Google search issue with exact domain
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We had a site from Feb-2011 to Nov-2011 at the domain amcoexterminating.com. The site was pure HTML/CSS and the daily unique visitors steadily increased over that time. So all was fine.
We then moved the site to a CMS (Joomla) on Dec. 6th. From that day forward, the daily visitors went into the tank.
Before the move, if you typed "amcoexterminating.com" or "amco exterminating" into Google search, the site would be the first result (as you'd expect since those are the words that make up the actua domain). But we tried this yesterday and the site did not come up at all. NOT GOOD. It would work in Yahoo or Bing, but not in Google. So obviously, the problem with Google search directly affected the daily visitors.
We just checked Webmaster tools yesterday (yes, this should have been done sooner, lesson learned) and it said "Site has severe health issues - Important page blocked by robots.txt". It listed the "important" page URL and it was just a link to an image. Regardless, I wiped out the Joomla created robots.txt file and added a new one and made it just say...
User-agent: *Allow: /
About 14 hours later, after the new robots.txt file was recognized by Google, the "severe health" message went away. However if I search in Google for "amcoexterminating.com", it still doesn't show up and the client is concerned (as they should be).
Do you think the search engines just need more time to refresh? If so, once it refreshes, should the site show up first again right away?
Or is it possible the robots.txt file had nothing to do with the issue? If so, what other things could I check into that might cause Google search to not find a site even if you search for exact domain name?
Please share any and all things I should look into as I need to get this site showing in Google search again (as it was before moving to the CMS).
Thanks!
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Sorry I never replied...It all looks good now.
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Hi Rob,
How are things going on this site? Are your rankings back, or are you still looking for some help?
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Yes thats all you needed to do.
it should come back, with ine a few weeks
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Update: I found this code in my htaccess file...
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
So I commented it out like so..
#Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
And resaved it.
I imagine this is all I needed to do. If you think I should have done something else, please let me know.
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Thanks Robert, the answer to your two "Edit" questions is Yes (htaccess.txt was renamed to .htaccess and "seo friendly URLs" was selected as YES).
It makes sense that what Alan suspects is my main problem (i.e. there is a no-index, no-follow on the homepage) so I'm hoping he can point me in the right direction to correct it. If you know and see my reply before he does, please let me know
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Thanks for the heads up on the canonical issues, will correct that.
As for this X-robots header, do you know where I can find that code to either change the no-index, no-follow to index, follow, or delete it completely? I tried to view what you said in IE, but when I click F12, the window that pops up doesn't have a "Networks" tab.
I am searching my site files for X-robots header and can't find this area, so if you could give me any insight on correcting this, I would be very appreciative. If that is the problem (and I trust that it is), I really gotta get it fixed ASAP
Side note you may not know: If I correct the X-robots header to be index, follow, should the site start showing up again in Google results immediately or could it take longer?
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Rob, you have a problem. Or two.
First, somehow your images files are showing up and I believe this is causing a duplicate content issue. If I were to guess, I would say that you are new to joomla and may have set something up incorrectly. Without seeing your Joomla dashboard, it is hard to say exactly what is going on though.
When you do a Site:www.amcoexterminating.com or Site:amcoexterminating.com you get mostly images and pdfs. You also see excluded content and when you click on it you see the same.
The only site url that is not a pdf is http://www.amcoexterminating.com/images/ so Google is not seeing any other url. This is due to Robots.txt or bad site map, Joomla settings that control these, etc.
I wish I could be of more help, but without seeing what the settings are in the dashboard, I cannot find the issue (using firebug, etc.).
Best
Edit: Alan has some good info in his response. Also, in Joomla on the Global Configuration there is an SEO Settings near top on right. Within that is a selection for Use Apache mod_rewrite if you selected this did you rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before you activated this?
Above it is a selection for search engine friendly urls, have you selected that? -
No I cant see one image blocked being the problem, you should not block images, js or css files that are used on pages that are not blocked, it is not a problem alone, but if there are any other signals of spam, then the fact that you hide these files is then seen as a suspicious signal.
I am not a fan of CMS, as they do not write clean code. I had a look at your site and found many problems. The worst is canonical issues, you home page rank is split between
http://www.amcoexterminating.com/index.php
http://www.amcoexterminating.com
http://amcoexterminating.com/index.php
http://amcoexterminating.comYou need to fix your canonical issues.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issuesbut the reason you cant find your page in Google is you have a X-robots header of no-index, no-follow. You have a index, follow meta tag, but the header must be overruling it.
If you want to see this for yourself. in IE press F12, select the network tab and start capturing. Load your home page, then click on the home page url in the results and select response headers.
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