Have you set up Google Webmaster Tools, checked for any flagged manual actions, submitted your sitemap, and run a fetch request?

Glad you figured it out. I honestly didn't think it would have been the canonicals. I'm a little surprised that the bots didn't just choose not to respect the suggestion as opposed to blanking your site from the index. Didn't think that was even a possibility from incorrect canonicals. Good to know for the future though in case anything like this comes up with anyone else's site.

Its not the most perfect tool. Sometimes if you move to a second or third page in the SERPs it will reset your location to your actual location. It doesn't do it all the time but when it does its not always noticeable. If I need to see more than page one while using it, I tend to just set google to show 100 results per page instead of the default. It also doesn't list every town in the world. So sometimes you just need to go with whatever is close to what you needed.

Not exactly. Its not so much that the canonical "supersedes" an index, follow tag.... a canonical tag establishes equivalency while a NoIndex is more like a "does not equal." The Index, Follow is still there and being seen by bots as they crawl... in fact, if you had NoIndex on a page with a Canonical Tag, it may not even see the canonical at all since you told it to NoIndex the page. The Meta Robots Index tag comes first allowing the bots to crawl and index the page but then the canonical sets up equivalency to a separate page. So if your canonical tag is being respected, it doesn't wind up doing the same thing as a NoIndex (though it may seem that way) nor does it do the same thing as a 301 (though there are similarities in how equity is passed). Since a canonical establishes an equivalency, you'll find that the Canon Page will eventually take the place of the Canonicalized Page in search results because you're telling them the Canonicalized Page _is _the Canon Page & that the Canon page is the right version of both.

I took a look at all of the usual suspects as well... which amounts to pretty much everything that everyone else mentioned but I was intrigued by this issue and thought maybe another set of eyes might notice something that was off. Nothing was wrong in the page source from what I saw, no issues crawling it myself and I didn't see any penalties. Normally I'd think that if your homepage wasn't appearing for branded organic searches then a penalty was levied against you but when that is the case the homepage is still normally find-able in a Site operator search. M__aybe it is related to all the backlinks that were lost/deleted in the past month but I'm not sure why that would be the case unless removing the homepage from the index was a Penguin response to link issues... but I was under the impression that peguin was devaluing the link source not the link recipient and deleting/removing links seems to be a preferred method of handling penguin-related issues. So if there is a relationship between penguin and your homepage being deindexed then I am not sure at all why nor am I certain how to fix it as I'm not seeing anything in particular that screams "linking issue" at me. (though I only did a fairly cursory inspection of things)

So I am stumped. Whenever the issue is figure out I would love to know how/why this came to be.

If I'm doing a quick search just to see some top ranking pages for a query in another city, I normally use https://serps.com/tools/google-search-location/

If a URL was indexed and has since had a canonical added to it pointing to another page, it will eventually disappear from results. Basically the pages gets consolidated with its canon page. If the bots choose to respect the canonical tag in that instance, all signals get passed to the canon page while still allowing the page and information to be accessible by human visitors. As such, there's no reason to keep the page in the index because you're telling the bots that another page is the correct page instead. This is not the same as NoIndexing a page but will eventually remove a page from the index much in the same way that a 301 will pass equity along to another page while eventually removing the redirected page from the index in favor of the page being redirected to.

Organic sitelinks in the SERPs are an automated feature. The best way to try to get them to show up (no guarantees) is to have good, quality content; ensure that your internal linking structure is done well; have a proper sitemap; and breadcrumbs may potentially help. Even then, they may only show up for very specific searches. I've found that getting them to show up for your branded searches tends to be easiest.

You are able demote sitelinks that you don't want showing up in Search Console but you can't pick and choose which exact ones you do want showing up. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en

Step 1 should really start off with something more along the lines of "Create a page around a product or service we provide. Determine related search terms, expanded terms, relevant informational queries, FAQ questions, LSI terms, etc. that could be used to enhance content of the page and draw traffic." Don't create a page for a single term. Create a page because it actually provides the user/customer/visitor with something worthwhile and relevant that you provide/offer.

