Our root domain is no longer appearing in search results
-
Hi all
The root domain for our site, roadtrippers.com, has been disappearing from Google's search results. Subfolders and subdomains still appear, but our root domain isn't found at all. I believe I've verified this by searching "-inurl:trips -inurl:byways -inurl:support -inurl:blog -inurl:places -inurl:guides -inurl:destinations site:https://roadtrippers.com/" in Google and our root domain is nowhere to be found.
This may or may not be related to another issue we've had, where the root domain is appearing with a seemingly rotating set of parameters. Sometimes it'll be ?mod=, sometimes it'll be ?tag=translation. Originally they appeared to simply displace our ranking root domain, but now they and our root domain are completely disappearing. Our dev team believes they fixed the problem with recent 301 tags to any unapproved parameter being added to the root domain, but this hasn't fixed the original problem.
Any insight into this is greatly appreciated!
Brandon
-
Wow. Definitely a hard lesson in checking the obvious, eh?
Thanks everybody. Total oversight not to even bother checking what I never considered to be an issue. Now to go talk to our dev team to figure out how this even got in...
Thanks again everybody!
-
ha! Silly me. That's what I get for not taking time and jumping to conclusions.
I'll blame the head cold I'm currently battling on a dreary Monday
in other words - yeah definitely that no index tag.
-
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but I notice that the page at https://roadtrippers.com/ has the following meta tag in the header:
-
Your homepage has this meta-tag on it
name="Robots" content="noindex,follow">
Remove it and you're good to go
-
Hi Brandon,
Its probably that robots meta noindex tag you have in there!
-
Yeah I see what you mean. Just googling "roadtrippers" shows me what you're describing. Your blog seems to populate first, which sort of makes sense as it has the most content.
Beyond the redirect issues, there may be a thin-content issue going on since there really doesn't appear to be a ton on that home page. Have you tried fetching as Google to see what they're seeing? What does it look like?
This is interesting I'd like to see what other people say. Cause your site looks awesome.. now how do you get it indexed beyond the blog...
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
-
Ranking drop after sub domain to sub directory migration. Usual?
Hi all, We had our help articles on sub-domain help.website.com. Then we moved it to sub directory website.com/help/. We expected ranking improvement of website.com as there is a wide saying of benefiting from sub domain to sub directory migration. We have noticed that ranking improvement of new sub directory pages (website.com/help/) but not for any main website pages (website.com). I presume that link juice from main website has benefited new sub directory pages but main website lost ranking due to the page rank dilution. Do you agree? Any ideas? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How Google's "Temporarily remove URLs" in search console works?
Hi, We have created new sub-domain with new content which we want to highlight for users. But our old content from different sub-domain is making top on google results with reputation. How can we highlight new content and suppress old sub-domain in results? Many pages have related title tags and other information in similar. We are planing to hide URLs from Google search console, so slowly new pages will attain the traffic. How does it works?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Satisfaction survey on Google search results
Anybody else noticing Google satisfaction surveys on long-tail results? I'm only seeing it when there are no ads... 6071fb3341.png
Algorithm Updates | | Propecta1 -
Images not getting indexed in google image search :( " site: hdwallpaperzones.com " )
hi as i have mentioned in title.. my website images are not getting indexed in google image search engine.. out of 360 images only 5 got indexed from 3 days.. please help me out.. thanks
Algorithm Updates | | toxicpls0 -
Will Parked Domain hurt My SEO as Duplicate Content?
Hello, I have one website (Migration Lawyers) and I have an extra 8 domains Parked so they are basically cloning the content of the site. so if the main site is: migrationlawyers.co.za and I have an addon domain migration-lawyers.com is that good or bad? is there a proper way to redirect the sites, will redirecting (301) subdomains be more effective? Thanks for your Input 🙂 0i8VXqr.png
Algorithm Updates | | thealika0 -
Do you think Google is destroying search?
I've seen garbage in google results for some time now, but it seems to be getting worse. I was just searching for a line of text that was in one of our stories from 2009. I just wanted to check that story and I didn't have a direct link. So I did the search and I found one copy of the story, but it wasn't on our site. I knew that it was on the other site as well as ours, because the writer writes for both publications. What I expected to see was the two results, one above the other, depending on which one had more links or better on-page for the query. What I got didn't really surprise me, but I was annoyed. In #1 position was the other site, That was OK by me, but ours wasn't there at all. I'm almost used to that now (not happy about it and trying to change it, but not doing well at all, even after 18 months of trying) What really made me angry was the garbage results that followed. One site, a wordpress blog, has tag pages and category pages being indexed. I didn't count them all but my guess is about 200 results from this blog, one after the other, most of them tag pages, with the same content on every one of them. Then the tag pages stopped and it started with dated archive pages, dozens of them. There were other sites, some with just one entry, some with dozens of tag pages. After that, porn sites, hundreds of them. I got right to the very end - 100 pages of 10 results per page. That blog seems to have done everything wrong, yet it has interesting stats. It is a PR6, yet Alexa ranks it 25,680,321. It has the same text in every headline. Most of the headlines are very short. It has all of the category and tag and archive pages indexed. There is a link to the designer's website on every page. There is a blogroll on every page, with links out to 50 sites. None of the pages appear to have a description. there are dozens of empty H2 tags and the H1 tag is 80% through the document. Yet google lists all of this stuff in the results. I don't remember the last time I saw 100 pages of results, it hasn't happened in a very long time. Is this something new that google is doing? What about the multiple tag and category pages in results - Is this just a special thing google is doing to upset me or are you seeing it too? I did eventually find my page, but not in that list. I found it by using site:mysite.com in the search box.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
What determines rankings in a site: search?
When I perform a "site:" search on my domains (without specifying a keyword) the top ranked results seem to be a mixture of sensible top-level index pages plus some very random articles. Is there any significance to what Google ranks highly in a site: search? There is some really unrepresentative content returned on page 1, including articles that get virtually no traffic. Is this seriously what Google considers our best or most typical content?
Algorithm Updates | | Dennis-529610 -
Does searching for brand names really affect search results?
Hey all, So I heard Rand Fishkin speak the other day at an event in Palo Alto and I tokk anyway an interesting little concept from the day. He mentioned that there might be some overall ranking benefits to having people search for your company's brand and hence arrive at your home page root URL. I was thinking and I'm going to put into place a little test to check this out, does anyone know if search results as a whole are positively affected by having a large number of searches for your company's brand name? I've referred to this in the past as "Branded Search" but perhaps there's another term... I'm interested in running a test whereby I actually remove our URL from the web almost entirely. From social media profile and potentially even from our business cards and instead replace this with "Google Us" or "Google: Junction Marketing". 25907011
Algorithm Updates | | blahblahblah20150
