Help my site it's not being indexed
-
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design....
The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site.
After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do....
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Dan
-
If it makes you feel any better, this is the solution about once a month in Q&A. You're not the first, and you certainly won't be the last!
-
This is way I love the SEOMOZ community no matter how stupid the solution to your problem might be people will let you know.
I feel like an amateur (cause I'm) I think I overtrusted yoast's plugin, Because whenever your are blocking the robots it will tell you, hoewever this time it didn't and the site, through wordpress config, was blocking the site.
I changed it, resubmited the sitemaps, checked the code and updated yoast's great plugin....
Thanks guys... I SEOPromise to check always the code myself
Dan
-
When I go to your page and look at the source code I see this line:
name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />
You are telling the bots not to index the page or follow any links on the page. This is in the source code for your home page.
I'd go back into the wordpress settings (you are using Yoast) and make sure to enable the site for search engine visibility!
Once you do that, and verify that the code is changed to "='index,follow'" then resubmit your sitemaps via webmaster tools.
-
Great tool I'm taking a look right now
thanks
Dan
-
I check GWT everyday, not even one page has been indexed... Nor We have any manual action suggested by google
Thanks
Dan
-
-
A suggestion for the future: use some type of code monitoring service, such as https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php (no relationship with the company, it's just what I use), and have it alert you to any changes in the robots.txt file on both the live and staging environments.
I was in a situation at a previous employment where the development team wasn't the best at SEO, and I had experienced the robots.txt from the dev site being put on the live site, and the other way around, and also things being added to or removed from the robots.txt without our request or knowledge. The verification files for Google and Bing Webmaster Tools would sometimes go missing, too.
I used that code monitor to check once a day and email me if there were changes to the robots.txt or verification files on the live site and the robots.txt of all of our dev and staging sites (to make sure they weren't accidentally indexed). Was a huge help!
-
Yes take another look at that robots file for sure. If you provided us with the domain we might be able to better help you.
Also, go into Webmaster Tools and poke around. Check how many pages are being indexed, look at sitemaps, do a fetch-as-google, etc.
-
Hi Dan
It sounds like your robot.txt are still blocking your site despite the redirects. You might be best getting rid of the robot.txt and starting again ensuring nothing is blocked that it shouldn't.
regards, David
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
-
Need Magento SEO expert for 301 clean up - any reco's?
My site is a total mess from a clean “crawling” perspective. We are still getting traffic and doing business, but I am afraid from an SEO perspective we are driving with the parking brake on. There a lot of 301’s and some of them are causing 404 errors. Below is an overview of my 5 year old magento site which was moved from a 5 year old xcart site (so there is a lot of old junk (url’s) in there). It needs cleaning up and I need a plan and seo / 301 help. Overview: Recently moved from http to https - not sure best practices were followed, but we had lots of crawl issues before this move. Analytics Top 100 Landing Pages = 82.7% of entrances Webmaster Tools 594 Pages Indexed 65 Not found errors - most involve 301’s - examples below Sitemap: 773 Submitted, 395 Indexed URL Parameters - 41 - I can’t tell if they are doing anything (helping or hurting) Moz Crawl Total Pages 3,454 324 Redirect Issues (258 Temp and 66 Chain) Magento 11,773 Redirects 5390 System 6383 Custom On July 15, 2017 I deleted 40 redirects from htaccess that a developer had put there that were causing problems. Blog We have a wordpress blog installed on Magento site. Years ago it was moved from a subdomain to a subdirectory.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SammyT0 -
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Linking to one of my own sites, from my site
Hi experts, I own a site for castingjobs (Site1) and a site for selling paintings (Site2). In a long time, I've had a link at the bottom of Site1, linking to Site 2. (Basicaly: Partnerlink: Link site 2). Site1 is for me the the only important site, since it's where Im making my monthly revenue. I added the link like 5 years ago or so, to try to boost site 2. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
1. Is it somehow bad for SEO for site 1, since the two sites have nothing to do with each other, they are basically just owned by me.
2. Would it make sense to link from Site 2 to Site 1 indstead?0 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Certain Pages Not Being Indexed - Please Help
We are having trouble getting a bulk of our pages indexed in google. Any help would be greatly appreciated! The Following Page types are being indexed through escaped fragment: http://www.cbuy.tv/#! http://www.cbuy.tv/celebrity#!65-Ashley-Tisdale/fashion/4097-Casadei-BLADE-PUMP/Product/175199 <cite>www.cbuy.tv/celebrity/155-Sophia-Bush#!</cite> However, all our pages that look like this, are not being indexed: http://www.cbuy.tv/#!Type=Photo&id=b1d18759-5e52-4a1c-9491-6fb3cb9d4b95&Katie-Holmes-Hot-Pink-Pants-Isabel-Marant-DAVID-DOUBLE-BREASTED-Wool-COAT-Maison-Pumps-Black-Bag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CBuy0 -
Hundreds of thousands of 404's on expired listings - issue.
Hey guys, We have a conundrum, with a large E-Commerce site we operate. Classified listings older than 45 days are throwing up 404's - hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Note that Webmaster Tools peaks at 100,000. Many of these listings receive links. Classified listings that are less than 45 days show other possible products to buy based on an algorithm. It is not possible for Google to crawl expired listings pages from within our site. They are indexed because they were crawled before they expired, which means that many of them show in search results. -> My thought at this stage, for usability reasons, is to replace the 404's with content - other product suggestions, and add a meta noindex in order to help our crawl equity, and get the pages we really want to be indexed prioritised. -> Another consideration is to 301 from each expired listing to the category heirarchy to pass possible link juice. But we feel that as many of these listings are findable in Google, it is not a great user experience. -> Or, shall we just leave them as 404's? : google sort of says it's ok Very curious on your opinions, and how you would handle this. Cheers, Croozie. P.S I have read other Q & A's regarding this, but given our large volumes and situation, thought it was worth asking as I'm not satisfied that solutions offered would match our needs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sichristie0