Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?
-
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
-
Any help will be good?
-
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?
-
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.
-
Is it possible to call Google?!?!
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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
-
-
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
-
On Google Webmaster Tools, the last updates was 6th April. Today is 9th April. Why did it stopped updating? Is there something wrong?
-
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?
-
I PMED you the link. Didnt want to put it publicly as this is for a client
-
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
-
will you share the URL of us?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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?
-
Manually add the URLs into GWT. You can do about 500, I think.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
1st Ecommerce site got penalized, can we start a 2nd one?
Hello, A client's first site got penalized by Goolge Penguin. It has recovered through cleaning up backlinks, but not to where it was before. It is 2nd and 3rd for several money keywords, but is far less successful than before penalization. We are starting a second site. Here's the important steps to mention The new site shows up first for it's domain name, and it has 30 pages indexed. It shows up NOWHERE for our leading search term. Out other site has a blog post that is 3rd for that search term. We are using new categories and new organization. We are using a different cart solution We are adding all unique content The home pages and some of the product pages are very thorough. We are adding comprehensive products like nothing else in the industry (10X) We plan on adding a very comprehensive blog, but haven't started yet. We've added the top 100 products so far. Our other store has 500. There's a lot of spam in the industry, so sites are slow to rank. Our category descriptions are 500 words Again, all unique content. No major errors in Moz Campaign tools Just a few categories so far, we're going to add many more. Same Google Analytics account as our other site It looks like we should eventually be on page 3 for our major search term. Again, we're nowhere for anything right now. ... Have you seen that Google will not rank a second site because it's from the same company and Google Analytics account, or does Google let you rank 2 sites in the same industry? We are hoping it's just slow to rank. If you can rank 2 sites, what are your best recommendations to help show up? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Massive rank drop on one particular keyword
As all other marketeers do I follow closely my keywords, one particular keyword has ranked continually at #2 and has suddenly dropped to +#60, but all others remain the same. We are a fairly large site in terms of numbers 9m views annually, could it be possible that someone has black hatted that particular keyword, and if so how do I find out how and more importantly who?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sususu0 -
Preventing CNAME Site Duplications
Hello fellow mozzers! Let me see if I can explain this properly. First, our server admin is out of contact at the moment,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley
so we are having to take this project on somewhat blind. (forgive the ignorance of terms). We have a client that needs a cname record setup, as they need a sales.DOMAIN.com to go to a different
provider of data. They have a "store" platform that is hosted elsewhere and they require a cname to be
sent to a custom subdomain they set up on their end. My question is, how do we prevent the cname from being indexed along with the main domain? If we
process a redirect for the subdomain, then the site will not be able to go out and grab the other providers
info and display it. Currently, if you type in the sales.DOMAIN.com it shows the main site's homepage.
That cannot be allow to take place as we all know, having more than one domain with
exact same content = very bad for seo. I'd rather not rely on Google to figure it out. Should we just have the cname host (where its pointing at) add a robots rule and have it set to not index
the cname? The store does not need to be indexed, as the items are changed almost daily. Lastly, is an A record required for this type of situation in any way? Forgive my ignorance of subdomains, cname records and related terms. Our server admin being
unavailable is not helping this project move along any. Any advice on the best way to handle
this would be very helpful!0 -
PDF Sharing sites - scribd/dropbox/edocr/etc Cleaning Up SEO History
Howdy, Whilst in the process of cleaning up a new clients seo profile and have encountered a lot of techniques I am uncomfortable with and in my opinion should be removed. One technique I have not seen before is using a load of pdf sharing and video sites. The domains have high DA ratings, but to me the intention is highly questionable. The sites include: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tuxb8w1qowcm27i/Looking for boiler spares-geniune parts and consumables.pdf?dl=0 http://www.scribd.com/doc/241542076/Looking-for-Boiler-Spares-geniune-Parts-and-Consumables http://www.divshare.com/download/26207602-569 And so the list goes on for about 50 domains. Am I correct to be concerned here and what was the seo plan here? Thanks in advance. Andy Southall. (Marz Ventures)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
WP Datar site shady linking to my site
Hello, I have done some research on this but cannot find a solid answer to my question. After recently reviewing my "not found" errors in webmaster tools, I see that a site called "WP Datar" has linked to a number of our pages that actually do not exist. I am wondering first, if this will harm our site, and second, what is the best way to get those links from their site taken down? I tried emailing, but of course, the email address listed on the site did not work. 🙂 Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Site that's 301 redirected is ranking for brand
We own a number of foreign TLD domains for our brand. They are all 301-redirected to our main .com branded domain. One of them is appearing in our branded search results, outranking out main .com page. To be clear, this is despite there being a 301 redirect from it to the .com page. Any ideas on what is going on here?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ipancake0 -
The purpose of these Algo updates: To more harshly push eCommerce sites toward PPC and enable normal blogs/forums toward reclaiming organic search positions?
