Today I woke up and was enjoying my morning and doing the tasks I like to usually do like see how my customers are faring on the Google ranking charts! To my horror one of the sites had totally disappeared off Google! “WHAT The ^^%%^&&” is said to myself, what went wrong!
I checked out all I could find out about this issue because we had no Manual Action issues in Webmaster Tools yet the client had disappeared off the face of Google! I read the horror articles of Penguin 3.0 and what people did wrong and all the issues around bad and weak back-linking strategies.
I went through all the external links and On-page code and nothing had changed and from what I could see because it all read well, no spammy keywords, all the links into the site had a PR over 3.. “What’s going on!” I thought to myself.
Then I saw some great articles that hinted (had the domain structure changed in any way)? I used one of my tools to check the server headers for the client and hey presto! the domain had changed from a HTTP to a HTTPS and Google had not realised this, nor had I been notified. The site disappeared off the face of Google even though there were redirects in place, as far as Google was concerned, the site didn’t exist anymore and had moved away so it didn’t rank it any longer.. Few crisis averted, moral of the story, don’t think that Google is always at fault, sometimes it may be you!
The way we solved the issue is to re-list and verify the site in Webmaster tools and this quickly solved the issue of the missing site. Happy me and more importantly happy client.
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