The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • My Q&A
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. SEO and Digital Marketing Q&A Forum
    2. Categories
    3. White Hat / Black Hat SEO
    4. Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?

    Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO
    27 4 344
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • semoney
      semoney last edited by

      I had a new site that was ranking on the first page for 5 keywords.

      My site was hacked recently and I went through a lot of trouble to restore it. Last night, I discovered that my site was nowhere to be found but when i searched site: mysite.com, it was still ranking which means it was not penalized.

      I discovered the issue to be a .htaccess and it have been resolved. My question is now that the .htaccess issue is resolved , will my site be restored back to the first page? Is there additional things that i should do? I have notified google by submitting my site

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • BlueprintMarketing
        BlueprintMarketing last edited by

        Have a site that currently was ranking well for 5 of your chosen keywords.

        Were the keywords exact match to the domain?

        When you say the new site how new are we talking about?

        You put this under black hat white hat please don't take offense to this, but is there anything you want to tell me that you've done to the site that Google might not like?

        When you are hacked did you completely clean up everything are you certain it is clean? If not please run your domain through this and tell me if you get any thing like black listing or something similar to tell if there is anything negative from a hack still affecting your website please use the link below type your domain name and and and enter allow it to process

        http://sucuri.net/

        After that please use this tool and remember it takes a little bit so don't. Refresh or the back button unless you're certain it is done. This will tell us rather not your site has been told to blocked access to Google bot

        http://www.noindexchecker.com/

        If it is still coming up short organ want to check your through your redirects

        http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

        if you find something you don't like please use one of the tools below to generate the correct redirects

        than if after this I found I needed to create a 301 I would use one of the tools below

        http://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.htm

        http://www.htaccessredirect.net/

        can you tell me what type of site it is a WordPress, HTML that type of thing?

        Without your domain name or more information all I can do is give you tools to gather information

        depending on what type of website you have this may be of some use to you as well

        http://www.seoverflow.com/setting-up-301-redirects-for-dynamic-urls/

        sincerely,

        Tom

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Francisco_Meza
          Francisco_Meza last edited by

          I would wait until the next crawl. Check your GWT to see when the last crawl was. Also, they may be taking their time to see if your site will disappear again. Make SURE it's up and running and no 404s.

          I think you'll be okay if you have a good link profile.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • semoney
            semoney last edited by

            The .htaccess is solved and ive got several sites where i used the same SEO methods on all sites. My other sites are sitting safely on the first page. I strongly believe it was due to .htaccess which couldnt find the site and de-indexed my site. How can i force Google to crawl my sites and place me back on first page?

            Francisco_Meza Cyrus-Shepard 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Francisco_Meza
              Francisco_Meza @semoney last edited by

              Manually add the URLs into GWT. You can do about 500, I think.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • semoney
                semoney last edited by

                Guys, please help me to figure out what could be wrong!

                Today, I saw that all of the keywords was back on the first page and i was very happy. But within an hour, everything got de-indexed again! What happened? What could be the issue?

                Francisco_Meza BlueprintMarketing 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Francisco_Meza
                  Francisco_Meza @semoney last edited by

                  If it's not a robots.txt or htaccess issue, then check GWT for malware.

                  If you are getting de-indexed, maybe your browser is remembering (cache) you queries. You sure you didn't write the .htacess the wrong way?

                  Contact Ryan Kent if you believe you need some link penalty removals.

                  semoney BlueprintMarketing 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • BlueprintMarketing
                    BlueprintMarketing @semoney last edited by

                    do you feel comfortable sharing the URL with us?

                    How did the results of using http://www.noindexchecker.com/

                    end up?

                    if you do not feel comfortable sharing the URL you can always private message us I know that is true for me.

                    I think Francisco is most likely right and it is just Google has not come back and index the site yet. Because of the large amount of sites out there who will takes a bit every once in a while to properly index your website.

                    Here is some information on how to get your website indexed faster.

