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Hi,

Yep its all verified, sitemap was all in place, no crawling errors, 301 redirects in place.

Talk about pulling your hair out, how can Google just drop the homepage without any prior warning or error.

Ugh

Very strange.. I find it incredibly bizzare as I haven't done any major SEO work and as you say, it just happened that over the weekend the homepage went.

Perhaps a Google bug or a major reshuffle? I am just struggling to come up with an answer.

www.honestideas.co.uk

Checking site index, everypage is present except for the homepage.

I have never done anything black hat so I am incredibly confused as to why it's been dropped from the index and what I can do to get it reindexed.

Cheers

After further investigation, it appears to just be the homepage that has been removed.

All other pages are still visible in search results, can anyone help shed some light on this situation with their experience?

Hey Guys,

Something is seriously going on with the SEO on my website and it's become business critical.

We were ranked first on Google for phrases like 'Advertising agency Cambridge' and all of a sudden we have been dropped, not even ranking.

To me this screams a penalisation but I can't understand why. I have never paid for links or done anything out of the ordinary that would get such a negative impact.

Is there a way to check if a site has actually been penalised and find the reason?

What would be the best course of action to appeal?

Has anyone experienced something like this and have a timeframe for resolution?

Thanks,

Gareth

Very in-depth response so thanks for this.

I will see how quickly Google reindexes my proper site now that I have a redirect in place for that not so wanted domain.

I will also send another 'calm' e-mail to the domain owner to see if I can get them to respond and point it away from my server.

Thanks again!

Hi,

To clarify:-

• Someone has a domain pointed at my server, the servers default site is my website.
• You type in a search term for my website, it lists their domain and not mine.

I have since added a redirect on my server for that domain but now I am losing traffic.

Very annoying!

Hey Guys,

Hopefully I can explain this so that you can understand, let me know if you need me to clarify any particular points.

I have a primary domain for my website, however someone has also pointed their domain at my server that has nothing to do with us or our website.

Typing a keyword in a search engine will list our website as this has been crawled but it's listing the domain as their domain and not our primary.

Is this because their domain has greater value then our primary?

What's the best course of action to resolve the issue?

The reason I ask is because the domain could potentially have a negative effect on business.

If I setup hosting for this second domain and setup a redirect on it, all the traffic that is trying to reach us via respective search terms are then directed away from our site.

I have been in contact with the domain administrator but they are yet to reply to my correspondence.

Has anyone experienced something similar and come up with a good way to resolve it?

Thanks guys, any help would be greatly appreciated.