Webpages look like they have been de-indexed

[Paul78]

Hi there,

My webpages seem that they have been de-indexed, I have no page rank anymore for my webpages, my homepage which was a PR4, is now saying N/A, plus lots of my rankings have dropped, what check should I been making to identify that this is the case?

Kind Regards

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Gary,

This could be for a number of reasons, bearing in mind that there has been a shed load of new algorithm updates from Google recently! The first step to take is to try and identify the rough date that you started to lose rankings.

This way you will be able to understand which update may have affected your website. Go into your Google Analytics and have a look at the organic search traffic coming to your website; if it is showing a dip around the end (24th) of April, then you may have been hit by the Penguin update (like a lot of us).

The Penguin update punished a lot of websites for their linking methods, i.e. having a lot of the same anchor text on links back to your website, having links in the footer areas of websites, duplicating links across single domains many times, linking from link-network websites, etc. If you think that your website may have any links like these then you may be at risk.

Take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools as well as http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and take a deeper look into your linking profile to see who is linking to you and how they are linking. If you start to see a pattern emerging, contact the sites and see if you can get those bad links changed.

If you think that everything in terms of links looks good then let me know and I will try to help find what else it could be.

Matt.

[Paul78]

Hi Matt,

It all happened the other day. I just recieved a notice that SEOmoz have crawled my website and noticed that there is literally hundreds of 500 errors on my webpages, could this be the reason why there is no PR and all my rankings have dropped?

Kind Regards

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Gary,

Yes that sounds like a server error. If you are getting a lot of 500 errors then Google will punish your website for this as they will assume that it isn't functioning correctly.

Take a look into the pages that are getting 500 errors and have a word with your web hosting company to see if they can look into the root of the problem with the server.

Once you have managed to sort out the issues with your server, go into Google Webmaster Tools and ask Google to fetch your site using Googlebot, then if there are no errors, re-submit the site to be crawled and indexed.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

[Paul78]

Hi Matt,

I have just checked webmaster tools and saw that there is over 900 server errors, it does seem likely this is the reason why all of these pages have dropped and no page has any PR, what do you think?

Is there a way of submitting all of these at once?

Kind Regards

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Gary,

I would assume that this is the root of the problem. Google themselves have said the following:

"If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search."

Once you have addressed the issues, go into Webmaster Tools and go to your website. Then click on 'Health' then 'Fetch as Google'. Fetch your homepage and then click on 'Submit URl and Linked Pages to Index'.

Only do this once you have rectified your server issues though.

Matt.

[Paul78]

Thanks for your help Matt, will keep you posted on the progress of this.

Kind Regards

[MatthewBarby]

No problem Gary, good luck.

Matt.