Lost homepage rankings for one day
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We had a strange thing happen to our website. We have a website that ranks for top keywords for some years. Last week we lost alle of our rankings for one day. The strange thing was, that the rankings were only lost on the homepage, the homepage didnt rank anymore. Even when i googled for 'homepage.com' google showed 'homepage.com/page' and not the homepage.
After some reading i checked for the following:
- no-index sources in the source code - but no results
- checked for http respons code - 200 ok status
- checked for downtime in pingdom - no downtime
With no rankings on the homepage i was losing 90% of the traffic, i went to GWT and did a fetch as google request, the website looked okay. After that i request a new indexation request. After this the website was back in google with all the old rankings.
But what has happend, is still a question for me. Can this be an hack or a wordpress problem or is this realtime penguin with a hit. I also read things about Google flux, but it didnt happen before and it was just the homepage, with no index at all. What happend?
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Have you tried contacting your hosting company or CDN to see if there were any gateway issues that might have blocked your home page? It seems a stretch, but it is the only thing I can think of outside of what you have tried. I am assuming you made no changes to your robots.txt file, either.
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