Step 2 should not be all about Social Media. SEO _is_how you get people to see/find your site. Social Media is a useful tool along side this but its more than just posting up a new page or a new blog post two or three times a week to your Company Page and somehow magically drawing in millions of followers... its about building a community, conversing with the community and related pages, cross-promotion, making yourself into an industry leader and authority on relevant related subjects. Now, if this is more of a B2B operation then you might want to consider a few other things. Because when thinking about it from that perspective you'll want to do some research about the major social networks and forums that members of that industry use. While Facebook, Google Plus, & Twitter seem like great ways to push out a new site page and to start getting some traction, if all your industry professionals who would care about your information are on LinkedIn and PartnerUp then you'll want to prioritize that. Or if they congregate around a handful of G+ community or Facebook pages then you'll want to work towards being able to post your information there and/or be posted by the admins & users of those groups.

Press Releases sound nice but make sure that its a good, legitimate press release service. Back in the day there were tons of these services out there and they were really good at getting your post on one or two decent sites.... and 300 crap sites... all of which were 'useful' at the time but definitely lead to some headaches involving disavows when that became a thing. Just because your content is being syndicated across a whole bunch of sites doesn't mean that its necessarily a good thing... for all you know, the bulk of those pages are buried so deep and NoIndexed instead of having a cross-domain canonical to the 'original' so there's no traffic to & through it and no equity being gained. And hell, since it could be creating 300 instances of duplicate content and most of those sites probably do the same for tons of other 'clients'... those links you do get will potentially be from low quality, low domain authority, and fairly spammy sites.

Step 4 sounds fine. You might also want to look into something like HARO (https://www.helpareporter.com/), offer up an article to a relevant business journal as an editorial (and don't try to 're-sell' that article to multiple sites with 'a couple tweaks'), reach out to leaders in related industries for legitimate cross-promotional opportunities, look into opportunities to speak with or offer insight to the writers of relevant industry blogs, etc.

As to the third part of your question... there can often appear to be a correlation between some of those offerings and improved site metrics which could be signals for improving organic rankings. But there is no definitive cause and effect that I can point to that would say "yes, always put these in" or "no, they never work." More specifically, having legitimate and useful reviews can help improve user engagement and can help to improve conversion rate. Having a decent amount of reviews can also allow you to add schema markup to the page that can add star ratings into your organic results which could improve your CTR. Will it always do this? No, but it can.

Videos are also a good way to improve user engagement, if its a decent and relevant video. Especially useful if people like it enough to share it either because its incredibly informative on the relevant subject or really amusing. This increase in time on page, lowered bounce rate, shares, etc. could improve organic rankings but there is not always definitive proof that this is the case. Videos can have the opposite issue as well... sometimes they just want their question answered or the information presented to them instead of sitting through your 2 minute video about the product offerings or how to install it.

Good images is just good business and so are good descriptions. Having relevant images on your page can also help you take up real estate in image search as well as generic organic SERPs. Having an informative description can help with a variety of ranking signals. But you need to make sure that you are not going overboard, stuffing keywords, or attempting to game the system. For some people, adding 5 images with great, informative descriptions could be helpful. For others it could be 10 images. But for some, those 10 images could wind up inadvertently hurting them if they don't things according to best practices.

Highlighting relevant blog posts? Well, that could help with retention on site as people are more likely to find the information that they need quicker and easier. Promoting flow through your site to the right information is a plus to UX which would make people more likely to come back to your site or to suggest this site to other people. It could also help with the flow of link equity to relevant pages that would then benefit from the infusion and possibly rank better. Or if overdone, or not done properly, it could have no effect, little effect, or the opposite effect as you clutter the page with extraneous links or dilute equity by pointing links at irrelevant pages.

Email subscriptions. This won't necessarily have any sort of organic impact but can help in the retention of users who are then slightly more likely to return as direct visits.

