undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Home page suddenly dropped from index!!

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Home page suddenly dropped from index!!

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
4
17
2.0k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • Caro-O
    Caro-O last edited by Jun 14, 2016, 1:43 PM

    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

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • KristinaKledzik
      KristinaKledzik @Caro-O last edited by Jun 17, 2016, 2:16 PM Jun 17, 2016, 2:16 PM

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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Caro-O
        Caro-O @Michael996 last edited by Jun 17, 2016, 12:32 PM Jun 17, 2016, 12:32 PM

        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!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Caro-O
          Caro-O @KristinaKledzik last edited by Jun 17, 2016, 11:20 AM Jun 17, 2016, 11:20 AM

          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.

          KristinaKledzik 1 Reply Last reply Jun 17, 2016, 2:16 PM Reply Quote 2
          • Caro-O
            Caro-O @Michael996 last edited by Jun 16, 2016, 3:40 PM Jun 16, 2016, 3:40 PM

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

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Michael996
              Michael996 last edited by Jun 16, 2016, 3:35 PM Jun 16, 2016, 3:35 PM

              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 2 Replies Last reply Jun 17, 2016, 12:32 PM Reply Quote 1
              • Caro-O
                Caro-O @KristinaKledzik last edited by Jun 16, 2016, 3:12 PM Jun 16, 2016, 3:12 PM

                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

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • KristinaKledzik
                  KristinaKledzik @Caro-O last edited by Jun 16, 2016, 3:11 PM Jun 16, 2016, 3:00 PM

                  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 2 Replies Last reply Jun 17, 2016, 11:20 AM Reply Quote 2
                  • Caro-O
                    Caro-O @KristinaKledzik last edited by Jun 15, 2016, 9:34 PM Jun 15, 2016, 9:34 PM

                    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 1 Reply Last reply Jun 16, 2016, 3:00 PM Reply Quote 0
                    • KristinaKledzik
                      KristinaKledzik @Caro-O last edited by Jun 15, 2016, 8:38 PM Jun 15, 2016, 8:38 PM

                      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 1 Reply Last reply Jun 15, 2016, 9:34 PM Reply Quote 0
                      • Caro-O
                        Caro-O @KristinaKledzik last edited by Jun 15, 2016, 4:09 PM Jun 15, 2016, 2:15 PM

                        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 1 Reply Last reply Jun 15, 2016, 8:38 PM Reply Quote 0
                        • KristinaKledzik
                          KristinaKledzik @Caro-O last edited by Jun 15, 2016, 1:38 PM Jun 15, 2016, 1:38 PM

                          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 1 Reply Last reply Jun 15, 2016, 2:15 PM Reply Quote 0
                          • Caro-O
                            Caro-O @KristinaKledzik last edited by Jun 15, 2016, 2:36 PM Jun 15, 2016, 9:05 AM

                            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 1 Reply Last reply Jun 15, 2016, 1:38 PM Reply Quote 0
                            • KristinaKledzik
                              KristinaKledzik last edited by Jun 14, 2016, 9:35 PM Jun 14, 2016, 9:35 PM

                              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 1 Reply Last reply Jun 15, 2016, 9:05 AM Reply Quote 2
                              • Caro-O
                                Caro-O @JordanLowry last edited by Jun 14, 2016, 2:54 PM Jun 14, 2016, 2:51 PM

                                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?

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • JordanLowry
                                  JordanLowry last edited by Jun 14, 2016, 2:50 PM Jun 14, 2016, 2:50 PM

                                  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 1 Reply Last reply Jun 14, 2016, 2:51 PM Reply Quote 0
                                  • JordanLowry
                                    JordanLowry last edited by Jun 14, 2016, 2:46 PM Jun 14, 2016, 2:46 PM

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

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • 1 / 1
                                    1 out of 17
                                    • First post
                                      1/17
                                      Last post

                                    Got a burning SEO question?

