My site disappeared from google

marios · ‎09-02-2018

Hello. I have a problem with my site: http://www.mariospagkratis.gr. The site is online since 2012 and never had problems with it. But lately I have seen a remarkable reduction of visits. Searching with a generic term related to my business I discovered that my website doesn't appear on search, anymore... Usually I was at the first page of google with this term. On Bing there is no problem.

Google Console tells me that the site is Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt. Is this the problem?

Can you help me please?

Thanx a lot!

bobafett · ‎09-03-2018

@marios: Google may have changed their algorithm in which free sites are kind of demoted. They think that free subdomain sites are basically vanity sites for friends and family - they don't serve any useful purpose.

Adam7 · ‎09-03-2018

Your robots.txt file looks normal, and I only see a few pages that you've blocked from being indexed. Are you using Google Analytics to track visitors? Since that uses cookies to track, pretty much everyone using it saw a drop in visits after the GDPR rules went into effect. A lot more people do not click the button to accept cookies, so they don't end up getting tracked like they would in the past.

marios · ‎09-03-2018

@bobafett If I am not wrong, my website doesn't have a free subdomain, but it is in the free hosting plan. Could this be the problem?
Thank you very much for your reply!

@Adam Yes, I am using google analytics to track the visits. The problem is verified not only by the visits, but using a search term like "psychologists corfu" (in greek). With this term my site was 3rd-4th at the first page for a long time. Now it is not visible at all (I repeat, searching with these terms). Searching by my name, it appears last result at the first page (strange as well to be the last link).
Thank you very much for your help!

bobafett · ‎09-04-2018

@marios wrote:
@bobafett If I am not wrong, my website doesn't have a free subdomain, but it is in the free hosting plan. Could this be the problem?
IMO yes. Whether you have your own domain somehow pointed to weely free subdomain is mute. The crawler knows that it is pointing to a free hosting.
There are more than a billion sites and millions and millions are free ones. Most of the free sites are junk and useless. You are lumped in with junk. Goggle constantly tweaks their algorithm so that they can be number 1 by providing information about something that people might be interested. If a business or individual can't spend even a cost of coffee per month for a website hosting it would imply that they are not serious about the stuff they do. Why bombard people with that kind of information about something they (owners) themselves don't care about.

marios · ‎09-04-2018

Thank you very much for your reply. It could be the problem. I will try to fix it and see what's going to happen...

Adam7 · ‎09-04-2018

Sounds like Google updated some of their algorithms and it ended up hurting your ranking. I've seen that happen before and then watched the reverse happen with the same site when they made another update. Google is basically a complete black box when it comes to that, so it's hard to know what changed.

marios · ‎09-04-2018

I'll see what I am going to do... Thank you very much for your help!