Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
-
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum.
We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index."
No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file.
Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping.
We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter.
It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas?
I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
-
I'm sure you've gone over this and if so feel free to ignore me but did you make sure your sitemap is up to scratch - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/184732?hl=en
You can also look to see if your data is up to par - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
You can always work back from the date it stopped working see if you've done anything that may have caused this (some one changing a tag etc.) lastly there is always the giant list of things to check for Google news - http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/
Best of luck and let us know how you get on.
-
Of course, I should have included that: Fabiusmaximus.com
-
Are you able to share the website that we're talking about?
-
Thanks for the ingenious advice, out of the box thinking. However, we're still in Google News. When we force Google to index a post via Fetch, it shows up in News. Plus the New Publisher page tells you that you're in News.
It's some sort of technical problem. A weird one.
-
My guess is that it's less of a technical constraint and more of a non-match for Google News guidelines. There are several things in there that could trigger the boot, (https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787) such as:
Stick to the news--we mean it! Google News is not a marketing service. We don't want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism. If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content. Otherwise, if we find non-news content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.
Journalistic standards. Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.
News content. Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. We generally do not include how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.
And so on... If you think you're in the clear try going to the Google News specific help center (on the previously linked page) and submit your site for inclusion.
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
-
On our site by mistake some wrong links were entered and google crawled them. We have fixed those links. But they still show up in Not Found Errors. Should we just mark them as fixed? Or what is the best way to deal with them?
Some parameter was not sent. So the link was read as : null/city, null/country instead cityname/city
Technical SEO | | Lybrate06060 -
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
Google index graph duration in Google Webmaster Tools
Hello guys, I wonder, my sites are currently being indexed every 7 days, exactly. At Index Status page in GWT. However, this new site gets updated almost everyday, how can I ask google to index faster and more frequently/almost daily? Is it about SItemap.xml frequency ? I changed it today to Daily. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mdmoz0 -
How do I influence what page on my site google shows for specific search phrases?
Hi People, My client has a site www.activeadventures.com. They provide adventure tours of New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. These destinations are split into 3 folders in the site (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand, activeadventures.com/south-america etc....). The actual root folder of the site is generic information for all of the destinations whilst the destination specific folders are specific in their information for the destination in question. The Problem: If you search for say "Active New Zealand" or "Adventure Tours South America" our result that comes up is the activeadventures.com homepage rather than the destination folder homepage (eg: We would want activeadventures.com/new-zealand to be the landing page for people searching for "active new zealand"). Are there any ways in influence google as to what page on our site it chooses to serve up? Many thanks in advance. Conrad
Technical SEO | | activenz0 -
Why would this site outrank a Pr2 site with higher domain authority?
I am trying to get a pr2 site to be on top 7 local spot for the keyword Van Nuys Bail bonds but have discovered a site which has barely any back links and is not even a year old on top results. Their backlinks are from lower authority domains than what we have. How could this site be beating a 7 year old pr2 website? The site I'm working on is http://bbbail.com/ The site that is ranking in 5th spot local with pr0 is http://www.vipbailbonds.org/ is it maybe because it is a .org site? Also I notice that all websites in top spots have www, could that be a factor as well?
Technical SEO | | jesse13410 -
Google has not been visiting my site
Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Crawl Errors
Okay, I was just in my Google Webmaster Tools and was looking at some of the stats. I have 1354 "not found" pages google says. Many of these URL's are bizarre. I don't know what they are. Others I do know. What should I do about this? Especially all the URL's I don't even know what they are?
Technical SEO | | azguy0 -
Google crawl index issue with our website...
Hey there. We've run into a mystifying issue with Google's crawl index of one of our sites. When we do a "site:www.burlingtonmortgage.biz" search in Google, we're seeing lots of 404 Errors on pages that don't exist on our site or seemingly on the remote server. In the search results, Google is showing nonsensical folders off the root domain and then the actual page is within that non-existent folder. An example: Google shows this in its index of the site (as a 404 Error page): www.burlingtonmortgage.biz/MQnjO/idaho-mortgage-rates.asp The actual page on the site is: www.burlingtonmortgage.biz/idaho-mortgage-rates.asp Google is showing the folder MQnjO that doesn't exist anywhere on the remote. Other pages they are showing have different folder names that are just as wacky. We called our hosting company who said the problem isn't coming from them... Has anyone had something like this happen to them? Thanks so much for your insight!
Technical SEO | | ILM_Marketing
Megan0