlinks. This sometimes happens when your site is fine, but the sites linking to you get hit with a penalty. Happens more and more these days.

[semoney]

Is it possible to call Google?!?!

[semoney]

Hi

1. There is no malware on my site. I have triple checked on Succuri and in GWT

2. Sitemap was re-submitted yesterday. No point in re-doing it. I even changed my robots.txt as per comments above.

3. I re-did a Fetch as Googlebot . No issues here

4. If i have been penalized, I wont even be able to see my site when i googled my site name. Additionally, i did not receive any messages from Google. Whatever SEO methods I did for this site, i used on my other sites and the other sites are all sitting on the first page. Only this site! Damn, why am i so unlucky?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Eada,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. I won't go over the same ground that the others have already covered here, but let me offer these suggestions.

Google often serves results from different data centers, and those data centers refresh at different times. Also, rankings can fluctuate greatly even throughout a single day. For this reason it's not unusual to occasionally see huge swings in rankings from hour to hour as the SERPs adjust. But let's try to get to the heart of the problem.

1. If you're site was hacked, this could be a strong signal to Google to not show you in search results.

Check in Google Webmaster Tools under "Health > Malware" to see if they have detected Malware on your site.

(I stated the next 2 earlier, but here they are again)

2. Submit a new sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure the sitemap is up to date. If your sitemap hasn't changed, resubmit it.

3. Do a "Fetch as Googlebot" - also in Webmaster Tools. Fetch your homepage. Then chose the option that says "Submit to index and all linked pages"

If Google has trouble fetching your homepage or any other page, it could indicate other problems you need to address.

4. Finally, we need to consider the possibility that this has nothing to do with hacking or .htaccess files, but instead there is the possibility that you have indeed been penalized and Google has dropped your rankings.

Have you done any questionable link building? Recieved any messages of unnatural links? If so, this may be another area you want to explore.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Eada,

There's 2 things you want to do here to "help" Google re-crawl your site.

1. Submit a new sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure the sitemap is up to date. If your sitemap hasn't changed, resubmit it.

2. Do a "Fetch as Googlebot" - also in Webmaster Tools. Fetch your homepage. Then chose the option that says "Submit to index and all linked pages"

An engineer at Google suggested #2 to me after my own site was hacked and I cleaned it up. It's a signal to Google to take another look at those pages.

[semoney]

Its strange! How can my website dropped suddenly in ONE hour?

1. Site was de-indexed due to .htaccess . It was resolved

2. Site was back up on the first page within two days

3. Site was de-indexed within an hour.

What happened? How did it get de-indexed so quickly? I don't think Google's penalty even worked so fast? What is happening man?

[semoney]

Hi

Thank you!

I have changed robots.txt as suggested and as mentioned, I have no choice but to wait

Im really praying that this goes back up

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS This

http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-webmaster-says-0-pages-indexed

[BlueprintMarketing]

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is you show up fine in Yahoo and Bing unfortunately you have to click one more button to show perfectly in Google. However I'm using the tool that I strongly strongly suggest that you use

Screaming frog spider SEO

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/

100% free for windows, Mac and Linux up to 500 pages per domain it tells you everything listed in the URL above. And will actually check your index status if you right-click on the a link that you want checked.

I believe that it is a matter of time however I would adjust your robot text to suit the information found at yoast.com below and in addition to that I would add your site map

so your robot text looks like this.

I would change my robot text to

User-Agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

In addition I have to go to work honestly or I am dead however I believe the frog spider will help you very much and if you add the site map to the robot text that never will hurt.

I will private message you regarding one other issue I don't know if you want talk about here.

your robot text is giving me some issues. But it may not be this.

http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/analyzer/

Your current robot text is this below I hope this is okay to share I don't think it'll violate any trust or anything like this it's not showing the site

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

try out this tool as well

http://phpweby.com/services/robots

I would change my robot text to

User-Agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

having the site map in helps a lot and if you have a /

Google tends to block more things. That are not listed below such as the site map

I also believe what this has to say is correct

http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/

also see

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13527529/robots-txt-is-blocking-wordpress-site-from-google?rq=1

[semoney]

On Google Webmaster Tools, the last updates was 6th April. Today is 9th April. Why did it stopped updating? Is there something wrong?

[semoney]

Cloudfare doesnt seem to serve my purpose. It seems to be able to detect hackers and spammers but my concern is on telling Google to index my site and put me back where I am originally was.

I have checked that on this site, there is no malware and no no-follows. The strangest thing is why did it suddenly go back to where it was and one hour later, it dropped?

[semoney]

I PMED you the link. Didnt want to put it publicly as this is for a client

[BlueprintMarketing]

I'm going to tell you something that work for friend that is a real oddball. Cloudflare.com the company that supposedly offers you a free CDN that I would not really count as a true CDN but will keep your site safer and possibly speed up depending on the configuration. Does submit your site to Google and did help a friend of mine. This is a last ditch effort however I know it did work so I don't think couldn't in the future and if you're not using a good anycast DNS system is really no harm in using it.

