Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Eada,

There's 2 things you want to do here to "help" Google re-crawl your site.

1. Submit a new sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure the sitemap is up to date. If your sitemap hasn't changed, resubmit it.

2. Do a "Fetch as Googlebot" - also in Webmaster Tools. Fetch your homepage. Then chose the option that says "Submit to index and all linked pages"

An engineer at Google suggested #2 to me after my own site was hacked and I cleaned it up. It's a signal to Google to take another look at those pages.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Eada,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. I won't go over the same ground that the others have already covered here, but let me offer these suggestions.

Google often serves results from different data centers, and those data centers refresh at different times. Also, rankings can fluctuate greatly even throughout a single day. For this reason it's not unusual to occasionally see huge swings in rankings from hour to hour as the SERPs adjust. But let's try to get to the heart of the problem.

1. If you're site was hacked, this could be a strong signal to Google to not show you in search results.

Check in Google Webmaster Tools under "Health > Malware" to see if they have detected Malware on your site.

(I stated the next 2 earlier, but here they are again)

2. Submit a new sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure the sitemap is up to date. If your sitemap hasn't changed, resubmit it.

3. Do a "Fetch as Googlebot" - also in Webmaster Tools. Fetch your homepage. Then chose the option that says "Submit to index and all linked pages"

If Google has trouble fetching your homepage or any other page, it could indicate other problems you need to address.

4. Finally, we need to consider the possibility that this has nothing to do with hacking or .htaccess files, but instead there is the possibility that you have indeed been penalized and Google has dropped your rankings.

Have you done any questionable link building? Recieved any messages of unnatural links? If so, this may be another area you want to explore.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[semoney]

Hi

1. There is no malware on my site. I have triple checked on Succuri and in GWT

2. Sitemap was re-submitted yesterday. No point in re-doing it. I even changed my robots.txt as per comments above.

3. I re-did a Fetch as Googlebot . No issues here

4. If i have been penalized, I wont even be able to see my site when i googled my site name. Additionally, i did not receive any messages from Google. Whatever SEO methods I did for this site, i used on my other sites and the other sites are all sitting on the first page. Only this site! Damn, why am i so unlucky?

[semoney]

Is it possible to call Google?!?!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

There are many types and degrees of penalization. Very very few penalties result in total de-indexation.

Most of the time, if you are penalized, your rankings will simply drop for most keywords, but Google will often keep most of your pages in it's index.

Additionally, Google will only send messages about unnatural links via webmaster tools if it's a manual penalty. Algorithmic penalties, like Panda and Penguin, usually are not accompanied by manual notices.

Here's a really good article from Ryan Kent about the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

There's one final possibility: Nothing is wrong with your site, but for some reason Google is devaluing your backlinks. This sometimes happens when your site is fine, but the sites linking to you get hit with a penalty. Happens more and more these days.

[semoney]

How can i verify if it's penalized or a Google dance? Because its too coincidental that the entire site got de-indexed after the site got hacked. What can i do now? I still believe that it is still getting indexed by Google but GWT told me that Google have already indexed it. Maybe its because i just refused to believe the hard truth. What can i do now?

[semoney]

Any help will be good?