Homepage/Root domain de-indexed by Google

[explorionary]

This morning I discovered that the homepage/root domain of our company site, http://www.collegeplus.org/, has been de-indexed by Google and Bing. Out IT dept. is claiming it's our fault because we changed the meta title on our homepage. But they will not give me access to GWT to see if there's any issues.

I believe the issue lies within our robots.txt file - http://www.collegeplus.org/robots.txt

I also don't believe we're suffering a penalty because all of our tier 2 pages are still indexed when any type of branded search is performed. We don't do things that can get a site de-indexed like this.

Any ideas on what the issue may be? Or at least something to convince our IT dept. that simply changing a meta title won't get your homepage totally de-indexed? Thanks.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi David

First off (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here) but that's completely silly they won't let you look at WMT!!  Seriously?!  You're not going to BREAK anything just by looking!!

Arggg...

OK... now that we got that out.  Let me give you some ideas.

• The homepage is missing from the sitemap - http://www.collegeplus.org/googlesitemap
• Also, shouldn't the sitemap end in .xml - as in /googlesitemap.xml ?
• The worst is I think what you point out from robots.txt - **Disallow: /.php$*    Isn't this asking it to block all pages with the file extension .php???  IF so... your homepage does load with the php extension - http://www.collegeplus.org/index.php
• In general, Google's preferred method of keeping pages out of the index is with a meta robots noindex tag - as opposed to the robots.txt
• ALSO - look at this site search - **over 27,000 pages indexed for /**events?state - i'd say not good!\
• You're not using any canonical tags
• The homepage is NOT indexed in Bing either.
• The robots.txt file does look more messed up the more I look at it - for example they're blocking a forums subfolder, yet none exists on the site. It sits on a subdomain, and is still in the index as you can see here

So there's a lot going on here, and anything could be contributing to the deindexation of your homepage. But I'm <sarcasm>pretty sure</sarcasm> its not your title tags.

Hope that helps get you in the right direction. Either way you've got some on-site stuff to clean up.

-Dan

PS - Meant to say, on a happier note, it was nice to meet you at LinkLove Boston

[explorionary]

Hi Dan. Greatly appreciate your response and insights. I think you've completely identified the issue(s). Basically from a technical SEO perspective our site is a trainwreck hit by a nuclear bomb. The battle between IT and my marketing department rages on, making it really difficult to get anything fixed. There's some politics at play that won't get solved here

Anyway, many thanks for your help on this. We'll try again tomorrow.

[KeriMorgret]

So sorry to hear about the battles going on. I've seen some of those, and they're no fun.

One thing that may be of help: last month Google rolled out new user access to GWT, including a way to let view without changing any settings (Barry Schwartz writes about it at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-users-14838.html). Is there a chance IT would let your team have a read-only view if you let them know it was now available?

[explorionary]

Hi Keri. Thank you for the info, I wasn't aware of the view only option. I'll send this post to our IT Director. Appreciate your help! Have a great weekend.

[KeriMorgret]

When I was in a similar situation where I didn't have the best of relations with the development company, I used Pole Position's free Code Monitor (https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php) to check the robots.txt files of the live site and any development sites/subdomains on a daily basis. I'd get an email if anything had changed, so I could go to the dev company right away and try to mitigate any problems.