Our stat counter went from a prior day average of over 800 hits per day, to 45 per day,
in a single day. The first thing I did was put the search - history of mecca - into Google, and found that our home page had gone from page 1/result 1 rankings, to not being at least in the first 10 pages I checked.
Then it occurred to me to try the URL in the Google tester for mobile friendliness.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/When that returned a "search did not return URL" message, which had formerly been "Awsome! Your website is mobile friendly.", I was convinced that Google had removed the site for some nefarious reason. That led me to making a false accusation of exactly that, and Google, I am very sorry and apologize for having done so.
At long last, I found a link to a Google forum to ask why we were dropped, and the person that responded said we weren't, and that it looked like a server problem at our host. After some checking I found that he was exactly right.
However the person that responded gave me
this link suggesting that the site was still indexed with Google. I only visited the link today to find that it seems
Google may indeed have dropped the site, but because of the host server error, since only a couple of back pages appear at that link which alleges they are listed in order of the most important. The list of two doesn't include the home page at all, even though 95% of the over 800 hits per day were to the home page, which explains the collapse. Also confirming that Google's equipment did indeed drop the link from their search engine.
HistoryOfMecca had ranked page 1 result 1 on Google, Yahoo,
Bing,
Duckduckgo and
Dogpile. It still does on the last 3 (as those links attest), but our Yahoo rankings disappeared apparently in sympathy with Google's having disappeared it.
Unlike Google, at least the home page link still
exists on Yahoo with a specific URL search.
At this point it appears that Google did drop the home page of the site, but because of the server problem, and I pray that the site hasn't been set back years in page rank as a result.
