Updates / penalty / anybody's guess

[lee_sufc]

I'm stumped:

Home page usually ranks somewhere around positions 7-14 (fluctating constantly during the year) for 3-5 primary keywords.

However, the past few weeks, my traffic has fallen off a cliff. Now, for those same keywords, my homepage is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a slightly less-relevant internal page on my site ranks around pages 2-4 (started at page 4, climbed all the way to top of page two and has now dropped back to page 4!)

Is there some sort of update going on that could be affecting this? Could my home page be being penalised (despite me not changing too much recently).

Should I attempt submitting my home page to be re-crawled?

I really don't know what do to?

[NickMNS]

Is there some sort of update going on that could be affecting this?

There was a spam update announced on Nov 11. See: [twitter.com...]

Should I attempt submitting my home page to be re-crawled?

Unless you've made changes. it is not going to make a difference either way and even then Googlebot has probably already crawled your home page on its own.

[lee_sufc]

So frustrating. You try to do what's best for your visitors, while also ensuring you comply with Google's "rules" and it seems all that goes to waste. Instead, I'm seeing 5+ year old pages that haven't been updated and aren't user friendly over page one.

Each year, this just gets more and more stressful and tiring.

[airship]

I don't think you need to submit to be crawled, as it sounds like you're already indexed.

You should set your site up on "Google Search Console", this will show if Google sees any errors on your site.

Is your SSL certificate up to date and not expired? If this is expired at your hosting company this would cause an error for some browsers and cause your site to drop in search rank. Search Google for: "is my ssl certificate current" and use a site to test your website URL to see.

[lee_sufc]

No errors shown on GSC, SSL all up to date.

What's frustrating is that after the initial drop to pages 4-5, I started to increase bit by bit each day to the top of page two...I started getting my hopes up that whatever what wrong had corrected itself, and then BAM, back down again!