Why isn't google indexing our site?
-
Hi,
We have majorly redesigned our site. Is is not a big site it is a SaaS site so has the typical structure, Landing, Features, Pricing, Sign Up, Contact Us etc...
The main part of the site is after login so out of google's reach.
Since the new release a month ago, google has indexed some pages, mainly the blog, which is brand new, it has reindexed a few of the original pages I am guessing this as if I click cached on a site: search it shows the new site.
All new pages (of which there are 2) are totally missed. One is HTTP and one HTTPS, does HTTPS make a difference.
I have submitted the site via webmaster tools and it says "URL and linked pages submitted to index" but a site: search doesn't bring all the pages?
What is going on here please? What are we missing? We just want google to recognise the old site has gone and ALL the new site is here ready and waiting for it.
Thanks
Andrew
-
Well, links/shares are good. But of course I'm just begging the question of how you can get those.
Rand gave a great talk called "Inbound Marketing for Startups" at a Hackers & Founders meetup that was focused more on Inbound as a whole than SEO in particular, but it's full of valuable insights: http://vimeo.com/39473593 [video]
Ultimately it'll come down to some kind of a publishing/promotional strategy for your startup. Sometimes your startup is so unique/interesting that it has its own marketing baked right in - in which case you can get a lot of traction by simply doing old-school PR to get your startup in front of the right people.
Other times, you've got to build up links/authority on the back of remarkable marketing.
BufferApp is a great example of a startup that built traction off their blog. Of course, they weren't necessarily blogging as an SEO play - it was more in the aim of getting directly in front of the right audience for direct signups for their product. But they definitely built up some domain authority as a result.
I'd also take a look at the guides Mailchimp has created - they created the dual benefit of getting in front of the right audience in a positive/helpful way (which benefits the brand and drives sign-ups directly) as well as building a considerable number of inbound links, boosting their domain authority overall.
Unfortunately no quick/easy ways to build your domain authority, but things you do to build your authority can also get you immediately in front of the audience you're looking for - and SEO just becomes a lateral benefit to that.
-
Thank you all for your responses. It is strange. we are going to add a link to our g+ page and then add a post.
As a new site what is the best way to get our domain authority up so we get crailed quicker?
Thanks again
Andrew
-
I disagree. Unless the old pages have inbound links from external sites, there's not much reason to 301 them (and not much benefit). If they're serving up 404 errors, they will fall out of the index.
Google absolutely does have a way to know these new pages exist - by crawling the home page and following the links discovered there. Both of the pages in question are linked to prominently, particularly the Features page which is part of the main navigation. A sitemap is just an aid for this process - it can help move things along and help Google find otherwise obscure/deep pages, but it by no means is a necessity for getting prominent pages indexed, particularly pages that are 1-2 levels down from the home page.
-
If you didn't redirect the old URLs to the new ones when the new site went live, this will absolutely be the cause of your problem, Studio33. That, combined with having no (or misdirected) sitemap means there was essentially no way for Google to even know your site's pages existed.
Good catch Billy.
-
Hi Andrew,
-
Google has been indexing HTTPS URLs for years now without a problem, so is unlikely to be part of the issue.
-
Your domain authority on the whole may be slowing Google down in indexing new pages. Bottom line is crawl rate and depth are both functions of how authoritative/important you appear based on links/shares/etc.
-
That said, I don't see any indication as to why these two particular pages are not being indexed by Google. I'm a bit stumped here.
I see some duplication between your Features page and your Facebook timeline, but not with the invoice page.
As above, your domain authority (17) is a bit on the low side. So this could simply be a matter of Google not dedicating enough resources to crawl/index all of your pages yet. But why these two pages would be the only ones is perplexing, particularly after a full month. There are no problems with your Robots.txt, no canonical tag issues, the pages are linked to properly.
Wish I had an easy answer here. One idea, a bit of a long shot: we've seen Google index pages faster when they're linked to from Google+ posts. I see you have a Google+ business page for this website - you might try simply writing a (public) post there that includes a link over to the Features page.
As weak as that is, that's all I've got.
Best of Luck,
Mike -
-
OK - I would get a list of all of your old pages and start 301 redirecting them to your new pages asap. This could be part of your issue.
