Not able to open Website from Google Search

[Irshad]

Hello All,

I am not able to open my website from Google Search. Also, not able to view, title, description and cached in google search. My index.php page is coming. ie example.com/index.php, but not able to view www.example.com. Please insert the whole domain, and click on the website link, you will get below error.

Google Shows, this error:

This www.example.com page can’t be found

No webpage was found for the web address: http://www.example.com/
HTTP ERROR 404

Could you please help, what exactly the issue is?

[edited by: goodroi at 1:31 pm (utc) on Nov 22, 2016]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, please go read & follow the forum charter :) [/edit]

[aakk9999]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Irshad!

Sorry, but we had to exemplify your website as we do not allow public site reviews. But before we exemplified, I had a quick look and will try to explain here what happens without mentioning specifics.

Searching on Google for the home page www.example.com shows a page without title or meta description and without "cached" link. Clicking on this SERP result takes visitor to a blank page with HTTP 404 returned.

Also, the command site:softnice.com does not return site home page, you can only get the home page in SERPs if you search for www.softnice.com

However, copying the same home page URL and pasting it to a browser address bar returns the site home page.

This behaviour would indicate that the website has been hacked since the server responds in one way when clicked from Google SERPs and in a different way when URL is pasted directly in the browser address bar.

I would check .htaccess or server side code for any condition where 404 is returned based on referrer being Google.
I would also check for any security holes on the site or in your hosting account.

[Irshad]

How it could possible that website is hacked, only the home page is issue is there, all the inner pages are opening from Google search. If it was hacked that whole website wouldn't open from google search. What i will do is I need to check 404 for this website. Please let me know if you find something else related to this issue. Thanks for the reply bro......

[aakk9999]

Maybe inner pages were not ranking well enough and home page was the one that bothered someone... who knows.

But it is very easy to put the following in .htaccess or in a script on the server that responds to your request:

IF the request is for the home page
AND the referrer is google
RESPOND with 404 Not Found

In this case the 404 response would be returned only if the request is for a home page and the home page link was on Google SERPs.

There could be a reason why this is done to home page only - I do not know. But I would firstly try to find where there is a code on your server that responds with 404 Not Found for your home page and fix this and check for security holes. Only after this I would worry why someone did it to home page only and not to other pages.

[lucy24]

Look at your htaccess file (or equivalent if you're not on an Apache server). Before you open it, look at its current datestamp. Is it later than the last time you remember editing it yourself?

If you have never personally edited your htaccess-or-equivalent, are you using a CMS where changes are made periodically by your host? If so, you may need to have a talk with them.

[Irshad]

Hello Lucy, htacess file is empty, we dont have any codes nor htaccess file for this website. Also, i had a word with hosting company, but they are also saying that DNS and all other things are working fine, and they are saying to contact Google for this issue.

[keyplyr]

If the site is newish (less than 30 or 40 days online) it sometimes takes Google a couple crawls to get it indexed correctly, especially if the site does not have a significant number of backlinks.

If the site is less than a few days online, you will need to let the DNS info propagate around to all the name servers... usually within 72 hours but occasionally longer

If your server is returning a 404 Not Found error, then your default index.php is configured improperly. You may need to set it as default.

I looked at your meta tags and your title tag is correct so Google should eventually get it correct.

[Robert Charlton]

How it could possible that website is hacked, only the home page is issue is there, all the inner pages are opening from Google search. If it was hacked that whole website wouldn't open from google search. What i will do is I need to check 404 for this website....

Irshad, there are a huge number of variations that hackers will use to hijack a site, and the uses they will then make of the site (or the page), but basic to most of them is that the results are cloaked for Googlebot, so the cause of the problem won't be visible to the site owner.

I would completely trust aakk9999's observations. While they may not tell the whole story, she is meticulously accurate in observing and reporting details.

Briefly for now as it's late at night, I recommend that you or your designer try a few things to find out very basically what's going on...

- Use a user agent switcher like [web-sniffer.net...] to view your site both as seen by Googlebot and also as seen by a non-Googlebot user agent (eg, web-sniffer's own user agent). Note that the captcha on web-sniffer is a nightmare, and will require some persistence to use. Check out what's been described by aakk9999, and do an inspection of your site.


- To see if your content has been hijacked... select a string of about 10 or 12 words or so that are unique to your home page, put them in quotes, and search for the text both on Google and on Bing.

Choose the string so it more or less makes sense... ie, search a full clause if you can. Bing won't be affected by any cloaking for Googlebot, so likely will show your site, as well other sites using that content.

A hacker who has scraped your content and re-used it on a hacked site might change your company name... so choose text strings with and without your own company name in them, and compare those results.

Note that if a site has scraped your content, it might very well be a hacked site whose purpose is to serve up malware, and you should be very wary about exploring it. You should, though, do a screen capture of it in the serps, along with the search terms, as documentation of the issue.

Note also that some scraped results can be obscured by cookies

Let us know what you find.

[3zero]

Maybe inner pages were not ranking well enough and home page was the one that bothered someone... who knows.

But it is very easy to put the following in .htaccess or in a script on the server that responds to your request:

IF the request is for the home page
AND the referrer is google
RESPOND with 404 Not Found

I can confirm this is the problem, I did a quick test of your site and there is indeed a script on your server that is responding to both the user agent and the referrer for both Google and Bing. The script may be in the vhost config if htaccess is blank but its definitely there. It called also be a php script. At this point I would say you have been compromised and to move to a new server.

[Irshad]

I will look into the vhost config with the help of my developer and will update you soon, regarding that, thanks for your help bro.