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
-
Pages not indexable?
Hello, I've been trying to find out why Google Search Console finds these pages non-indexable: https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/eat-drink.html https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/florida-beaches/beach-finder.html Moz and SEMrush both crawl the pages and show no errors but GSC comes back with, "blocked by robots.txt" but I've confirmed it is not. Anyone have any thoughts? 6AYn1TL
Technical SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Google is still indexing the old domain a year after 301 redirects are put in place
Hi there, You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first. A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com" The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
Technical SEO | | iQi
Cache-Control => private
Content-Length => 174
Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
Connection => close Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago. Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain! Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening. Best,0 -
Google rejected my reconsideration request of unnatural link manual action, and list one blog article twice as example?
Hi Moz Community, On April 22 my site received a manual action in Google Webmaster telling me it's caused by unnatural links. After some a deep cleaning of all the sitewide links, which I think is the major problem of my external links, I requested a reconsideration request on May 4. And Google rejected my reconsideration request of unnatural link manual action on May 29, and list one blog article twice as example, which is quite weird to me. Is it normal for Google to list one URL twice as example in the feedback? I don't quite see the reason for that. Does anybody have any idea about that? This is really quite frustrating to me. And to be honest, I don't see much problems about the article Google listed as well. Yeah it's all about our product and it has 3 do-follow links to our site. But it contains no words such as sponsor, advertisement, or rewards... And the blog itself is quite healthy as well. The post also get rather high engagement, with organic comments and shares. How did Google flag that out? I don't think it's possible that Google will go into all our site links one by one... Hope you guys can help me with that. Thanks in advance! Ben
Technical SEO | | Ben_fotor0 -
No index on subdomains
Hi, We have a subdomain that is appearing in the search results - I want to hide this as it looks really bad. If I were to add the no index tag to the sub domain would URL would this affect the whole domain or just that sub domain? The main domain is vitally important - it is just that sub domain I need to hide. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Canonical needed after no index
Hi do you need to point canonical from a subpage to main page if you have already marked a no index on the subpage, like when google is not indexing it so do we need canonicals now as is it passing any juice?
Technical SEO | | razasaeed0 -
Page not being indexed
Hi all, On our site we have a lot of bookmaker reviews, and we are ranking pretty good for most bookmaker names as keywords, however a single bookmaker seems to have been shunned by Google. For a search "betsafe" in Denmark, this page does not appear among the top 50: http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe All of our other review pages rank in top 10-20 for the bookmaker name as keyword. What to do if Google has "banned" a page? Best regards, Rasmus
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang0 -
Is there any evidence that using Google Site Search will help your ranking, speed of indexing, or traffic?
I am considering using Google Site Search on our new site. I was told... "We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often (they claim using the paid Google Site Search has no effect on search rankings but we have also seen bumps in rankings after using it so that may just be what they have to say legally)." Is there any evidence of this? Would you recommend using Google Site Search? Thanks David
Technical SEO | | DavidButler710 -
Will google let me do this
Hi i am working on my site at the moment www.in2town.co.uk and i am adding new sections and was thinking about buying domain names that best describe that section and which people would remember. so for example i am looking at adding a tenerife magazine to my site and would like to know if it would be wise to buy a domain name for example tenerife magazine and then have it directed to the section of my site. would this benefit my site in any way and would google allow this. instead of having in2town.co.uk and then tenerife magazine after it, sorry cannot find the slash as i am on a spanish keyborad at the moment, i would like to have something like tenerifemagazine.co..uk etc If anyone can give me advice on this then that would be great. also can anyone let me know if this is a wise idea or not, to have sub domain names on my main site. i would like to know if i had tenerifemagazine under the in2town domain name would it slow the site down or should i consider building a brand new site just for that and then making people aware that it comes under the in2town umbrella many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848861