-
Hi checked XML, its there if you view source it just doesn't have a stylesheet
-
Hi thanks about 1 month. The blog page you are getting maybe the old ones,as they are working this end http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog . What you have mentioned re the blog is part of the problem. Google has the old site and not the new.
-
Getting this on your Blog pages:
The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.
where you aware?
Anyway - may I ask how old these pages are?
-
Thanks. I will look into the sitemap. That only went live about an hour ago whilst this thread has been going on.
-
Yeah - with no path specified the directive is ignored. (you don't have a '/' so the directive (disallow) is ignored)
however, you do direct to your xml sitemap which appears to be empty. You might want to fix that....
-
Hi no I think its fine as we do not have the forward slash after the disallow. See
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
I wish it was as simple as that. Thanks for your help though its appreciated.
-
Hmmm. That link shows that the way you have it will block all robots.
-
Thanks but I think Robots.txt is correct. Excert from http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
To exclude all robots from the entire server
User-agent: * Disallow: /
To allow all robots complete access
User-agent: * Disallow:
(or just create an empty "/robots.txt" file, or don't use one at all)
-
It looks like your robots.txt file is the problem. http://www.invoicestudio.com/robots.txt has:
User-agent: * Disallow: When it should be:
User-agent: *
Allow: / -
Hi,
The specific pages are
https://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate
http://www.invoicestudio.com/Features
I'm not sure what other pages are not indexed.
New site has been live 1 month.
Thanks for your help
Andrew
-
Without seeing the specific pages i cant check for things such as noindex tags or robot text blocking access, i would suggest you double check these aspects. The pages will need to be accesible to Search engines when they crawl your site, so if there are no links to those pages Google will be unable to access them.
How long have they been live since the site re-launch as it may just be that they have not been crawled yet, particuarly if they are deeper pages within your site hierarchy.
Heres a link to Googles resources on crawling and indexing sites incase you have not been able to check through them yet.
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
-
Staging website got indexed by google
Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta0 -
Site shows up after re-indexing, then disappears.
I have a site, natvest.com, with which I sell real estate in Alabama and Georgia. I need to show up in an "Alabama Land for Sale" search. Same thing for Georgia. If I re-index my site, I show up for roughly one day, before disappearing again. Happens every time I re-index. Ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | natvest0 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
How to make Google index your site? (Blocked with robots.txt for a long time)
The problem is the for the long time we had a website m.imones.lt but it was blocked with robots.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
But after a long time we want Google to index it. We unblocked it 1 week or 8 days ago. But Google still does not recognize it. I type site:m.imones.lt and it says it is still blocked with robots.txt What should be the process to make Google crawl this mobile version faster? Thanks!0 -
Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
Hey all - I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address. I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses. An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all. Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated. http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AtticusBerg10 -
Site Structure: How do I deal with a great user experience that's not the best for Google's spiders?
We have ~3,000 photos that have all been tagged. We have a wonderful AJAXy interface for users where they can toggle all of these tags to find the exact set of photos they're looking for very quickly. We've also optimized a site structure for Google's benefit that gives each category a page. Each category page links to applicable album pages. Each album page links to individual photo pages. All pages have a good chunk of unique text. Now, for Google, the domain.com/photos index page should be a directory of sorts that links to each category page. Alternatively, the user would probably prefer the AJAXy interface. What is the best way to execute this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tatermarketing0 -
Why did this website disappear from Google's SERPs?
For the first several months this website, WEBSITE, ranked well in Google for several local search terms like, "Columbia MO spinal decompression" and "Columbia, MO car accident therapy." Recently the website has completely disappeared from Google's SEPRs. It does not even exist when I copy and paste full paragraphs into Google's search bar. The website still ranks fine in Bing and Yahoo, but something happened that caused it to be removed from Google. Beside for optimizing the meta data, adding headers, alt tags, and all of the typical on-page SEO stuff, we did create a guest post for a relevant, local blog. Here is the post: Guest Post. The post's content is 100% unique. I realize the post has way to many internal/external links, which we definitely did not recommend, but can anyone find a reason why this website was removed from Google's SERPs? And possibly how we should go about getting it back into Google's SERPs? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VentaMarketing0 -
My Job Site is having Indexing Issues
I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0