Disappeared from Google with in 2 hours of webmaster tools error
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Hey Guys
I'm trying not to panic but....we had a problem with google indexing some of our secure pages then hit those pages and browsers firing up security warning, so I asked our web dev to have at look at it
he made the below changes and within 2 hours the site has drop off the face of google
“in web master tools I asked it to remove any https://freestylextreme.com URLs” “I cancelled that before it was processed”
“I then setup the robots.txt to respond with a disallow all if the request was for an https URL” “I've now removed robots.txt completely” “and resubmitted the main site from web master tools”
I've read a couple of blog posts and all say to remain clam , test the fetch bot on webmasters tools which is all good and just wait for google to reindex
do you guys have any further advice ?
Ben
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Thanks for the responses guys , it was picked back up in around 4 hours and lost no rank thankfully orders crashed but are back to normal now ! I'm going to investigate the two versions of the site is a bit strange
again thanks for your help
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Hi Ben,
It's now 2 days after your original question, and it looks like your back in the SERPs, at least from what I can tell. Hopefully you've made a full recovery.
It's difficult to understand exactly what damage was done by your dev in Webmaster Tools, but it's reasonable to assume that whatever it was caused the error.
One thing I did notice is that both the https and http version of your site resolve.
http://www.freestylextreme.com/ &
https://www.freestylextreme.com/Ideally, one would redirect to the other, or at a minimum have a rel canonical tag in place so that only one version is crawled.
I'd go ahead a put your robots.txt file back in place, and check yourself with Google webmaster tools to make sure everything is okay.
Best of luck!
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Hi Ben
I understand the panic in such a situation. I truly do. I checked your website and the fact that you do not have a robots.txt. You also do not have any kind of noindex or anything like that in your code and you look like a strong established website.
Do you have an XML sitemap in your webmaster console ? I would suggest you build one and submit it if you don't already have it.
Other then that, I would also suggest to have a robots.txt even if it's blank. Rather then a 404 redirecting to your homepage. Give me 24-48hrs and in my opinion, you should be back.
I hope this helps.
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