Homepage/Root domain de-indexed by Google
-
This morning I discovered that the homepage/root domain of our company site, http://www.collegeplus.org/, has been de-indexed by Google and Bing. Out IT dept. is claiming it's our fault because we changed the meta title on our homepage. But they will not give me access to GWT to see if there's any issues.
I believe the issue lies within our robots.txt file - http://www.collegeplus.org/robots.txt
I also don't believe we're suffering a penalty because all of our tier 2 pages are still indexed when any type of branded search is performed. We don't do things that can get a site de-indexed like this.
Any ideas on what the issue may be? Or at least something to convince our IT dept. that simply changing a meta title won't get your homepage totally de-indexed? Thanks.
-
When I was in a similar situation where I didn't have the best of relations with the development company, I used Pole Position's free Code Monitor (https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php) to check the robots.txt files of the live site and any development sites/subdomains on a daily basis. I'd get an email if anything had changed, so I could go to the dev company right away and try to mitigate any problems.
-
Hi Keri. Thank you for the info, I wasn't aware of the view only option. I'll send this post to our IT Director. Appreciate your help! Have a great weekend.
-
So sorry to hear about the battles going on. I've seen some of those, and they're no fun.
One thing that may be of help: last month Google rolled out new user access to GWT, including a way to let view without changing any settings (Barry Schwartz writes about it at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-users-14838.html). Is there a chance IT would let your team have a read-only view if you let them know it was now available?
-
Hi Dan. Greatly appreciate your response and insights. I think you've completely identified the issue(s). Basically from a technical SEO perspective our site is a trainwreck hit by a nuclear bomb. The battle between IT and my marketing department rages on, making it really difficult to get anything fixed. There's some politics at play that won't get solved here
Anyway, many thanks for your help on this. We'll try again tomorrow.
-
Hi David
First off (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here) but that's completely silly they won't let you look at WMT!! Seriously?! You're not going to BREAK anything just by looking!!
Arggg...
OK... now that we got that out. Let me give you some ideas.
- The homepage is missing from the sitemap - http://www.collegeplus.org/googlesitemap
- Also, shouldn't the sitemap end in .xml - as in /googlesitemap.xml ?
- The worst is I think what you point out from robots.txt - **Disallow: /.php$* Isn't this asking it to block all pages with the file extension .php??? IF so... your homepage does load with the php extension - http://www.collegeplus.org/index.php
- In general, Google's preferred method of keeping pages out of the index is with a meta robots noindex tag - as opposed to the robots.txt
- ALSO - look at this site search - **over 27,000 pages indexed for /**events?state - i'd say not good!\
- You're not using any canonical tags
- The homepage is NOT indexed in Bing either.
- The robots.txt file does look more messed up the more I look at it - for example they're blocking a forums subfolder, yet none exists on the site. It sits on a subdomain, and is still in the index as you can see here
So there's a lot going on here, and anything could be contributing to the deindexation of your homepage. But I'm <sarcasm>pretty sure</sarcasm> its not your title tags.
Hope that helps get you in the right direction. Either way you've got some on-site stuff to clean up.
-Dan
PS - Meant to say, on a happier note, it was nice to meet you at LinkLove Boston
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
De-indexing and SSL question
Few days ago Google indexed hundreds of my directories by mistake (error with plugins/host), my traffic dropped as a consequence. Anyway I fixed that and submitted a URL removal request. Now just waiting things to go back to normality. Meantime I was supposed to move my website to HTTPS this week. Question: Should I wait until this indexing error has been fixed or I may as well go ahead with the SSL move?
Technical SEO | | fabx0 -
Recover google INdexing issue after fixing malware attack.
