Homepage gone from SERPS (over 1 month), iternal pages ranking quite well

[mandos123]

Hello,

One of my websites (out of 100s) was steadily climbing up the SERPs, but little bit over a month ago my homepage got vanished from serps (all the keywords were gone). However, all the subpages/internal pages are ranking quite well for different keywords.

What I did to try to get back the positions

-Added weekly new, relevant content
-Made backlinks
-Lessened keyword density/keyword stuffling
-Lessened affiliate links
-Updates homepage
-Resubmitted sitemap
-Fetched for googlebot
-Reconsideration request was sent and the answer war that "no spam was found", your website is "ok".

But nothing seem to help me. For example, if I search for my main keyword, then on the 4th page comes my site, but it's mywebsite.com/contact-me (not the main page) which is very weird.

What should I do in order to get my homepage back to SERPs? It seems like only my HOMEPAGE is penalized.

E: my website is doing in well in other search engines (BING/YAHOO)

[webinventaekhlas]

Did you do anything in your .htaccess? Are bots are all allow or disallow in your .htaccess? Is there any chance that someone log into your cpanel and change the data? It happened to one of my known sites. Previous guy disallowed all robots to visit the website also he made changes in google webmaster tools for which that site suffers a lot. I am afraid soon BING/Yahoo will delist your site if anything is wrong in .htaccess

Also, did you verify your site to google?

[mandos123]

No I didn't changed anything on htaccess.. my robots file is:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Sitemap: http://mywebsite . com /sitemapindex.xml

My site is verified by google

[asepkomara]

Do some backlinks campaign from high authoritative sites. This way also helps my sites also someday a go.

[Trevor]

Hey there,

I had this happen to one of my sites about half a year ago. What I would do then is I would add more content and create more backlinks, but it was no help. The site wouldn't come back to the SERPs even after a month.

What MADE the site gain its positions in the SERPs back was adding more content to the HOME PAGE. I also removed ALL affiliate links from the home page (and made it a directory of all of my site's content, I simply linked from the home page to internal pages and posts where the affiliate links were placed.

Also, I found that in my Wordpress theme's footer there was a link to a site that was selling fake drugs. The footer was encrypted with a code so I had to decode it and remove the link.

Only after I made those changes, my site got its positions back.

Hope this helps.

[seenathkumar]

Recently I have also faced some similar issue, I got unnatural link warning from Google at webmaster tool, so I sent it for reconsideration after making some changes but the reconsideration was failed and again the same message was displayed "site violated with unnatural links" this was my recent experience all I am doing is removing network domains of my website and creating natural quality link get ranking or my home page. Recently Google also have announced that they will penalize over optimized website so also take care of link building process.

[mandos123]

Originally Posted by Trevor

Hey there,

I had this happen to one of my sites about half a year ago. What I would do then is I would add more content and create more backlinks, but it was no help. The site wouldn't come back to the SERPs even after a month.

What MADE the site gain its positions in the SERPs back was adding more content to the HOME PAGE. I also removed ALL affiliate links from the home page (and made it a directory of all of my site's content, I simply linked from the home page to internal pages and posts where the affiliate links were placed.

Also, I found that in my Wordpress theme's footer there was a link to a site that was selling fake drugs. The footer was encrypted with a code so I had to decode it and remove the link.

Only after I made those changes, my site got its positions back.

Hope this helps.

Sounds like a winning method. I will try it asap. How long did it take to bring your site back with this homepage updating?

[Theeban]

It is better not to hold on for this case. Keep on adding FRESH content and keep on getting quality links specially contextual links. Try this one for at least 4-5 weeks, that should give you a change, specially an improvement in your existing rank,

[mandos123]

Any other advices?

[Pronin]

Originally Posted by Trevor

Hey there,

I had this happen to one of my sites about half a year ago. What I would do then is I would add more content and create more backlinks, but it was no help. The site wouldn't come back to the SERPs even after a month.

