[wtf] Mysterious Homepage De-Indexing
-
Our homepage, as well as several similar landing pages, have vanished from the index. Could you guys review the below pages to make sure I'm not missing something really obvious?!
URLs: http://www.grammarly.com http://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker
- It's been four days, so it's not just a temporary fluctuation
- The pages don't have a "noindex" tag on them and aren't being excluded in our robots.txt
- There's no notification about a penalty in WMT
Clues:
-
WMT is returning an "HTTP 200 OK" for Fetch, is showing a redirect to grammarly.com/1 (alternate version of homepage, contains rel=canonical back to homepage) for Fetch+Render. Could this be causing a circular redirect?
-
Some pages on our domain are ranking fine, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=grammarly+answers
-
A month ago, we redesigned the pages in question. The new versions are pretty script-heavy, as you can see.
-
We don't have a sitemap set up yet.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance, friends!
-
Did this get resolved? I'm seeing your home-page indexed and ranking now.
I'm not seeing any kind of redirect to an alternate URL at this point (either as a browser or as GoogleBot). If you 301'ed to an alternate URL and then rel=canonical'ed back to the source of the 301, that could definitely cause problems. It's sending a pretty strong mixed-signal. In that case you'd probably want to 302 or use some alternate method. Redirects for the home-page are best avoided, in most cases.
-
Are you sure it was missing for a time? Ultimately I wouldn't use a third-party (Google) as a tool to diagnose problems (faulty on-site code) that I know are problems and need to be fixed.I'd fix the problems I know are issues and then go from there. Or hire someone capable of fixing the problems.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I'll get to work on the issues you mentioned.
I do have one question for you - grammarly.com/proofreading (significantly fewer links, identical codebase) is now back on the index. If the issue was too many scripts or HTML errors, wouldn't both pages still be de-indexed?
-
Here are some issues just going down the first few lines of code...
- There's a height attribute in your tag.
- Your cookie on the home page is set to expire in the past, not the future
- Your tag conflicts with your script and other code issues (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21363090/doctype-html-ruins-my-script)
- Your Google Site Verification meta tag is different than other pages.
- Your link to the Optimizely CDN is incorrect... (missing 'http:' so it's looking for the script on your site)
- You have many other Markup Issues.
And that's prior to getting into the hundreds of lines of code preceding the start of your page at the tag... 300 lines or so on your other indexed pages 1100+ on your home page. So not only are you not following best practices as outlined by Google, but you have broken stuff too.
-
The saga continues...
According to WMT, there are no issues with grammarly.com The page is fetched and rendered correctly.
Google! Y u no index? Any ideas?
-
Like Lynn mentioned below, if you're having redirection take place across several portions of the site, that could cause the spikes, and a big increase in total download time is worrying if you're crossing the average bounce rate threshold for most people's patience.
Here's the Google Page speed take on it: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgrammarly.com&tab=desktop. They go over both desktop and mobile.
-
Hmm, was something done to fix the googlebot redirect issue or did it just fix itself? Here it states that googlebot will often identify itself as mozilla and your fetch/render originally seemed to indicate that at least some of the time that was the page google was getting. It is a bit murky technically what exactly is going on there but if google is getting redirected some of the time then as you said you are getting into a circular situation between the redirect and the canonical where it is a bit difficult to predict what will happen. If that is 100% fixed now and google sees the main page all the time then I would wait a day or two to see if the page comes back into the index (but be 100% sure that you know it is fixed!). I still think that is the most likely source of your troubles...
-
Excellent question, Lynn. Thank you for chiming in here. There's a user agent based javascript redirect that keeps Chrome visitors on grammarly.com (Chrome browser extension) and sends other browsers to grammarly.com/1 (Web app that works on all browsers).
UPDATE: According to WMT Fetch+Render, the Googlebot redirection issue has been fixed. It is no longer being redirected anywhere and returning a 200 OK for grammarly.com.
Kelly, if that was causing the problem, how long should I hold my breath for re-indexing after re-submitting the homepage?