If you're looking for a magic bullet to increase your rankings via user engagement, there is no such thing. There are things to consider best practices and things that work for the right types of sites and things that work well if done properly.

Having no Robots.txt, or a blank one, is perfectly fine (though honestly its no more a security risk than your Sitemap.xml). But your current issue is that both of your sites are returning 403 status codes at crawlers while people are still able to land on your pages. This has nothing to do with the Robots.txt file being changed or removed; just an odd coincidence. This most likely is an issue in htaccess file.

I saw more volatility and fluctuations earlier in the month on some of my clients than I did on the "official" rollout day & weekend.

Honestly I do it all by hand in excel using conditional formatting to highlight  various core terms and change text color/bold/italicize for certain common combinations that accompany core terms. Then I sort by those variations, copy/paste them into new tabs, and break them down further as needed from there.

That's a URL encoding issue that is popping up. That string after the slash is a>

**DIXCEL HS-typeスリットディ **which looks more like an <a>tag lost its closing slash and is now adding the following paragraph end & following h1 into the url string. You don't need to remove these links from Google or disavow them. You just need to fix the tags on the site.</a>

Looks like the two people who responded to your question yesterday actually gave pretty good answers/followups to your issue.

Without seeing the backend of the site and all the collected data, I can only speculate as to potential causes.

If there was a manual penalty, you'd be able to check that in Search Console/Webmaster Tools. Make sure your sitemap is uploaded to search console as well. Make sure there are no errors associated with it. Run a "fetch as" in Search Console to ensure that Google can properly see your homepage and submit to index. Build out the content. Build out the link profile. Determine your core search terms that you would like to be ranking for. Make sure to build out pages associated with those things. If things like the English Writing Course, the Premier League and the Newsletter Publishing are important then make sure they're higher on the page and more noticeable instead of in the footer. The meta keywords tag is not actually important but you do stuff a lot of keywords into it on some pages... consider toning it down a bit. Make sure your meta descriptions are well written and explain what the page is about. Don't just copy & paste a line or two from the paragraph of page content to re-use as a meta description.

Your content is _severely _lacking. It appears that you have three real pieces of original content (which are all pretty thin) and then 5 sample blog pages on your site. You can't really expect to be ranking for your content if you've done practically no work on your content. And you don't appear to have a backlink profile. You should really consider getting your name out there and getting some relevant links. These may not be the only reasons but they are contributing factors. Put some time and energy into expanding your content, making your site richer and more informative, and you'll start to see some movement.

It is absolutely natural for people to link to your website with your URL. When looking at your backlink profile, you should see tons of links with the anchor text being things like your naked url or "website" or "this". In fact, it would be incredibly unnatural, and potentially a sign of paid linking schemes, if every single link to your website was a keyword rich, long tail anchor.

Where do you see it generating this? Is it listed as a 404 on your site and does search console show it as originating on any specific pages on your site? It could be a generic 404 where someone is linking (purposefully or accidentally) to your site. It could be malicious (but that would be hard to tell from the information provided).

As to what that string of code is doing.... that happens when there is a UTF-8 encoding issue. Sometimes its as simple as a space showing up as %20.

In your case, its the UTF for キャラクター図鑑_レアリティ（★★★）_【ID：675】ワッツ・ステップニー which translates to Character picture book _ rarity (★★★) _ [ ID: 675 ] Watts Stepney.

Not sure if that helps clarify things.

There is nothing "bad practices" about allowing a non-existent page to 404. People often times forget that a 404 isn't a signal that something is broken and needs fixing, its just a status code that returns "Not Found". Sometimes it makes sense for things not to be found on your site because they were never there in the first place. 404s eventually stop being crawled and indexed.

You shouldn't just bulk redirect things to your homepage though. Its always best to have a 301 point to the most relevant page based on what the original page was. If there is no most relevant page, have you considered 301-ing them to one step up in the site navigation? (i.e. a category page or hub page)