                                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                    Start my free trial


                                    Browse Questions

                                    Explore more categories

                                    • Moz Tools

                                      Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                                    • SEO Tactics

                                      Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                                    • Community

                                      Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                                    • Digital Marketing

                                      Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                                    • Research & Trends

                                      Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                                    • Support

                                      Connect on product support and feature requests.

                                    • See all categories

                                    Related Questions

                                    • chelseaskirtinguk

                                      My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?

                                      My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 1, 2022, 1:09 PM | chelseaskirtinguk
                                      0
                                    • Chammy

                                      Is a 404, then a meta refresh 301 to the home page OK for SEO?

                                      Hi Mozzers I have a client that had a lot of soft 404s that we wanted to tidy up. Basically everything was going to the homepage. I recommended they implement proper 404s with a custom 404 page, and 301 any that really should be redirected to another page. What they have actually done is implemented a 404 (without the custom 404 page) and then after a short delay 301 redirected to the homepage. I understand why they want to do this as they don't want to lose the traffic, but is this a problem with SEO and the index? Or will Google treat as a hard 404 anyway? Many thanks

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Sep 10, 2014, 12:37 PM | Chammy
                                      0
                                    • Waismann

                                      Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages

                                      Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 19, 2014, 12:23 PM | Waismann
                                      0
                                    • oomdomarketing

                                      Home Page Copy Ideal Length

                                      Hi Guys, I'm currently trying to turn around the organic performance of a website I have been working on. I have been reading that content for home pages should be particularly long. What is the ideal length of the copy on a home page? 500 words, 1000 words, 1500 words? The current work is kind of short in my opinion, and I would like to know if it would be a worth while effort to make it longer since this thing is getting clobbered organically. Thanks!

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 18, 2014, 1:46 PM | oomdomarketing
                                      1
                                    • Dillman

                                      How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??

                                      I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY?  and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference.  I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/');  to $redirect_url = home_url('');       nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file  (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) :   RewriteEngine on
                                      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
                                      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
                                      RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 16, 2014, 11:00 PM | Dillman
                                      0
                                    • fablau

                                      Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?

                                      Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 3, 2013, 10:43 AM | fablau
                                      0
                                    • Martin_S

                                      How do you de-index and prevent indexation of a whole domain?

                                      I have parts of an online portal displaying in SERPs which it definitely shouldn't be. It's due to thoughtless developers but I need to have the whole portal's domain de-indexed and prevented from future indexing. I'm not too tech savvy but how is this achieved? No index? Robots? thanks

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 13, 2013, 8:53 AM | Martin_S
                                      0
                                    • Peter264

                                      NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?

                                      Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page.  For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages?  Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.

                                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 6, 2011, 3:18 PM | Peter264
                                      0

                                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                    Start my free trial
                                    Products
                                    • Moz Pro
                                    • Moz Local
                                    • Moz API
                                    • Moz Data
                                    • STAT
                                    • Product Updates
                                    Moz Solutions
                                    • SMB Solutions
                                    • Agency Solutions
                                    • Enterprise Solutions
                                    Free SEO Tools
                                    • Domain Authority Checker
                                    • Link Explorer
                                    • Keyword Explorer
                                    • Competitive Research
                                    • Brand Authority Checker
                                    • Local Citation Checker
                                    • MozBar Extension
                                    • MozCast
                                    Resources
                                    • Blog
                                    • SEO Learning Center
                                    • Help Hub
                                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                    • How-to Guides
                                    • Moz Academy
                                    • API Docs
                                    About Moz
                                    • About
                                    • Team
                                    • Careers
                                    • Contact
                                    Why Moz
                                    • Case Studies
                                    • Testimonials
                                    Get Involved
                                    • Become an Affiliate
                                    • MozCon
                                    • Webinars
                                    • Practical Marketer Series
                                    • MozPod
                                    Connect with us

                                    Contact the Help team

                                    Join our newsletter
                                    Moz logo
                                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                    • Accessibility
                                    • Terms of Use
                                    • Privacy

                                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.