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Correlation does not equal causation. Your ranking do not drop just because you have a security component installed. In fact, the same kind of anecdotal evidence shows that this isn't even remotely close to the truth! Our own site has been using Admin Tools since before we officially released it (around June 2010) and even before that we were using the same .htaccess file the .htaccess Maker generates since 2009. As you can easily observe our rankings on the specific keywords we're interested in are very high, have remained high (or improved over the years) and Google loves us, scanning our site for new content several times every day.

Are you sure you're not affected by the changes in Google's search ranking algorithm? For example, over the last few months Google has dropped the rankings for:

• Slow loading sites (loading slower than 70% in the same business sector, as detected by Google)
• Non-HTTPS sites (if you are using plain HTTP Google considers your site a risky, low quality affair and penalises you)
• Sites with mobile-friendliness issues (check Google Webmaster Tools)
• Sites with keyword-bait pages (pages not linked from any other page on the site, containing keywords not found anywhere else on the site, designed to trick users into visiting your site)

And that's just the last four months. In pretty straightforward terms, as long as you regularly produce fresh content written by actual humans on a fairly fast loading, mobile-friendly site without gray-hat and black-hat SEO practices Google loves you and ranks you high. If you let your content rot, engage in algorithmic content generation, have a slow site, a non-mobile-friendly site, non-HTTPS site or employ typical gray-hat and black-hat SEO techniques Google will screw you because you're hurting their business model.

Did you notice a pattern here? Admin Tools has nothing to do with it. It's all about content.

Are you doing something which actively blocks GoogleBot?

For example, are you blocking site access by user agent using .htaccess Maker? Pay extra attention to NOT include GoogleBot.

Also, have you enabled "Block template=foo site template switch" but not "Allow site templates"? As written in the documentation (read it, I didn't write it for myself!) about this latter option if you don't enable the email links of articles will result in security exceptions. Since these links lack the nofollow attribute GoogleBot will follow them, get blocked and be unable to scan your site.

It's easy to figure out IF and WHY GoogleBot is blocked on your site. Use Google Webmaster Tools to see IF there are scan errors. If you get a lot of 403s collate these blocks with the Security Exceptions Log in Admin Tools to see WHY it got blocked. Then you can take corrective actions.

But before doing anything else please DO read the documentation. There's a very good reason I wrote a small book of documentation instead of just giving you a piece of software without further explanation. If you don't understand how the software works and what each option does there's no chance you can troubleshoot your problem, not to mention that you might get a false sense of security due to false assumptions about what the software is or should be doing.