What MADE the site gain its positions in the SERPs back was adding more content to the HOME PAGE. I also removed ALL affiliate links from the home page (and made it a directory of all of my site's content, I simply linked from the home page to internal pages and posts where the affiliate links were placed.

Also, I found that in my Wordpress theme's footer there was a link to a site that was selling fake drugs. The footer was encrypted with a code so I had to decode it and remove the link.

Only after I made those changes, my site got its positions back.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the tip. It seems to be the only useful (hopefully) tip that I have ever encountered. Can you please advice for my case:
My site's homepage was ranked well for at least 15 highly competitive keywords. Then I got an "unnatural links" message and after 15 days it went down. Some keywords got -30, some -300. Almost all targeted "money"-traffic was gone. Since I do not have any affiliate or external links on my homepage, should I add some content (currently ~800 words), create separate landing pages for every lost keyword, and make contextual links to those pages, thus spreading the relevance? Does it sound like a good idea?

[johnben1444]

For the fact that your site was on Google for some times means you onsite SEO is ok.

Try to focus on building quality high pr links on a consistent basis.

And also diversify your link building tactics/keywords/do and no follow.

This will greatly help if you try it out.

[Trevor]

Originally Posted by Pronin

Thanks for the tip. It seems to be the only useful (hopefully) tip that I have ever encountered. Can you please advice for my case:
My site's homepage was ranked well for at least 15 highly competitive keywords. Then I got an "unnatural links" message and after 15 days it went down. Some keywords got -30, some -300. Almost all targeted "money"-traffic was gone. Since I do not have any affiliate or external links on my homepage, should I add some content (currently ~800 words), create separate landing pages for every lost keyword, and make contextual links to those pages, thus spreading the relevance? Does it sound like a good idea?

What do you mean by "unnatural links" message?

Yep, you can try adding more content, that could help. Generally the more relevant and unique content on the site the better.

It looks like your site was hit as a whole. It may be the Google dance or it may be a longer-term problem. Try to search for your site on Google with the "site:" operator, i.e., site:yoursite.com to check whether it's still indexed or not.

If only some of the pages dropped in rankings, make sure they are optimized well, on-page wise. Try to target one keyword per page primarily and some other related or LSI keywords secondarily.

Hope this helps.

[willium4]

In my suggestion, first you do competitor analysis and then make changes in your home page, means update the content or make changes in meta tags.
Also try to get backlinks for home page through directory submission, article submission etc.

[Pronin]

Originally Posted by Trevor

What do you mean by "unnatural links" message?

Yep, you can try adding more content, that could help. Generally the more relevant and unique content on the site the better.

It looks like your site was hit as a whole. It may be the Google dance or it may be a longer-term problem. Try to search for your site on Google with the "site:" operator, i.e., site:yoursite.com to check whether it's still indexed or not.

If only some of the pages dropped in rankings, make sure they are optimized well, on-page wise. Try to target one keyword per page primarily and some other related or LSI keywords secondarily.

Hope this helps.

I mean the message from google to my WMT that says that "unnatural" links have been detected.
So it's not a dance for sure. The sites is indexed well, googlebot visits every day as usual.
Other sure thing is that only homepage and one landing pages were hit by the penalty. The total figures for traffic have doubles since the penalty, but all "money" traffic was lost.
It seems that the only way out is to re-target the relevance from homepage to keyword-specific landing pages.

[mandos123]

Any more thoughts about this issue? It's not penguin issue..

[Robby54]

Sandboxed.. I lost a few domains like this when panda was first introduced.

[mandos123]

Originally Posted by Robby54

Sandboxed.. I lost a few domains like this when panda was first introduced.

Why you think so?
I made under 100 backlinks and manually from different sources :|

[alphadude]

If it happened 1 month ago, it was probably a Panda 3.5 update which is to with content.

[mandos123]

My website has 100% unique content, only 2 affiliate links.
For me it looks like the homepage is under some sort of penalty. Because sub pages still rank quite well : ). I would really like to know if someone have had same sort of issue with their website?

Thanks