My best page gone for several hours now

[Tonearm]

I've been making many SEO changes to my site in the last few days, and several hours ago I noticed my best page is completely gone from Google's index. I checked for it with a site: search and conventional searches. The page has been online for almost 10 years, and has been #2 for its target phrase for as long as I can remember. I've never done anything even remotely "black hat".

Should I be rolling back changes right now, or could this be a temporary thing? If it could be temporary, how long should I wait before rolling back?

[Tonearm]

After posting I discovered that I had blocked a single Google IP about 3 days ago. google.com/webmaster alerted me to 403 permission denied errors from the 27th. Could that block be to blame for this? A couple other pages are missing from the SERPs too.

[BillyS]

>>I've been making many SEO changes to my site in the last few days

>>I've never done anything even remotely "black hat".


Tonearm - I do think the above statement conflict a bit. If you're #2 why would you be doing "many SEO changes?"

And why are you blocking a Google IP? On the surface this looks like cloaking of sorts. I'm not saying you're doing this, but that might be what Google thinks too.

[Tonearm]

If SEO always means black hat, what does white hat mean?

The changes I've made are source ordering, removing duplicate internal links, title tag changes, h1 tag changes, and meta description tag changes.

I blocked the IP because I noticed it was requesting my pages in what I thought was a strange way. I was stupid not to look up the IP first. I thought I recognized it from a Russian IP that had done the same thing in the past.

[BillyS]

>>If SEO always means black hat, what does white hat mean?

I never said that SEO = black hat. What I was pointing out is behavior on the site. You're making changes, then blocking Google. That might be raising a red flag - even if done innocently.

My advice? Keep cleaning things up (some of the items you mention are more housekeeping than SEO) and unblock Google. If you don't come back in a couple of weeks, then think about reaching out to Google.

[Tonearm]

Wow my home page is gone from the index now. I'm ready to hit the panic button. Do you think this could happen from blocking 1 IP?

[crobb305]

If you don't come back in a couple of weeks, then think about reaching out to Google

BillyS,

What should one expect after doing a reconsideration request in WMT? Do you get a message once the site has been reviewed? Are they pretty quick about doing reviews? I sent a request in on Thursday, and there has been no sign whatsoever of a visit/review.

[Tonearm]

I did create a situation with my source-ordering that the Google algo might detect as hidden text.

I have 3 lines of text that appear on the page like this:

p
h1
p

but the p's are actually encapsulated in a div, and that div is absolutely-positioned so that the layout appears as above when viewed in a browser. I wonder if the Google algo would detect the h1 as hidden text since text appears above and below it in an absolutely-positioned div. Has anyone heard of anything like that happening?