Hi everyone, This is my first post here, and absolutely loving the site and the services. Just a quick background, I have dabbled in SEO in the past, and have been reading up over the last few months and am amazed at the speed at which things are changing. I currently have a few clients that I am doing some SEO work for 2 of them, and have had an ecommerce site enquire about SEO services. They are a medium sized oak furniture ecommerce site. From all the major changes..the devaluing of spam links, link networks, penalization of overuse of exact match anchor text and the overall encouraging of earned links (often via content marketing) over built links, adding to this the (not provided) section in Google Analytics, and the increasing screen real estate that PPC is getting over organic search...all points to me thinking on major thing..... That the search engine is trying to push eCommerce sites and sites that sell stuff harder toward using PPC and paid advertising and allowing the blogs/forums and informational sites to more easily reclaim the organic part of the search results again. The above is elaborated on a bit more below.. POINT 1 Firstly as built links (article submission, press releases, info graphic submission, web 2.0 link building ect) rapidly lose their effectiveness, and as Google starts to place more emphasis on sites earning links instead - by producing amazing interesting and unique content that people want to link to. The fact remains that surely Google is aware that it is much harder for eCommerce sites to produce a constant stream of interesting link worthy content around their niche (especially if its a niche that not an awful lot could be written about). Although earning links is not impossible for eCommerce sites, for a lot of them it is more difficult because creating link worthy content is not what eCommerce sites were originally intended for. Whereas standard blogs and forums were built for that exact purpose. Therefore the search engines must know that it is a lot easier for normal blogs/forums to "earn" links through content, therefore leading to them reclaiming more of the organic search ranking for transaction and non transaction terms, and therefore forcing the eCommerce sites to adopt PPC more heavily. POINT 2 If we add to the mix the fact that for the terms most relevant to eCommerce sites, the search engine results page has a larger allocation of PPC ads than organic results (above the fold), and that Google has limited the amount of data that sites can see in terms of which keywords people are using to arrive on their sites, which effects eCommerce sites more - as it makes it harder for them to see which keywords are resulting in sales. Then this provides further evidence that Google is trying to back eCommerce sites into a corner by making it more difficult for them to make sense of and track sales from organic results in comparison to with PPC, where data is still plentiful. Conclusion Are the above just over exaggerations? Can most eCommerce sites still keep achieving a good percentage of sales from organic search despite the above? if so, what do the more niche eCommerce sites do to "earn" links when content topics are thin and unique outreach destinations can be exhausted quickly. Do they accept the fact that the are in the business of selling things, so should be paying for their traffic as opposed to normal blogs/forums which are not. Or is there still a place for them to get even more creative with content and acquire earned links..? And finally, is the concentration on earned links more overplayed than it actually is? Id really appreciate your thoughts on this..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Is it possible that since the Google Farmer's Update, that people practicing Google Bowling can negatively affect your site?
We have hundreds of random bad links that have been added to our sites across the board that nobody in our company paid for. Two of our domains have been penalized and three of our sites have pages that have been penalized. Our sites are established with quality content. One was built in 2007, the other in 2008. We pay writers to contribute quality and unique content. We just can't figure out a) Why the sites were pulled out of Google indexing suddenly after operating well for years b) Where the spike in links came from. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dahnyogaworks0