Home Page Deindexed overnight?
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Hi,
Hope you guys can help. I run an e-commerce site https://alloywheels.com Last night our home page (and a few other pages, but not all) were de-indexed by Google. The site has been ranking (UK) for years in P1 for the "alloy wheels" keyword and on the whole been running very successfully. However recently I have noticed from fluctuation on the "alloy wheels" keyword, dropping to P3 then P5 then back to P3, but this morning I noticed we were not even ranking on the first page.
When I check inside Search Console there are no messages or warnings but the "/" page was de-indexed. There were a few other key pages that were also de-indexed. I have request reindexing and they have come back, P7 for the home page for "alloy wheels"
The only thing I have changed was I realised yesterday there was no robots.txt on the site and was being recommended by web.dev to add one, so I did. It was just an allow all:
User-agent: *
DisallowSitemap: https://alloywheels.com/sitemap.xml
I ran tests on the robots.txt before it was uploaded and it all came green. I have removed the robots.txt for now.
Has anybody seen anything like this before? With the recent ranking fluctuation I am not sure whether it is to do with that, the robots.txt or something different altogether?
Thanks in advance,
James
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Lots of people facing this same problem. It happening because Google has some technical issues.
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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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Thanks for taking the time to reply. Certainly seems the same as others are reporting, so makes me feel a little better!
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Someone else in the forum has posted a very similar question to you! My response there:
"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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