Help.. there was a html and php version of my home page on my server for about a week. Now lost all rankings!
-
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
Main keyword sex toy party
-
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?
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Multiple h1 tags on this html 5 page a issue?
Hi Guys, I have a html5 page located here: https://tinyurl.com/yc6s3xs2 I know from some online discussions having multiple h1 tags on HTML 5 pages like this, shouldn't be an issue. Any thoughts on this? Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Certain Pages Not Being Indexed - Please Help
We are having trouble getting a bulk of our pages indexed in google. Any help would be greatly appreciated! The Following Page types are being indexed through escaped fragment: http://www.cbuy.tv/#! http://www.cbuy.tv/celebrity#!65-Ashley-Tisdale/fashion/4097-Casadei-BLADE-PUMP/Product/175199 <cite>www.cbuy.tv/celebrity/155-Sophia-Bush#!</cite> However, all our pages that look like this, are not being indexed: http://www.cbuy.tv/#!Type=Photo&id=b1d18759-5e52-4a1c-9491-6fb3cb9d4b95&Katie-Holmes-Hot-Pink-Pants-Isabel-Marant-DAVID-DOUBLE-BREASTED-Wool-COAT-Maison-Pumps-Black-Bag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CBuy0 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Will links to a subdomain help it rank?
I have an affiliate subdomain on a larger company's domain. (For example I have: www.victor.company.com on www.company.com). Would working to attain backlinks to the subdomain help it rank or will I just be putting forth my effort and helping the domain rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
Flash to HTML? Will I lose rank when I return?
My clients site in in flash! I am taking it down and building an all HTML site. the domain is 11 years old and google has only indexed 3 pages...Yikes! My question is that when I rebuild the site and optimize it for certain keywords and get my placement moved higher and then switch back in 6 months to the all flash site. Will I lose my gained rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0