Help.. there was a html and php version of my home page on my server for about a week. Now lost all rankings!

[GemmaApril]

Our home page has disappeared from the Google SERPS completely. It won't even show for a search of our business name although other internal pages appear. Site appears in bing for our keywords but not for our business name.

When I republished the site I got a message saying there was a php and html version of the site on the home page. I deleted this immediately but was then advised by another staff member that they had also got that message the week before but not done anything about it - so I think it was out there for about a week.

Could this be the cause of the ranking drop? We have also done the following:

Checked GWM for robots issue, manual action, crawl errors, blocked URLs - all good. Some crawl errors on other pages relating to broken links. All sorted and marked as fixed.

Checked for duplicate content - redirected non www version of site to www

Checked back links

Removed video from home page that was temporarily unavailable when we did fetch and render

Added canonical tag

Added H1 tag that was missing

Coding checked - all looks good

There has been no change to the content of the page.

We have fetched and rendered and resubmitted for indexing but it's still not coming back in SERPS  it did for a short time the other day and then after a couple of days disappeared again  Prior to all this it had ranked really well for our most important keywords for years. It's not a new site.

The page is indexed as it comes up when doing a site: search.

Please can anyone help? Nobody seems to have the answer and we don't know what else to do. The site is

NSFW

NSFW https://goo.gl/dwA8YB

Main keyword sex toy party

[GemmaApril]

Hello again. I have just discovered this URL on a duplicate content checker site...

http://www.aprilnites.com.au/?el.outerHeight({margin:true})/2:el.outerWidth({margin:true})/2)

I have no idea where it has come from or how to get rid of it but it brings up my home page. Can anyone advise on this?

[GemmaApril]

Thanks Paul. My first thought was to do a 301 redirect which I did last week on the index page but when the SEO company came out they took it off. They said I was creating a loop or something along those lines. I wasn't 100% sure what they meant. I didn't quite follow. Do you know what they meant? I created it in the same way as other 301 redirects I have on the site and they are all working just fine.

[ThompsonPaul]

I'd strongly recommend changing that to actually redirect the /index.html version. There's no reason for either bots or human visitors to ever visit that URL. (A redirect is a directive, whereas canonical is only a suggestion and will leave the unwanted page in the search index.)

P

[GemmaApril]

Hi Paul,

Thanks so much. I have now put a canonical tag on the index page to tell it to go to the home page. All of these things must help. Really appreciate the help from everyone.

[ThompsonPaul]

Your home page is still also reachable under the /index.html version - that should be redirected to the real home page (the bare domain). In addition, the PHP version should probably have been redirected to the real home page, instead of just leaving it to 404, if it had ever been indexed by Google.

These aren't likely to be the primary reason for all versions of the page disappearing from the SERPs entirely, but they need to be fixed and then can be eliminated as a contributing cause.

Hope that helps?

Paul