-
Yup definitely. Whether you're completely removed or simply dropped doesn't matter. If you're not there anymore, for some reason Google determined you're no longer an authority for that keyword. So you need to find out why. Since you just redesigned, the way way is to back track, double check all the old tags and compare them to the new site, check the text and keyword usage on the website, look for anything that's changed that could contribute to the drop. If you don't find anything, tools like majesticSEO are handy to checking if your backlinks are still healthy.
-
Hi Alex, Thank you for your response. The pages didn't suffer in ranking, they were completely removed from the index. Based on that, do you still think it could be a keyword issue?
-
That's actually a great point. I suppose Google could have been holding on to a pre-redesign cached version of the pages.
There has been a 50-100% increase in page download times as well as some weird 5x spikes for crawled pages. I know there could probably be a million different reasons, but do any of them stick out at you as being potential sources of the problem?
-
How does that second version of the homepage work and how long has it been around for? I get one version of the homepage in one browser and the second in another, what decides which version is served and what kind of redirect is it? I think that is the most likely source of your troubles.
-
Yes, but the pages were indexed prior to the redesign, no? Can you look up your crawl stats in GWT to see if there's been a dramatic up tick in page download times, and a down trend in pages crawled. That will at least give you a starting point as to differences between now and then: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-stats
-
Logo definitely needs to be made clickable to Home.
Did you compare the old design and the new design's text to make sure you're still covering the same keywords. In many cases a redesign is more "streamlined" which also means less text or a re-write which is going to impact the keywords your site is relevant for.
-
Thanks, Ryan. Improving our code-to-text ratio is on our roadmap, but could that really be the issue here? The pages were all fully indexed without problems for a full month after our redesign, and we haven't added any scripts. Was there an algorithm update on Monday that could explain the sudden de-indexing?
-
VERY script heavy. Google has recently released updates on a lot of this (Q4 2014) here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.mx/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html. With further guidance given here: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-encoding-and-transfer. Without doing a deep dive that's the most glaring issue and obvious difference between pages that are still being indexed and those that are not.
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
-
Page with metatag noindex is STILL being indexed?!
Hi Mozers, There are over 200 pages from our site that have a meta tag "noindex" but are STILL being indexed. What else can I do to remove them from the Index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Password Protected Page(s) Indexed
Hi, I am wondering if my website can get a penalty if some password protected pages are showing up when I search on google: site:www.example.com/sub-group/pass-word-protected-page That shows that my password protected page was indexed either before or after adding the password protection. I've seen people suggest no indexing the page. Is that the best method to take care of this? What if we are planning on pushing the page live later on? All of these pages have no title tag, meta description, image alt text, etc. Should I add them for each page? I am wondering what is the best step, especially if we are planning on pushing the page(s) live. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Index an URL without directly linking it?
Hi everyone, Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants. Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and: Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D). So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not? In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Homepage 302 Redirect For SSL
Hi All, My site, http://domain.com, currently has a 302 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com. The reason we have an SSL cert is because we have a registration and log in form on the homepage (as well as log in options in the top bar of every page on the site - email/password). My question is: When taking SEO best practices into account, would we be better having a 301 redirect from http://domain.com to https://domain.com as most of our inbound links are directed to http://domain.com. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rogs.SEO0 -
How Long Does it Take for Rel Canonical to De-Index / Re-Index a Page?
Hi Mozzers, We have 2 e-commerce websites, Website A and Website B, sharing thousands of pages with duplicate product descriptions. Currently only the product pages on Website B are indexing, and we want Website A indexed instead. We added the rel canonical tag on each of Website B's product pages with a link towards the matching product on Page A. How long until Website B gets de-indexed and Website A gets indexed instead? Did we add the rel canonical tag correctly? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
Same day indexing... some tips for a non blog site
Hi There's a question today about paying for Yahoo directory - I wondered if these kinds of links would help with getting indexed. We're adding about 10-20 pages of new unique content each day, but it takes google about 4 days to list it and then it only lists a few pages of that 10-20 pages, we have other older sites and blogs that are within the hour. What tips can you give me for getting at least a same day index, and a thorough one at that, so if we publish 20 pages on Thursday by the end of play Friday they're indexed? Would the Yahoo Directory help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0