                    I would definitely read

                    one word of caution kiss metrics is my favorite analytics tool and I believe very trustworthy. However in this article they encourage one to use certain web directories. I would not do the web directories that are not relevant to your site or are not recommended on SEOmoz everything else in the article I highly agree with I just wanted to give this disclaimer

                    I would not do what it says underneath here italic bold I underlined

                    other than what is directly below this aside from the link I think everything in here is exactly what you need to do

                    http://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/

                    kissmetrics.com is used by companies like distilled.net so they are not a hack company or anything to be wary of

                    • Submit to Blog Directories – TopRank has a huge list of sites you can submit your RSS feed and blog to. This will help you build even more incoming links. If you aren’t ready to do them all, at least start with Technorati as it is one of the top blog directories. Once you have a good amount of content, also try Alltop.

                    here is my list of links to get your site back on top.

                    http://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/

                    http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2198245/How-to-Force-Google-to-Recrawl-Your-Site

                    https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1

                    http://yoast.com/how-to-get-google-to-crawl-your-site-faster/

                    I apologize that I could not write more guys however I have a huge business meeting today and the fact that I will be tested today big-time does not give me much time to response unfortunately however I will when I can. I can tell you from experience that I had an intern do some updates on the site. Found out my site was not ranking for what it should be ranking for did a quick scan of the site found a bunch of no follows and no index within approximately 5 days the site was back to where it was prior to the abrupt change.

                    Sincerely and best of luck,

                    Tom

                    semoney 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • semoney
                      semoney @Francisco_Meza last edited by

                      No, i used Firefox which is specially for checking results. I do not use it to surf the website and i make sure it is never signed in to any Google accounts and history is never remembered.

                      How do I know if the .htaccess is correct? How is it possible to be back on the first page and within one hour, everything disappears?

                      I do not believe that i am being penalized as I am still showing up in results when keyed in the company name

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • semoney
                        semoney @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                        Results from no index

                        Total amount of pages found on "site.com" with the noindex and/or nofollow meta tag is 0

                        I assumed that the above is good? Additionally, I have no malware. Succurri results were good.

                        BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • BlueprintMarketing
                          BlueprintMarketing @Francisco_Meza last edited by

                          Francisco,

                          outstanding idea. I mixes one up with one that I actually give the same advice to. I would check Google Webmaster tools in addition to that I would check your sites domain name using Sucuri I feel there are one of the best in the business and 100% free to check your site for problems. If there are issues I would suggest using them as well as they are merely $89 a year per site. You can use the URL below to scan your website and make sure there's no malware offending Google.

                          http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/

                          sincerely,

                          Tom

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • BlueprintMarketing
                            BlueprintMarketing @semoney last edited by

                            will you share the URL of us?

                            semoney 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • BlueprintMarketing
                              BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                              I'm going to tell you something that work for friend that is a real oddball. Cloudflare.com the company that supposedly offers you a free CDN that I would not really count as a true CDN but will keep your site safer and possibly speed up depending on the configuration. Does submit your site to Google and did help a friend of mine. This is a last ditch effort however I know it did work so I don't think couldn't in the future and if you're not using a good anycast DNS system is really no harm in using it.

                              Thanks for the PM will check ASAP

                              semoney 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • semoney
                                semoney @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                I PMED you the link. Didnt want to put it publicly as this is for a client

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • semoney
                                  semoney @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                  Cloudfare doesnt seem to serve my purpose. It seems to be able to detect hackers and spammers but my concern is on telling Google to index my site and put me back where I am originally was.

                                  I have checked that on this site, there is no malware and no no-follows. The strangest thing is why did it suddenly go back to where it was and one hour later, it dropped?

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • semoney
                                    semoney last edited by

                                    On Google Webmaster Tools, the last updates was 6th April. Today is 9th April. Why did it stopped updating? Is there something wrong?

                                    BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • BlueprintMarketing
                                      BlueprintMarketing @semoney last edited by

                                      I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is you show up fine in Yahoo and Bing unfortunately you have to click one more button to show perfectly in Google. However I'm using the tool that I strongly strongly suggest that you use

                                      Screaming frog spider SEO

                                      http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/

                                      100% free for windows, Mac and Linux up to 500 pages per domain it tells you everything listed in the URL above. And will actually check your index status if you right-click on the a link that you want checked.

                                      I believe that it is a matter of time however I would adjust your robot text to suit the information found at yoast.com below and in addition to that I would add your site map

                                      so your robot text looks like this.

                                      I would change my robot text to

                                      User-Agent: *
                                      Disallow:

                                      Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

                                      In addition I have to go to work honestly or I am dead however I believe the frog spider will help you very much and if you add the site map to the robot text that never will hurt.

