Lost all homepage rankings overnight.

Basically I'm using Squarespace, and because Squarespace is a pain in the behind for SEO, it forces you to create 2 homepage URLs.

These were both showing up for the keyword I'm trying to rank for on Google, and I didn't want to run into duplicate content issues so I wanted to solve it. So I decided to add a canonical tag pointing to the one I wanted to show up on the SERPs.

The problem is, I found out later that Squarespace AUTOMATICALLY adds a canonical tag to one of them

Also both these pages are controlled by the same "settings" section on the CMS.

So I essentially had 2 canonical tags on both pages, pointing to one of them.

So I think this threw Googlebot on a loop, sort of like a redirect loop and caused all my rankings to disappear.

Within a day, my rankings went from 12 all the way to 70. I immediately removed the canonical tag and re-indexed and crawled the pages on search console.

It then went to rank 50 after a day or two, and now it's disappeared completely off the Search Console data for my target keyword, and that hasn't changed for a month. This all happened in April 3rd.

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It's still ranking for related keywords, so it's not like it disappeared completely and isn't able to be indexed. It just disappeared for my main one which I was ranking 12 for.

I'm not sure what to do. Do I just let it sit for longer? What should my course of action be?

Does anyone else have any experience with something like this, or a redirect loop perhaps?

submitted by /u/iLoveMeatballz
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/gbeuck/lost_all_homepage_rankings_overnight/>