Dear My Niche site attacked by malware on 1 st march 2018. Hacker inject a php file on my blogpage. Injected link like: mydomain.com/blog/dmy4xa.php? Then I scan My site by wordfence. Identifying all malware code.Then manually clean whole site with database. My site is completely free from malware. and remove all malware link from webmaster tools. Even Block my blog page by robots.txt . But new malware link index every week. So i need to remove those link every week. So this issue I decided to rebuild my site. Finally I rebuild my site another server. Then I flash my current server and migrate my site from those server on 10th january 2019 . I wait 1 month to deindex malware link. But new link are indexing every week. I discourage site for over 1 week and even delete site from google webmaster tools with all properties as well as verification file from server. Over 1 week , Link are showing. I feel boar to delete malware link every week. I need permanent solution. Please give me a perfect solution for this malware link index. Google index about 100 url .After that I clean my site with some tools. My site was free from malware. But Ne
Technical SEO | | Gfound1230 -
Need Help On Proper Steps to Take To De-Index Our Search Results Pages
So, I have finally decided to remove our Search Results pages from Google. This is a big dealio, but our traffic has consistently been declining since 2012 and it's the only thing I can think of. So, the reason they got indexed is back in 2012, we put linked tags on our product pages, but they linked to our search results pages. So, over time we had hundreds of thousands of search results pages indexed. By tag pages I mean: Keywords: Kittens, Doggies, Monkeys, Dog-Monkeys, Kitten-Doggies Each of these would be linked to our search results pages, i.e. http://oursite.com/Search.html?text=Kitten-Doggies So, I really think these pages being indexed are causing much of our traffic problems as there are many more Search Pages indexed than actual product pages. So, my question is... Should I go ahead and remove the links/tags on the product pages first? OR... If I remove those, will Google then not be able to re-crawl all of the search results pages that it has indexed? Or, if those links are gone will it notice that they are gone, and therefore remove the search results pages they were previously pointing to? So, Should I remove the links/tags from the product page (or at least decrease them down to the top 8 or so) as well as add the no-follow no-index to all the Search Results pages at the same time? OR, should I first no-index, no-follow ALL the search results pages and leave those tags on the product pages there to give Google a chance to go back and follow those tags to all of the Search Results pages so that it can get to all of those Search Results pages in order to noindex,. no follow them? Otherwise will Google not be able find these pages? Can someone comment on what might be the best, safest, or fastest route? Thanks so much for any help you might offer me!! Craig So, I wanted to see if you have a suggestion on the best way to handle it? Should I remove the links/tags from the product page (or at least decrease them down to the top 8 or so) as well as add the no-follow no-index to all the Search Results pages at the same time? OR, should I first no-index, no-follow ALL the search results pages and leave those tags on the product pages there to give Google a chance to go back and follow those tags to all of the Search Results pages so that it can get to all of those Search Results pages in order to noindex,. no follow them? Otherwise will Google not be able find these pages? Can you tell me which would be the best, fastest and safest routes?
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Google Indexing - what did I missed??
Hello, all SEOers~ I just renewed my web site about 3 weeks ago, and in order to preserve SEO values as much as possible, I did 301 redirect, XML Sitemap and so on for minimize the possible data losses. But the problem is that about week later from site renewal, my team some how made mistake and removed all 301 redirects. So now my old site URLs are all gone from Google Indexing and my new site is not getting any index from Google. My traffic and rankings are also gone....OMG I checked Google Webmaster Tool, but it didn't say any special message other than Google bot founds increase of 404 error which is obvious. Also I used "fetch as google bot" from webmaster tool to increase chance to index but it seems like not working much. I am re-doing 301 redirect within today, but I am not sure it means anything anymore. Any advise or opinion?? Thanks in advance~!
Technical SEO | | Yunhee.Choi0 -
Can't get Google to Index .pdf in wp-content folder
We created an indepth case study/survey for a legal client and can't get Google to crawl the PDF which is hosted on Wordpress in the wp-content folder. It is linked to heavily from nearly all pages of the site by a global sidebar. Am I missing something obvious as to why Google won't crawl this PDF? We can't get much value from it unless it gets indexed. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Here is the PDF itself:
Technical SEO | | inboundauthority
http://www.billbonebikelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Whitepaper-Drivers-vs-cyclists-Floridas-Struggle-to-share-the-road.pdf Here is the page it is linked from:
http://www.billbonebikelaw.com/resources/drivers-vs-cyclists-study/0 -
HELP: Wrong domain showing up in Google Search
So i have this domain (1)devicelock.com and i also had this other domain (2)ntutility.com, the 2nd domain was an old domain and it is not in use anymore. But when i search for devicelock on Google, the homepage devicelock.com does not exist. Only ntutility.com comes up. I asked one of the developer how the redirect is happening from the old domain to the new one and he told me its through a DNS forward. And there is no way to have an .htacess file to set up a 301 instead. Please help!
Technical SEO | | Devicelock0 -
Google Indexing
Hi Everybody, I am having kind of an issue when it comes to the results Google is showing on my site. I have a multilingual site, which is main language is Catalan. But of course if I am looking results in Spanish (google.es) or in English (google.com) I want Google to show the results with the proper URL, title and descriptions. My brand is "Vallnord" so if you type this in Google you will be displayed the result in Catalan (Which is not optimized at all yet) but if you search "vallnord.com/es" only then you will be displayed the result in Spanish What do I have to do in order for Google to read this the way I want? Regards, Guido.
Technical SEO | | SilbertAd0 -
How long does it take for Google to de-index urls?
Added the noindex meta tag to some pages on my site and I am wondering if anyone has any idea how long it will take to deindex the urls?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0