Banned from SERPs after non-payment of AdWords Invoice

[neen]

I've just been contacted by a new client who wanted to know why his website no longer appears in Google, since about a month ago. I've done in-depth analysis of his Webmaster Tools account and there are NO manual penalties. His link profile looks more than fine, with no spammy inbound links. The only thing he says has changed is that he didn't pay his AdWords invoice for a month. The invoice has since been settled but since then his website actually does NOT appear in Google at all. If you search for site:domainname.com it comes back with no results.

Anyone else heard of this happening?

[jakebohall]

I have not heard of this happening. Have you reviewed analytics to determine organic traffic from Google in the past? Just wanting to confirm that they were in fact indexed and receiving traffic historically.

If they were, and the theory is consistent, then post a screenshot from GA showing the traffic disappearing on a date corresponding with their non-payment...

[jakebohall]

One other question... what was the experience with adwords? Did he have consistent issues with ads being denied? What industry is this?

Just wondering if there may be something else at play as well.

[neen]

Yes the site was established in 2007 and had been receiving organic traffic since then. Here's a screenshot showing the info you have requested [linkbrightmedia.com...]

[jakebohall]

Is that image isolated to Google organic?

Does the site appear in Bing?

I'm afraid without more detail I can't do much to troubleshoot further? Would you be okay to dm the url?

[RhinoFish]

Never heard of this, the legal implications and the separation I've seen over the years between Paid and Organic there, suggest to me that the non-payment is not the reason.

The site: operator suggests it's not ranking, but de-indexing. Check robots.txt and metatags on the site. Yes, I know you said you looked thru GWT in-depth, so I'm reaching here for sure.

(Re)check the Google Index, Crawl, Security Issues tabs in GWT?

[not2easy]

Is this an ecommerce site? It is possible they could be affected by recent SHA-1 security changes that millions are unaware of. Just another possibility.

[neen]

jakebohall,
I've never done much with other search engines but just searched for the domain name in Bing and Yahoo and getting pretty much the same results (practically none) which I hadn't expected to see. I've sent you the domain name, thanks for taking a look.

RhinoFish,
I've already used Google's fetch tool and all the site pages are fetched no problem at all. The sitemap is up to date and the robots file is only disallowing a couple of directories for js files and other things it shouldn't index. I've checked all the other tabs in GWT and can't see anything wrong at all. The strange thing is that I only see 10 incoming links (and there are a couple of article directories here but those directories have still got high PR, they're not banned) whereas other tools like ahrefs.com are showing around 70 inbound links (not at all new links).

not2easy,
No it's not an ecommerce site. The client deals with yachts and moorings so it focuses on providing information and relies on people picking up the phone to call. The site has duplicate meta descriptions but that's easy to fix (this is a new client so will fix in the next couple of days) and certainly wouldn't result in being deindexed.

Thanks for your ideas everyone

[neen]

jakebohall,
Sorry I missed your 2nd question. There were no issues with the AdWords campaign at all - this is the yachting niche and the person who set up the campaign in question targeted horribly generic keywords like 'buy boats' which would obviously cost a fortune. The client wasn't aware of this second AdWords account and so couldn't figure out where the invoices were coming from - so eventually paid 4 weeks late.

I'm wondering if he re-enables the campaign with some long tail keywords it might put the account back in good standing with Google and what seems to be an invisible penalty will be removed. Just guessing here.

[jakebohall]

Poster submitted URL via DM and I took a look... responding here to update the thread.

There are many pages of the site still indexed, but not the homepage. This confirmed there wasn't some sweeping action against the site. After noticing that most of the pages that were indexed were .pdf files, I checked the robots.txt and confirmed that the pages were not being blocked. I then checked the meta tags on the site, and see that a NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW is present throughout all the pages of the site.

Neen, fix this tag and the site should start popping back into the SERPS.

[neen]

jakebohall,
Yes there are PDFs indexed but no standard pages. I'm astonished at the noindex, nofollow meta which is really hidden away. It's a WordPress site with no SEO plugins and as such you cannot even set the index status. I've just been digging around and someone's actually put this code in the site template files. Very strange. I'm feeling rather foolish that I overlooked this but very grateful that you took the time to have a look. Mystery solved. Thank you so much for your help.

[jakebohall]

:) Happy SEOing!

[RhinoFish]

"Check robots.txt and metatags on the site."

Yep, told ya. :-)

I've seen this many times with Word Press!

[not2easy]

It's a WordPress site with no SEO plugins and as such you cannot even set the index status.

I do not use very many plugins, but because it allows you to set index status and choose which URLs to show in your sitemaps and a few other useful features, I use Yoast's SEO plugin. Yes, you can set up a canonical metatag instead, but because the content is identical, I prefer to index only one version for each page and post rather than have "index, follow" metatags on /2012/page6 and /category/page6 and /tags/page6 which are all the same page. The content can still be found using search at any of those URLs but only one version is indexed.

[neen]

not2easy,
there's been no SEO done on the site yet and because there were no SEO plugins I knew that normally nothing ever sets NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW without this. Interesting update: the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW was actually set in one of the CORE WordPress files. Apparently this was done by someone who purposely ruined a few other things for this client so it looks like sabotage.

[not2easy]

Check first in your "Settings > Reading" area, there is a little checkbox there near the bottom of the page to ask robots not to crawl. Look for

Search Engine Visibility [] Discourage search engines from indexing this site

It is often checked on during development and then unchecked when ready for a site to go live.

[neen]

not2easy I've already fixed it thanks, it was someone putting some code into one of the WP core files directly - this wasn't an admin setting at all.