Google can't access/crawl my site!
-
Hi
I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings.
[URL Errors: 1st photo]
8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up.
The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages.
After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked.
Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get:
[Fetch as Google: 2nd photo]
From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles).
What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings?
Thanks a lot
Granit -
What did you do specifically to mitigate the problem? You can PM me, if you would like.
-
This applies to the guy from Albania.
Oh, this IS the guy from Albania. Never mind.
-
Great, thanks for letting us know what happened with this!
-
Hi all
Just wanted to let you know that we fixed the problem. We disabled CloudFlare which we found out was blocking Google bots. More about this issue can be found at: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169806-I-m-getting-Google-Crawler-Errors-What-should-I-do-
-
Hi Travis, thank you for your time.
Great for your friend, I also suggest to visit Kosovo someday, you will have great time here, for sure
Back to the issue:
Here is an interesting issue that is happening with the crawler.
Our own cms uses htaccess for rewrite purposes. I created 2 new files that are independent from CMS and tried to fetch them with WMT, and it worked like a charm.
These 2 independent files are:
www.gazetaexpress.com/test_manaferra.php
www.gazetaexpress.com/xhezidja.php
Then, I created an ajax page with our CMS, which contains only plain text, tried to fetch it by WMT and strangely enough it didn't work. To make sure that the .htaccess file is not affecting this behavior, I deleted the htaccess and tried to fetch it, but it didn't worked.
The ajax page is: www.gazetaexpress.com/page/xhezidja/?pageSEO=false
The site works perfectly for humans which access it via the browser.
I'm more than confused now!
-
A friend of mine just got back from Kosovo. It was the last stop on a tour of the Balkans. He had a pretty good time. Moving along...
I crawled about 12K URLs and hit almost 90 Internal Server Errors (500). It's probably not your core problem, but it's something to look at. Here are a few examples:
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/blihet/?search_category_id=1&searchFilter=1
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/shitet/?category_id=134&searchFilter=1
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/me-qera/?category_id=131&searchFilter=1
There was one actual page that threw a 500 at the time of crawl:
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/mistere/edhe-kesaj-i-thuhet-veze-22591/
The edhe kesaj page now resolves fine. (I'm not even going to pretend to understand or write Albanian.)
So there may be some issues with the server or hosting. If you haven't already, try this troubleshooter from Cloudflare.
-
Ah OK - well keep us updated with what you find. Someone else will chip in with other info if they have some
-Andy
-
We are suspecting that CloudFlare might be causing these troubles. We are trying everything, in the meantime i'm looking here to see if anyone has any similar experience or an idea for solution.
As for warnings, the only warning we had was the one last week (8/23/14) saying that Google bot can't acces our site:
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 316 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 7.5%.
-Granit
-
It doesn't look like a firewall, as I can crawl it with Screaming Frog. However, the server logs will be able to answer that one for you.
Without looking in depth, I'm not seeing anything that stands out to me - do you think that there have been changes to the server that could cause issues? What firewall is the server running? Also, if there were errors in crawling the site, you would see a warning about this.
-Andy
-
In mid-march website changed it's CMS but i don't think that could be the reason because until this week everything was working perfectly. I don't think it could have been compromised too. I'm still suspecting it could be the firewall blocking bots from crawling the site, but the server administrator couldn't find any evidence of this.
-
Hi Granit,
Has any work been done to the site in the last 2-3 months? Have you had any warnings in webmaster tools at all? I did once see a strange problem where Google wasn't crawling a site correctly because it had been compromised, but after checking, there is nothing like this on yours.
-Andy
-
No prb. Thanks a lot for your time. Let just hope that someone in the community will help with a solution
-
Unfortunately, I don't have a quick answer for you. Looking forward to seeing what other community members have to say on this one!
-
I'm looking at the http version in GWT
-
If I do a site:gazetaexpress.com in Google, I get some results that are http, and some results that are https. The https ones say there is an SSL connection error.
Are you looking at the http or https version in GWT?
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
-
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
NGinx rule for redirecting trailing '/'
We have successfully implemented run-of-the-mill 301s from old URLs to new (there were about 3,000 products). As normal. Like we do on every other site etc. However, recently search console has started to report a number of 404s with the page names with a trailing forward slash at the end of the .html suffix. So, /old-url.html is redirecting (301) to /new-url.html However, now for some reason /old-url.html/ has 'popped up' in the Search Console crawl report as a 404. Is there a 'blobal' rule you can write in nGinx to say redirect *.html/ to */html (without the forward slash) rather than manually doing them all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Weird rankings on my website, can't figure it out
Hey guys, One of my post popular pages for "Rust Hacks" use to be - http://www.ilikecheats.com/01/rust-cheats-hacks-aimbot/ Now when searching Google for site:ilikecheats.com rust hacks This page shows as the highest ranking - http://forum.ilikecheats.com/forums/221-Rust-Hacks-Rust-Cheats-Public-Forum What's weird is it seems the entire front end (Wordpress site) isn't ranking well anymore on page #1 of Google and the forums are ranking better currently. I did have a huge penalty from backlinks last year but cleared it. I got Yoast to do a site review and I'm cleaning up everything now. I also cleared most of the bad links via the disavow tool. Another example is when I search for "warz hacks" the forums show up in 4th place but the main website isn't showing at all back to page 10. If I search site:ilikecheats.com warz hacks the links directly to the main site doesn't show until page #2. So is this still a penalty that is carried over or is something else going on? Can't seem to figure it out, thanks in advance for looking. 😃 Any ideas what's going on and why the main pages no longer rank - http://www.ilikecheats.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Draden670 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
How can I see all the pages google has indexed for my site?
Hi mozers, In WMT google says total indexed pages = 5080. If I do a site:domain.com commard it says 6080 results. But I've only got 2000 pages in my site that should be indexed. So I would like to see all the pages they have indexed so I can consider noindexing them or 404ing them. Many thanks, Julian.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julianhearn0 -
Duplicate Content http://www.website.com and http://website.com
I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
Why is my site's 'Rich Snippets' information not being displayed in SERPs?
We added hRecipe microformats data to our site in April and then migrated to the Schema.org Recipe format in July, but our content is still not being displayed as Rich Snippets in search engine results. Our pages validate okay in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Any idea why they are not being displayed in SERP's? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy0 -
DCMI and Google's rich snippets
I haven't seen any consistent information regarding DCMI tags for organic SEO in a couple of years. Webmaster Tools obviously has a rich set of instructions for microdata. Has there been any updated testing on DCMI or information above the whisper/rumor stage on whether engines will be using Dublin? As a final point, would it be worth going back to static pages that haven't been touched in a couple of years and updating them with microdata? It seems a natural for retail sites and maybe some others, but what about content heavy pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyseo0
