Google refuses to index our domain. Any suggestions?
-
A very similar question was asked previously. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-google-did-not-index-our-domain) We've done everything in that post (and comments) and then some.
The domain is http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/ and, so far, we have:
- put "User-agent: * Allow: /" in the robots.txt (We recently removed the "allow" line and included a Sitemap: directive instead.)
- built a few hundred links from various pages including multiple links from .gov domains
- properly set up everything in Webmaster Tools
- submitted site maps (multiple times)
- checked the "fetch as googlebot" display in Webmaster Tools (everything looks fine)
- submitted a "request re-consideration" note to Google asking why we're not being indexed
Webmaster Tools tells us that it's crawling the site normally and is indexing everything correctly. Yahoo! and Bing have both indexed the site with no problems and are returning results. Additionally, many of the pages on the site have PR0 which is unusual for a non-indexed site. Typically we've seen those sites have no PR at all.
If anyone has any ideas about what we could do I'm all ears. We've been working on this for about a month and cannot figure this thing out.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
-
You make excellent points. I'll escalate this to "the pros" and see if they're able to bring their guru powers to bear on the trouble.
Thanks again Ryan for all your advice. It is greatly appreciated.
-
Looking at the site I can confirm the following:
-
the home page is tagged index follow
-
the status code for the home page is 200, an OK response
-
the robots.txt file is valid and clear
-
your crawl reports look fine to me
-
you stated your sitemap is received and 73 of 75 pages are indexed
-
your site is clearly not in Google's index as a site:miwaterstewardship.org search shows nothing.
-
I looked at your sitemap. I am not familiar with .aspx sitemaps but it does contain valid html links which apparently is enough for Google to utilize
-
you stated your site is not under penalty, as per Google
The possibilities are:
-
one of the pieces of information we are depending on is incorrect
-
we are overlooking a key piece of information
-
our understanding of SEO in this case is not complete
-
there is an issue with Google which is preventing your site from being indexed.
At this point I would suggest using your 1 PRO question on this issue, and reference this Q&A thread. While I don't believe we missed anything we should get the team to look at this issue and rule out every last possibility.
-
-
Thanks for the suggestions, Ryan. All of the previous changes were made before Google did it's last crawl. Here's the other info...
URLs Submitted = 78 / URLs in Web Index = 75 / The sitemap status is green check mark and it was downloaded today--June 14.
Geographic target has not been selected. Google has always been able to determine the crawl rate. I just changed the preferred domain to www.miwaterstewardship.org. That's the only change made recently.
This is another piece that baffles me. Check out the crawl stats for the site here: http://netvantagemarketing.com/temp/miws-crawl-stats.png
The bot is crawling an average of 63 pages per day and there's crawling activity since the middle of March. STILL, though...the domain absolutely will not appear in the index.
We're working with the client right now to see if we can get the site changed to a new IP address. The thought is that perhaps Google has somehow historically blocked the IP that it lives on now and changing to a new IP might get us out of jail. SUPER long shot...but those are the kinds of things we're trying now.
Thanks again for the help.
-
I was able to verify your robots.txt file is correctly set up. Did you make the changes before Google crawled the site on Saturday? You are correct that your site is not in the index. I would guess the robots.txt file was not modified until after the crawl. If it was adjusted pre-crawl, below are the next steps you can take.
Let's take a fresh look at your site:
-
you have a valid robots.txt file
-
your home page has a valid "index, follow" tag (not necessary, but it doesn't hurt either)
-
you have checked WMT and confirmed your site was crawled
In WMT, Site Configuration > Sitempas there is a "URLs submitted" field and a "URLs in web index field". What are those numbers please?
- It's a bit far reaching but while you are there please go over to your Settings tab in WMT. Geographic Target should not be checked, or if it is then Target Users in US should be selected. Preferred domain should be "www.miwaterstewardship.org" and I would recommend "Let Google determine my crawl rate" option unless you have a specific reason for doing otherwise.
-
-
Well...we're still in the virtual doghouse so-to-speak...
I made the changes that Ryan suggested on Friday. Webmaster Tools reports that the GoogleBot crawled the site on Saturday and that everything is OK in its eyes. Google responded to our reconsideration request over the weekend and stated very specifically that no actions were taken by the Google Spam team which would affect the rankings of our site or domain.
Still, if you search info:miwaterstewardship.org in The Ol' Goog, it continues to report that the site does not exist in the Google database.
Are there any other ideas of what we might be able to try?
This is a Dot Net Nuke site. Is there a DNN setting somewhere which might indicate to Google that it should not report our domain in search results?
Thanks for the looks and the help.
-
I agree with Ryan, your backlinks look great, website is structured well and has a great looking design. No signs of you breaking any of googles TOS.
-
Thank you EGOL. I consider myself a student of SEO, definitely not a master.