Thanks for the PM will check ASAP

[BlueprintMarketing]

will you share the URL of us?

[BlueprintMarketing]

Francisco,

outstanding idea. I mixes one up with one that I actually give the same advice to. I would check Google Webmaster tools in addition to that I would check your sites domain name using Sucuri I feel there are one of the best in the business and 100% free to check your site for problems. If there are issues I would suggest using them as well as they are merely $89 a year per site. You can use the URL below to scan your website and make sure there's no malware offending Google.

http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/

sincerely,

Tom

[semoney]

Results from no index

Total amount of pages found on "site.com" with the noindex and/or nofollow meta tag is 0

I assumed that the above is good? Additionally, I have no malware. Succurri results were good.

[semoney]

No, i used Firefox which is specially for checking results. I do not use it to surf the website and i make sure it is never signed in to any Google accounts and history is never remembered.

How do I know if the .htaccess is correct? How is it possible to be back on the first page and within one hour, everything disappears?

I do not believe that i am being penalized as I am still showing up in results when keyed in the company name

[BlueprintMarketing]

do you feel comfortable sharing the URL with us?

How did the results of using http://www.noindexchecker.com/

end up?

if you do not feel comfortable sharing the URL you can always private message us I know that is true for me.

I think Francisco is most likely right and it is just Google has not come back and index the site yet. Because of the large amount of sites out there who will takes a bit every once in a while to properly index your website.

Here is some information on how to get your website indexed faster.

I would definitely read

one word of caution kiss metrics is my favorite analytics tool and I believe very trustworthy. However in this article they encourage one to use certain web directories. I would not do the web directories that are not relevant to your site or are not recommended on SEOmoz everything else in the article I highly agree with I just wanted to give this disclaimer

I would not do what it says underneath here italic bold I underlined

other than what is directly below this aside from the link I think everything in here is exactly what you need to do

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/

kissmetrics.com is used by companies like distilled.net so they are not a hack company or anything to be wary of

• Submit to Blog Directories – TopRank has a huge list of sites you can submit your RSS feed and blog to. This will help you build even more incoming links. If you aren’t ready to do them all, at least start with Technorati as it is one of the top blog directories. Once you have a good amount of content, also try Alltop.

here is my list of links to get your site back on top.

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2198245/How-to-Force-Google-to-Recrawl-Your-Site

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1

http://yoast.com/how-to-get-google-to-crawl-your-site-faster/

I apologize that I could not write more guys however I have a huge business meeting today and the fact that I will be tested today big-time does not give me much time to response unfortunately however I will when I can. I can tell you from experience that I had an intern do some updates on the site. Found out my site was not ranking for what it should be ranking for did a quick scan of the site found a bunch of no follows and no index within approximately 5 days the site was back to where it was prior to the abrupt change.

Sincerely and best of luck,

Tom

[Francisco_Meza]

If it's not a robots.txt or htaccess issue, then check GWT for malware.

If you are getting de-indexed, maybe your browser is remembering (cache) you queries. You sure you didn't write the .htacess the wrong way?

Contact Ryan Kent if you believe you need some link penalty removals.

[semoney]

Guys, please help me to figure out what could be wrong!

Today, I saw that all of the keywords was back on the first page and i was very happy. But within an hour, everything got de-indexed again! What happened? What could be the issue?

[Francisco_Meza]

Manually add the URLs into GWT. You can do about 500, I think.

[semoney]

The .htaccess is solved and ive got several sites where i used the same SEO methods on all sites. My other sites are sitting safely on the first page. I strongly believe it was due to .htaccess which couldnt find the site and de-indexed my site. How can i force Google to crawl my sites and place me back on first page?

[Francisco_Meza]

I would wait until the next crawl. Check your GWT to see when the last crawl was. Also, they may be taking their time to see if your site will disappear again. Make SURE it's up and running and no 404s.

I think you'll be okay if you have a good link profile.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Have a site that currently was ranking well for 5 of your chosen keywords.

Were the keywords exact match to the domain?

When you say the new site how new are we talking about?

You put this under black hat white hat please don't take offense to this, but is there anything you want to tell me that you've done to the site that Google might not like?

When you are hacked did you completely clean up everything are you certain it is clean? If not please run your domain through this and tell me if you get any thing like black listing or something similar to tell if there is anything negative from a hack still affecting your website please use the link below type your domain name and and and enter allow it to process

http://sucuri.net/

After that please use this tool and remember it takes a little bit so don't. Refresh or the back button unless you're certain it is done. This will tell us rather not your site has been told to blocked access to Google bot

http://www.noindexchecker.com/

If it is still coming up short organ want to check your through your redirects

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

if you find something you don't like please use one of the tools below to generate the correct redirects

than if after this I found I needed to create a 301 I would use one of the tools below

http://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.htm

http://www.htaccessredirect.net/

can you tell me what type of site it is a WordPress, HTML that type of thing?

Without your domain name or more information all I can do is give you tools to gather information

depending on what type of website you have this may be of some use to you as well

http://www.seoverflow.com/setting-up-301-redirects-for-dynamic-urls/

sincerely,

Tom