Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Neil Cheesma on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/12/2017).

The site is tanking but no manual penalty message

STILL trying to get to the bottom of why this site is tanking.. especially for "Pet Portraits" where it has now gone into `omitted results` - when Fetch and Render the homepage goes into SERPS at varying positions 140-170 etc and then after a few minutes/hours it goes back into omitted results... ps - with "Pet Portraits England" at No. 8, Pet Portraits UK about 80 - this is a site that 2-3 years ago was on page 1. No manual penalty message Any suggestions? https://goo.gl/6a1nkf
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Jim Munro: This is not the problem but you might as well work towards getting it better. Your robots.txt will be understood by some bots but not all. Cut and paste this and leave a couple of blank lines after "Disallow:(space)(space)"
  • Jim Munro: User-agent: * Disallow:
  • Neil Cheesman: Space OR linespace?
  • Neil Cheesman: so... copy this... User-agent: * Disallow:
  • Neil Cheesman: and space or linespace after disallow?
  • Jim Munro: Yes. Both I think
  • Jim Munro: Note the capitalisation.
  • Jim Munro: I put two spaces after "Disallow:" followed by a couple of blank lines.
  • Neil Cheesman: What does this do? Allow: /
  • Jim Munro: It`s a bastardisation introduced by Google. googlebot knows what it means.
  • Neil Cheesman: okay... and I have amended the robots.txt
  • Neil Cheesman: Tonight, the homepage seems to have stayed at around 168 for a couple of hours and not gone back into omitted...
  • Neil Cheesman: and today dropped back into omitted results for "pet portraits"
  • Jim Munro: Are you going to fix this? I would, even if it is just a home page with the main site`s menu on it. There are some links pointing to http://blog.finepetportraits.co.uk/
  • Jim Munro: Have you changed the site since 19th March? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ypEZY_QNkFIJ:www.finepetportraits.co.uk/kolbakur/&num=1&hl=en&gl=au&strip=0&vwsrc=0 https://www.finepetportraits.co.uk/kolbakur/

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/12/2017).