Homepage disappeared from Google

[TineDL]

Hello,

Since 2 weeks, our website is losing positions in Google. After years on the first page, we dropped for our main keyword to the 3rd page. Seems that all the positions we lost, were ranking with the homepage. Now, we are on the 3rd page but with a less important page.

How is it possible that only the homepage disappeared? Is there any explanation for that?

I hope there is an explanation, so we can fix the trouble.

Kind regards,

Tine

[AL123al]

Hi,

Have you been working on the website recently in any way? Updates etc? For such a significant drop it will mean that there is something going on behind the scenes rather than an algorithmic update (unless it is a penalty which is a different scenario). Perhaps the 301 redirects aren't working anymore (sometimes with Wordpress updates things can go awry) and you have two copies of the website. I've seen the HTAccess file get updated and that causing the redirects not to work. Perhaps your developer has been working on the website and created copies of some pages but didn't block them to indexing leading to duplication.

First place to look is Google Console and see how many pages are being indexed and whether it is highlighting any issues. Look at when your home page was last crawled by viewing the caching info. Look at the response codes for your pages using a tool like Screaming Frog. Are you getting 200's or perhaps server timeouts which could point to a server issue impacting the website.

It is really like investigating a crime scene and you've got to come at it from all angles.

Good luck

[TineDL]

Hi,

Thank you for your answer. Nothing has changed lately. That's the strange thing.

I checked a lot of info in the Google webmaster tools, but nothing unusual. The page give a 200 status code, the pages indexed are normal, there is no warning or message from Google, robots are not blocking, no meta tag blocking from indexing, redirects are ok, ...

We have a more or less duplicate website but this website is for another country and have some country specific changes. This is already like this since years. The domain extensions are different and the matched the good countries to it.

The website is www.conseilfleursdebach.fr.

Kind regards

[ViviCa1]

Is it possible that it is affected by the intrusive interstitials penalty (see here)? I don't see any interstitials on your website but the timing would be about right with the penalty launching on 10 January... although I suppose that wouldn't explain it if your website has dropped in rankings on desktop and mobile.

[TineDL]

Thanks for your input. I already thought about it too, I saw the article before, it was around that date that we dropped.

But I don't see any troubles with our website regarding mobile.

[TineDL]

Hello,

I noticed that the cached version is going to the Belgium website instead of the French website (who is dropped). Any ideas what can cause that?

The content is country specific, there is no redirect, each page has a 200 status, there are no links and Google console is showing thousands of links between the 2 websites... something is going really wrong but no idea what...

[AL123al]

I wonder if this is a problem?

The canonical of this page http://www.conseilfleursdebach.fr.  is  http://www.bachbloesemadvies.be

The canonical of this page: http://www.conseilfleursdebach.fr is http://www.conseilfleursdebach.fr/

It is tricky for me to understand what is going on as I'm no linguist so the languages look pretty similar to me. But having a "." after the fr does not result in a 404 but resolves to a page whose canoncal is a different site? So it maybe that you have too many duplicate home pages? I would redirect the one with the "." to the one without?

Not sure if this is helpful or actually a problem but it doesn't seem right.

[TineDL]

Thanks for your help.

It's strange that the fr. is even working. That should not work, I wrote it in my previous message, but the . was the end of my sentence

I don't think that could be the problem, but it's good to know and to fix it anyway!