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Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
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As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up.
We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google.
This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server.
One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
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The issue is now being reported as fixed, with a response from Google’s John Mueller saying it was a technical issue their end. https://searchengineland.com/google-de-indexing-issue-now-fixed-result-of-technical-issues-315058
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Myself and a friend (who is a competitor) both had the same problem. Doing a URL Inspection in Google Search Console - specifically the Test Live URL thing - fixed it immediately.
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I've gone through my logs and the last time this happened to a different brand website was on the 15th of February. If people want to cross reference this date with anything.
Then before that, the dates are not clear on my end but it was around November/ December last year.
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From what I've read, it seems to be an issue at Google's end, not something the site owners have done and therefore not something you can fix your end.
That said, interestingly, yours is the first case with reports of the exact same issue occurring multiple times over a timescale of months, most are reporting hours.
Not that that helps I'm afraid.
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Aye we pretty much established what that article spoke about well before it came about.
The real annoyance is that it's not the first time and has happened several times over the last 6 months and we have no idea how to track when it's happened other than visually checking ourselves.
I'm trying to understand why this is happening and how to better solve this issue, as at the moment no one has provided a solid theory to which we can adjust our efforts towards.
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It looks like you're not the only one: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dropping-pages-out-of-the-search-index-27369.html
No response from Google yet.
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