Google Indexing Suddenly Stopped

  • Hi, Really at a loss on this one. We have a website that was ranking well on Google for local related search terms then all of a sudden it has disappeared entirely! I have run the Google Webmaster tools and it could not Fetch as google and came back “unreachable” On speaking to our hosting company they said to change the name of .htaccess file to .htaccess.hold to see if that would get a crawl back. That worked and Google instantly indexed our search results again but becuase the .htaccess file was renamed only the Honme page sows and works. Click on any page links from the Home page and we get a broken link “The requested URL /contact/ was not found on this server.”

    Any ideas on this? I’m thinking there’s a bug from a robot attack in the WordPress files themselves somewhere which stopped Google indexing but I’m a bit of a novice. Help please! I will be entirely grateful as our business is taking a real knock for not ranking.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hello BuyFOB,

    Try comparing the .htaccess.hold file with the default htaccess file and if they differ use the default one. This should fix the “not found on this server.” errors on the site.

    On a side note, I would investigate whether the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting is unchecked under Dashboard -> Settings -> Reading -> Search Engine Visibility. Also look at the robots.txt file to make sure the site isn’t disallowing crawling.

    Thread Starter BuyFOB

    (@buyfob)

    Hi Keith, thanks for the message.
    The htaccess file is exactly the same (had already checked that) and the robots .txt file is all fine and normal. The “discourage…” isn’t selected so that wouldn’t be an issue. That’s why I have posted on here as I have exhausted all basic avenues to look down. It’s very strange!

    Hello BuyFOB,

    Can you access https://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your web browser? If so, try fetching as Google again just to avoid the possibility of this being a transient error.

    Have you asked your hosting provider: do they have any firewall rules in place that would block or rate limit crawling activity? Also ask them to check the webserver logs for “500 Errors”. Finally, this one is a long shot — does your website support IPv6 connectivity? If so, is it properly configured?

    Your hosting provider should really be able to help pin this one down.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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