Two days ago I was making my regular internal and client SERPS check and my company’s page was no where to be found. I pretty much had to perform the search 10 times to believe my eyes.
Now, we averaged at about SERP #3 and #5 for the term “Web Marketing” on Google.pt, as for “Web Design” we tend to rank#11.
Upon further research, I realized that my internal pages were showing up as usual, maintaining a steady rank for the usual keywords that they were ranking for.
By searching for the company name itself (easylogics), I realized that the root page of my domain had simply been removed from the index, leaving the first result as the https://www.easylogics.com
By now, everything was going through my mind. Could it have been too many inbounds at a short period of time? (Although this was very unlikely as I was very cautious not to link build too aggressively)
Although I do tend to venture off to rather gray waters at times, I do not subscribe to any SEO Black hat techniques whatsoever.
1. No hidden text on any of the pages
2. No Keyword dumping in the ATL tags or anywhere else in the pages
3. No Duplicate content – Even the print version of the site used nofollow
4. No Reciprocal links
5. No purchased links. (well..at least no too many 
)
6. No sneaky javascript redirects or anaythung remotely similar
7. No unrelated outbound links
Basically no misdoing was going on. So I began looking for answers somewhere else. Why were our first results replaced with the exact same page but with the HTTPS?
I believe that Goole somewhat favours HTTPS pages in detriment to regular pages. I haven’t read or had any proof of this beyond what happened to me, but it does make sense.
An HTTPS page is a secure page that not only provides a safe way for the user to interact with the web platform, but it usually also assures a bigger degree of veracity regarding to the website itself.
Disclaimer
Now, in all honesty it is impossible to assure that any of the actions that I took had any influence at all in the resolution of my problem. Nevertheless, it was quite a coincidence that everything went back to normal after the last time crawl seeing has it had been crawled 3 times before I made the changes though any improvement in my situation.
1. Prevent Google from indexing your HTTPS pages
One of the other issues I was facing was a potential Duplicate content problem caused by a mistake of my doing.
If you have HTTPS enabled, it might be a good idea to mess around with your Robots.txt file and disallow Google from crawling these pages. Additionally a no-follow should be implemented on the Meta-tags.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
Example of a Robots.txt disallowing HTTPS indexing
User-agent: *
Disallow:/https:/
Also, if you use Sitemaps, remember to remove the HTTPS links from the XML file.
Remember, and HTTPS version is treated as an independent page, even tough the content is the same as in the regular HTTPS version.
Google FAQ – HTTP V.s HTTPS
2. Chose your preferred URL format
Making life easer for the Google Bot may actually help you. Now please notice that this is highly speculative, and there might not be a direct correlation between this and the problem it self, however, I find it logical that the easier you make your site to crawl the better it get’s crawled!
Login to your Web Master Central account, and on the diagnosis tab select “Preferred domain”, chose the domain format that you would like Google to display on your Results page.
3. Resubmit your Sitemap
Even if no changes were done to the XML file, resubmit it.
Try to be patient and wait
Easier said that done, I know! Just try and wait out for 24 hours.
My guess is, if within these 24 hours your site was crawled and nothing changed, none of the above had any effect.
