Homepage was removed from google and got deranked

[Christian_T]

Hello experts

I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back.

It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist.

4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk".

Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk".

At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better.  Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page.

After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image.

Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all?

For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results

[Christian_T]

Hi Everett

First of all I am sorry for the late reply, I was vacationing the last 7 days.

Thank you for your reply. I think you might be right about the "sandbox" thing. The page had a good position in the google search results, but then we made a mistake and canonicalized it to a non-existent page for 4 months. It could be that google considers it a "new page", even though they had it indexed for a year.

I appreciate your efforts, and I will wait some time, to see if it improves by itself, otherwise I will have to work some more on improving the contents of the site.

[Everett]

Hi Christian,

I don't see any evidence of the site being deindexed now. Here are some things I checked for you, along with a few observations:

• Nothing in the Robots.txt file, or robots meta tag, or X-robots HTTP header response that would keep these pages from being indexed by Google

• The rel= canonical tags appear to be functioning properly

• The home page is indexed and not duplicated by other indexed pages

• Google has about 86 pages indexd from your domain

• Hrefl Lang tags appear to be implemented properly

• There are only about 50 links going into the domain from other sites, and the ones from Moz are the best of what few aren't just random scraper sites (harmless, but annoying).

Sometimes Google ranks a brand higher when it first comes out because it's a chicken or egg situation. How else can they collect data for their machine to chew on unless some traffic is sent to a new site? We used to call this phenomenon "the Google sandbox" a long time ago, but it is essentially (in its effect) the same thing. We do it ourselves with A:B testing and paid advertising. You have to spend some budget to gain enough data to know what's working and what isn't.

I don't think you have a technical SEO problem here. I think you need to continue building a brand and producing useful, rich content. Good luck!

[Christian_T]

Hi Ross

Thank you a lot for all the recommendations, I will get those things done and get back on here with the result.

Though currently I have the Yoast SEO plugin, and have generated a sitemap with only the pages we want ranking, which I did already upload to GSC, but I will make sure there is a link in the footer as well.

And also I did a 301 redirect on all these "attachment" pages, but I will change that to a 410.

[RossKernez]

Hi Christian,

Try to update your home page by adding additional content to it or rewriting the existing content on the home page. Do not forget to reindex the home page after your update. In addition, you should install the Rank Math SEO plugin and regenerate the sitemap. Once, you have a new sitemap then you should resubmit the sitemap to GSC. You should only keep the URLs in the sitemap, but no images. If you want to remove some of your pages from the index you should set those pages to 410 Gone instead of 404 status. Also, I do not see that you have a link to your sitemap on your home page. You should add a link to the sitemap into your footer.

Ross