The Q&A forums here have given me a great opportunity to learn about SEO. I have been spending all my time this past month un-learning all the bad information I gathered from the internet, and learning SEO the right way.
The Matt Cutts videos, SEOmoz webinars, blogs and pro Q&A have all been immensely helpful. Those resources, along with the replies you and other mozzers offer have provided me an incredibly rich learning experience.
Thanks for noticing.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I noticed this as well but figured I'd leave it alone since Webmaster Tools was telling me "all is well" with the robots.txt file. I'll add the code like you suggest and we'll see what happens.
Thanks again.
-
Ryan, you have been giving some really valuable answers. Nice. Keep up the great work!
-
Fix your robots.txt. It is not set up as you suggested.
http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/robots.txt
User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/SiteMap.aspx I am unsure of what action a search engine would take upon encountering your code, but based on your post it seems that it blocks all agents. The correct code would be:
User-agent: *
Disallow:Sitemap: http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/SiteMap.aspx For more information about robots.txt you can take a look at: [http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html](http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html)
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
-
How to remove the specific link from Google Listed Index?
I am working on SEO for an e-commerce client. When I search for brand name in the Google it displays the top link with tabular index of categories. Whereas I want to remove the category called Coffee from the tabular index because it redirecting to the Home page which is not relevant. For your ref. attached is the screenshot. pXjdaCH.png
Technical SEO | | mountain.penguine0 -
Website Migration - Very Technical Google "Index" Question
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specifc: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" connects to the "page directory". I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I ask is I am starting to work with a client who has a newly developed website. The old website domain and files were located on a GoDaddy account. The new websites files have completely changed location and are now hosted on a separate GoDaddy account, but the domain has remained in the same account. The client has setup domain forwarding/masking to access the files on the separate account. From what I've researched domain masking and SEO don't get along very well. Not only can you not link to specific pages, but if my above assumption is true wouldn't Google have a hard time crawling and storing each page in the cache?
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Best way to handle indexed pages you don't want indexed
We've had a lot of pages indexed by google which we didn't want indexed. They relate to a ajax category filter module that works ok for front end customers but under the bonnet google has been following all of the links. I've put a rule in the robots.txt file to stop google from following any dynamic pages (with a ?) and also any ajax pages but the pages are still indexed on google. At the moment there is over 5000 pages which have been indexed which I don't want on there and I'm worried is causing issues with my rankings. Would a redirect rule work or could someone offer any advice? https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:outdoormegastore.co.uk+inurl:default&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvnsl&filter=0&biw=1600&bih=809#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:outdoormegastore.co.uk+inurl%3Aajax&oq=site:outdoormegastore.co.uk+inurl%3Aajax&gs_l=serp.3...194108.194626.0.194891.4.4.0.0.0.0.100.305.3j1.4.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.SDhuslImrLY&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=ff301ef4d48490c5&biw=1920&bih=860
Technical SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of a site migration, and are at the final stage of testing redirects etc. However, to our horror we've just discovered Google has started indexing the new site. Any ideas on how this could have happened? I have most recently asked for robots.txt to exclude anything with a certain parameter in URL. Is there a chance this, wrongly implemented, could have caused this?
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
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 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
"Site Suspended" in Google Adwords + Lost all rankings in Google => is this related?
Can anyone share thoughts on this: Does the S recently (mid april) we revamped our website (same content, new layout, strong brand), but a few days later our google rep contacted us to tell that she got a "red flag" for one of our SEA campaigns (we broke the bridge page policy, not on purpose to be clear), they were completely correct on this matter. We even got some extra time to correct this, normal policy is only 10 days. But, we were a little slow, so all our Adwords Campaigns are suspended and we get the message "Site suspended". We are working to have this fixed, our Google rep even granted some more time to fix this. Now, almost simultaneously, same time frame, all our new pages, that were already ranking well tx to proper 301 rules, suddenly fell out of the google SERPS, nothing to be found anymore up till now. Our website is live since 1996, no issues, up till now. There seems to be a strong correlation to what happened in our SEA and what happened in our SEO can anyone share some info?
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Google shows the wrong domain for client's homepage
Whenever the homepage of my client's homepage appears in Google results, the search engine is not showing our URL as our domain, but instead a partner domain that is linking to us. (The correct title and meta description of our homepage is showing.) I believe this is caused by the partner website (with a much higher pank rank) linking to our homepage from their footer to a URL with it's own domain that 302 redirects to our homepage. Example: Link: http://www.partnerwebsite.com/?ad2203 302 redirects to: http://www.clientwebsite.com/?moreadtracking The simple fix would be for the client to ask for removal of the 302 hijacking link - but they are uncomfortable with this request since they had requested it prior, and their relationship is not the best. Is there any other way to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Conor_OShea_ETUS0