                                      I will private message you regarding one other issue I don't know if you want talk about here.

                                      your robot text is giving me some issues. But it may not be this.

                                      http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/analyzer/

                                      Your current robot text is this below I hope this is okay to share I don't think it'll violate any trust or anything like this it's not showing the site

                                      User-agent: *
                                      Disallow: /wp-admin/
                                      Disallow: /wp-includes/

                                      try out this tool as well

                                      http://phpweby.com/services/robots

                                      I would change my robot text to

                                      User-Agent: *
                                      Disallow:

                                      Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

                                      having the site map in helps a lot and if you have a /

                                      Google tends to block more things. That are not listed below such as the site map

                                      I also believe what this has to say is correct

                                      http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/

                                      also see

                                      http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13527529/robots-txt-is-blocking-wordpress-site-from-google?rq=1

                                      semoney 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                      • BlueprintMarketing
                                        BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                        PS This

                                        http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-webmaster-says-0-pages-indexed

                                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • semoney
                                          semoney @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                          Hi

                                          Thank you!

                                          I have changed robots.txt as suggested and as mentioned, I have no choice but to wait 😞

                                          Im really praying that this goes back up

                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • semoney
                                            semoney last edited by

                                            Its strange! How can my website dropped suddenly in ONE hour?

                                            1. Site was de-indexed due to .htaccess . It was resolved

                                            2. Site was back up on the first page within two days

                                            3. Site was de-indexed within an hour.

                                            What happened? How did it get de-indexed so quickly? I don't think Google's penalty even worked so fast? What is happening man?

                                            Cyrus-Shepard 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                            • 1
                                            • 2
                                            • 1 / 2
                                            • First post
                                              Last post
                                            • A semi client of mine reached out to me recently that another site scraped his whole site and traffic dropped significantly.
                                              ThompsonPaul
                                              ThompsonPaul
                                              0
                                              3
                                              49

                                            • Sudden Drop in Website Traffic Last month
                                              Verve-Innovation
                                              Verve-Innovation
                                              0
                                              7
                                              743

                                            • Sudden Recent Drop in Impressions in GWT - WTF?
                                              kimmiedawn
                                              kimmiedawn
                                              0
                                              2
                                              174

                                            • Rank Drop Possibly due to links but no warning in GWT
                                              Kingof5
                                              Kingof5
                                              0
                                              4
                                              217

                                            • Site dropping in rank even through there are more backlinks being added
                                              ToddFosterSEO
                                              ToddFosterSEO
                                              0
                                              4
                                              203

                                            • Sudden Large Traffic and SERP Drop
                                              ajiabs
                                              ajiabs
                                              0
                                              6
                                              673

                                            • Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why
                                              CSawatzky
                                              CSawatzky
                                              0
                                              3
                                              1.4k

                                            • Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
                                              Getz.pro
                                              Getz.pro
                                              0
                                              7
                                              9.8k

                                            Get started with Moz Pro!

                                            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                            Start my free trial
                                            Products
                                            • Moz Pro
                                            • Moz Local
                                            • Moz API
                                            • Moz Data
                                            • STAT
                                            • Product Updates
                                            Moz Solutions
                                            • SMB Solutions
                                            • Agency Solutions
                                            • Enterprise Solutions
                                            • Digital Marketers
                                            Free SEO Tools
                                            • Domain Authority Checker
                                            • Link Explorer
                                            • Keyword Explorer
                                            • Competitive Research
                                            • Brand Authority Checker
                                            • Local Citation Checker
                                            • MozBar Extension
                                            • MozCast
                                            Resources
                                            • Blog
                                            • SEO Learning Center
                                            • Help Hub
                                            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                            • How-to Guides
                                            • Moz Academy
                                            • API Docs
                                            About Moz
                                            • About
                                            • Team
                                            • Careers
                                            • Contact
                                            Why Moz
                                            • Case Studies
                                            • Testimonials
                                            Get Involved
                                            • Become an Affiliate
                                            • MozCon
                                            • Webinars
                                            • Practical Marketer Series
                                            • MozPod
                                            Connect with us

                                            Contact the Help team

                                            Join our newsletter
                                            Moz logo
                                            © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                            • Accessibility
                                            • Terms of Use
                                            • Privacy