Home page suddenly dropped from index!!

[Caro-O]

A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name.

The Robot.txt contains:

Default Flywheel robots file

User-agent: *

Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/

The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem.

Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro

[JordanLowry]

Is there a 'meta no index no follow tag' implemented by chance?

[JordanLowry]

Also, Google recommends you 302 those url's instead of returning a 200 http code. You can read more about their best practices about a/b testing.

[Caro-O]

Jordan, not on the original version of the home page, but there is on the B test version.
The way I understand it the B version is a javascript page that is noindexed. Their redirect system seems to leave the original page looking like there is no redirect. Are you suggesting we use a 302 instead?

[KristinaKledzik]

Hm, I've done a lot with Optimizely in the past, and it's never caused an SEO problem, but it's completely possible something went wrong. Since that's your first inkling, have you tried pausing that test and removing the Optimizely code from the homepage? Then you can determine whether or not it's an Optimizely problem.

Another thing you can do is use the Fetch as Googlebot feature in GSC. Does GSC say it can fetch the page properly?

If it says it can, try searching for "site:www.yourcompanysite.com". This will show if Google's got your URL in its index. If nothing comes up, it's not there; if it comes up, Google's decided not to rank it for some reason.

After those steps, get back to us so we can figure out where to go from there!

Good luck,

Kristina

[Caro-O]

Thanks Kristina,

We have not tried pausing the test, but I can request they do that. It may be a good idea to do it regardless of whether it's causing the problem or not, while we get this issue sorted out.

Fetch as Google gave this result:HTTP/1.1 200 OK   -  so looks ok. I understand this also submits your page to Google as an actual indexing request?

site:https://website.com shows all our pages except the home page.

So, it looks like it's decided not to rank it for some reason.

I deleted some links from the blog to the home page - they had a keyword phrase as the anchor text. There were about 20 links that had accumulated over a few months. Not sure if that's the issue.

Still no manual penalty notice from Google.

[KristinaKledzik]

Okay, I ran some tests, and can't see anything that could've gone wrong. That does make it seem like a penalty, but given that this coincided with setting up Optimizely, let's go down that path first.

While your team is taking down the test - have you checked Moz to see if its crawler sees anything that could be causing an issue? I set up my Moz crawler to look into it, but it'll take a few days.

[Caro-O]

I see no serious crawl issues. Mostly things we're already addressing, like duplicate content caused by blog tags and categories, missing meta descriptions (mostly in our knowledge base, so not an issue) and stuff like that.

When I checked the home page alone it said zero high, medium or low priority issues.

The page only de-indexed very recently. Maybe the next crawl will catch something. Same with GSC...it looks like the last 2 days of info is not available yet.

I should mention the home page Optimizely test had been running for at least a week before the page got dropped (will get actual date from client) , plus they have had a product page running  a test for weeks with no problem. But I still think your suggestion to pause the test is a good one as I don't want anything to hinder the process of fixing this.

Update: Optimizely has been paused, code removed, home page submitted in GSC.

[KristinaKledzik]

Any luck so far? Usually it only takes a few hours for Google to crawl new pages after you submit them in GSC, in my experience.

[Caro-O]

No luck Kristina

I'm wondering if it's an algorithmic penalty in response to back links. We've never done shady linking, but over the years the site has gathered some strange links. Or, is there some chance that about two dozen anchor text links from their blog to the home page could have done it? I deleted them. But I can't request reconsideration if the penalty isn't manual.

[KristinaKledzik]

I would be incredibly surprised if internal links to the homepage caused the issue. Google expects you to have a bunch of internal links to the homepage.

What you're going to need to do now is do a thorough review of all of the external links pointing to your homepage. I would do this with a tool - I recommend Kerboo, although I'm sure there are others that could do the same thing. Otherwise, you can look through all of the links yourself and look for spam indications (steps outlined in this handy Moz article).

Either way, make sure that you pull your list of links from Ahrefs or Majestic. Ideally both, and merge the lists. Moz doesn't crawl nearly as many links.

Since you haven't gotten a manual penalty warning, you're going to have to take as many of the spammy links you find down as you can and disavow the others. For speed, I'd recommend that you immediately upload a list of spammy links with Google's disavow tool, then start asking for an actual removal.

Keep in mind that you're probably going to disavow links that were helping rankings, so expect that your homepage won't come back ranking as well for nonbranded search terms as it used to. You'll probably want to start out uploading a very conservative set of URLs to the disavow tool, wait a couple of days to see if that fixes the problem, upload a bigger set, check, etc.

Good luck!

[Caro-O]

Thanks so much for that info. I had not heard of Kerboo...I'll definitely check that out right away. Your input has been extremely helpful Kristina.

Caro

[Michael996]

I've seen a client have an internal page just suddenly be de-indexed.  What appears to have happened is that Google saw it as a near duplicate of another page on their site, and dropped it from the index for that reason.  Then, magically, it reappeared a week later.

You may be seeing something like this here.  See what Moz Pro thinks in terms of duplicate content on your site, and if the home page gets called out along with another page.

[Caro-O]

Thank you Michael...I'll do that.

[Caro-O]

Everyone, this has been resolved! The problem turned out to be a code error in the canonical tag for the page. There was an extra space and slash. Ironically, the canonical tag was one of the first things we looked at, yet we all overlooked that error

Thank you all so much for your input and assistance.

[Caro-O]

Michael,

Duplicate content wasn't the issue in the end, but your response prompted me to analyse their home page text more closely and I discovered that there was room for improvement - too much of the home page content was also present on other pages of the site. Thanks for that!

[KristinaKledzik]

Woot! So glad to see it wasn't a penalty!