Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why is my blog disappearing from Google index?
-
My Google blogger blog is about 10 months old. In that time i have worked really hard with adding unique content, building relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, and done some inbound marketing.
2 weeks ago I updated the template to something cleaner, with a little more "wordpress" feel to it. This means i've messed about with the code a lot in these weeks, adding social buttons etc.
The problem is that from some point late last week thurs/fri my pages started disappearing from Googles index. I have checked webmaster tools and have no manual actions. My link profile is pretty clean as its a new site, and i have manually checked every piece of content published for plagiarism etc.
So what is going on? Did i break my blog? Or is something else amiss? Impressions are down 96% comparing Nov 1-5th to previous 5 days.
site is here: http://bit.ly/174beVm
Thanks for any help in advance.
-
Thank you. That thought process did occur to me at the time of adding the robots txt, however that was back in March and the impressions drop has happened this week.
I have updated the robots.txt to show the new disallow command rather than "/search".
I also just installed my last back-up which was just before i added Google comments.
Thanks for your help!
-
I really think the main issue is with the robots.txt. If you think about it, all of your blog posts that are not featured on the home page would be inaccessible to Google (since the pagination at the bottom and the main navigation URLs to browse posts all contain "/search"). So once the posts leave the homepage, you're telling Google they shouldn't see them anymore.
I only brought up the issue with "cloaked" text because the second link I saw was to a credit company and a red flag went up in my head screaming SPAM! But it looks to be legitimate.
I would advise you update the robots.txt and create an XML sitemap for all your posts/pages and submit that to Google Webmaster Tools. Should clear things up!
-
Thanks for this. I knew i needed to stop search being crawled for duplicate content and the disallow "/search" operator seemed to be the way a few others had done it. I will update that line to show the new query instead, presuming this is relevant for blogger blogs?
-
That line of text is from the fourth post down "Sales Stats Confirm the UK Still Loves Cars", its truncating the posts to show "read more". However the source code, for some reason, shows all of the post.
Could there be something missing from here? I did delete the code that shows number of comments per post as i integrated Google comments late last week and the numbers didnt add up.
-
Also, your robots.txt is disallowing "/search" which appears in the URL for all paginated pages on the homepage as well as in your "browse posts" category URLs. I would advise that you remove that line from your robots.txt. If you want to prevent search queries from being indexed, replace that with the following line:
Disallow: /*q=
That should prevent search queries from getting crawled or indexed.
-
I've only begun looking into your issue however I noticed something odd when looking at the source code of your home page. I did a search for a couple of snippets of code (noindex, meta data, etc..) but when I searched for nofollow, I found a few links that seem to have a fair amount of text associated with them. However I do not see the text on the actual site.
The first instance is in line 1406 of your source code, there is a link to smnt.co.uk and some text about private vehicle registrations yet that link and text is not visible on the home page.
You may want to look in to that, while there may not have been a manual action against you, it's possible that your pages are being caught in Google's algorithm.
Hope that helps
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
-
Should I "no-index" two exact pages on Google results?
Hello everyone, I recently started a new wordpress website and created a static homepage. I noticed that on Google search results, there are two different URLs landing on same content page. I've attached an image to explain what I saw. Should I "no-index" the page url? Google url.JPG In this picture, the first result is the homepage and I try to rank for that page. The last result is landing on same content with different URL. So, should I no-index last result as shown in image?
Technical SEO | | amanda59640 -
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google.
Technical SEO | | ChophelDoes anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags
Hi there! I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it? Thank you for your help in advance! L
Technical SEO | | Chris_Wright1 -
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0