Weird indexing problem - Can it be solved?
-
Hi
Been building and optimising sites for 15 years and this is one of the hardest problems I ever came across. So any help would be very much appreciated. Here we go:
For some mysterious reason this URL http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ has been indexed as http://weekend.visitsweden.com even if we tried all we can to correct it. The problem is that since the latter points to the first URL with a 301 it refuses to get any page rank. Also it does not get visible in Google at all.
Just a recap of what we have tried so far:
- Add site to webmaster tools
- Add proper sitemap.xml
- Add 301 redirect to the correct URL
An easy way to locate the problem is to search for the main content of the site. As you can see it returns the wrong URL and the correct URL does not even get listed.
Again, any help is very much appreciated.
Kind regards
Fredrik
-
Hi there,
This is definitely a crazy problem! It looks like you've done what you should, but Google's ignoring you.
Here's a theory, though: I don't think that Google loves the idea of there being no "home" page; it probably only expects domain.com/home or domain.com/default.asp or domain.com/index.html as alternatives to domain.com, so seeing http://weekend.visitsweden.com/ redirect to http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ could be confusing it.
Is there a reason why you don't want http://weekend.visitsweden.com/ to be the homepage?
Kristina
-
That's very strange. Do you have anything conflicting in your htaccess file and redirect plugin (if you're using one)? Does weekend.visitsweden.com (without the /no/) reside on the same servers and is it using conflicting canonical or redirect tags?
weekend.visitsweden.com/ IS getting indexed. I did a search for "Slottet er et av Skånes eldsteog mest bemerkelsesverdige slottmed anertilbake til 1200-tallet" and weekend.visitsweden.com/ was the #2 result. My tools tell me the page has 0 links though. Thought that was odd too.
Have you tried asking Google to specifically deindex weekend.visitsweden.com?
That's all I can think of.
-
And does it do the same thing if you remove the 301 from .com/ to .com/no/ and leave it without a redirect for a while?
-
Forget to mention, this has been discussed before in this thread:
http://moz.com/community/q/visitsweden-indexing-errorUnfortunately those suggestions did not seem to solve the issue.
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
-
Why is a canonicalized URL still in index?
Hi Mozers, We recently canonicalized a few thousand URLs but when I search for these pages using the site: operator I can see that they are all still in Google's index. Why is that? Is it reasonable to expect that they would be taken out of the index? Or should we only expect that they won't rank as high as the canonical URLs? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
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 -
Old pages STILL indexed...
Our new website has been live for around 3 months and the URL structure has completely changed. We weren't able to dynamically create 301 redirects for over 5,000 of our products because of how different the URL's were so we've been redirecting them as and when. 3 months on and we're still getting hundreds of 404 errors daily in our Webmaster Tools account. I've checked the server logs and it looks like Bing Bot still seems to want to crawl our old /product/ URL's. Also, if I perform a "site:example.co.uk/product" on Google or Bing - lots of results are still returned, indicating the both still haven't dropped them from their index. Should I ignore the 404 errors and continue to wait for them to drop off or should I just block /product/ in my robots.txt? After 3 months I'd have thought they'd have naturally dropped off by now! I'm half-debating this: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamMcArthur
Disallow: /some-directory-for-all/* User-agent: Bingbot
User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /product/ Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml0 -
Problem with redirects in coldfusion
How to redirect pages in cold fusion? If using ColdFusion and modrewrite, the URL will never be redirected from ModRewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
PR Dilution and Number of Pages Indexed
Hi Mozzers, My client is really pushing for me to get thousands, if not millions of pages indexed through the use of long-tail keywords. I know that I can probably get quite a few of them into Google, but will this dilute the PR on my site? These pages would be worthwhile in that if anyone actually visits them, there is a solid chance they will convert to a lead do to the nature of the long-tail keywords. My suggestion is to run all the keywords for these thousands of pages through adwords to check the number of queries and only create pages for the ones which actually receive searches. What do you guys think? I know that the content needs to have value and can't be scraped/low-quality and pulling these pages out of my butt won't end well, but I need solid evidence to make a case either for or against it to my clients.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Bad neighborhood linking - anyone can share experience how significant it can impact rankings?
SEOMoz community, If you have followed our latest Q&A posts you know by now that we have been suffering since the last 8 months from a severe Google penalty we are still trying to resolve. Our international portfolio of sports properties has suffered significant ranking losses across the board. While we have been tediously trying to troubleshoot the problem for a while now we might be up to a hot lead now. We realized that one of the properties outside of our key properties, but are site that our key properties are heavily linking to (+100 outgoing links per property) seems to have received a significant Google penalty in a sense that it has been completely delisted from the Google index and lost all its PageRank (Pr4) While we are buffed to see such sort of delisting, we are hopeful that this might be the core of our experienced issues in the past i.e. that our key properties have been devalued due to heavy linking to a bad neighborhood site. My question two the community are two-fold: Can anyone share any experience if it is indeed considered possible that a high number of external links to one bad neighboorhood domain can cause significant ranking drops in the rank from being top 3 ranked to be ranked at around a 140 for a competetive key word? The busted site has a large set of high quality external links. If we swap domains is there any way to port over any link juice or will the penalty be passed along? If that is the case I assume the best approach would be to reach out to all the link authorities and have tem link to the new domain instead of the busted site? Thanks /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
Should I index tag pages?
Should I exclude the tag pages? Or should I go ahead and keep them indexed? Is there a general opinion on this topic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NikkiGaul0