Of course, I should have included that: Fabiusmaximus.com

Thanks for the ingenious advice, out of the box thinking. However, we're still in Google News. When we force Google to index a post via Fetch, it shows up in News. Plus the New Publisher page tells you that you're in News.

It's some sort of technical problem. A weird one.

This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum.

We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index."

No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file.

Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping.

We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter.

It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas?

I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.

Thanks for the ingenious advice, out of the box thinking. However, we're still in Google News. When we force Google to index a post via Fetch, it shows up in News. Plus the New Publisher page tells you that you're in News.

It's some sort of technical problem. A weird one.