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Errors In Search Console
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 Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks 
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 Nope, sorry, that site doesn't have Jetpack installed. 
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 Checked the xmlroc file and it was identical to a new download. Fetch as Googlebot returns an almost instant error message. 
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 Did the error come up again on console? I would recommend resubmitting the site after fixing the errors and wait for some time. 
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 Unfortunately this did not work. I am absolutely baffled by it. Siteground (the hosts) dont have a clue either. 
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 Thanks Vijay, Yes my thought was that would be the killer for the site. Thanks for the link, i will check it out. Thanks Dale 
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 Hi There, The problem with the errors that appeared in the Google Console might be due to wordpress. But the errors would have made the content and structure of the website look very different or even not available for the bots. You should focus on fixing the following error and re-submit the site. xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 A possible solution might be available here https://mobilunity.com/q-n-a/how-to-fix-error-405-in-xmlrpc-php/ Regards, Vijay 
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