Google search issue with exact domain
-
We had a site from Feb-2011 to Nov-2011 at the domain amcoexterminating.com. The site was pure HTML/CSS and the daily unique visitors steadily increased over that time. So all was fine.
We then moved the site to a CMS (Joomla) on Dec. 6th. From that day forward, the daily visitors went into the tank.
Before the move, if you typed "amcoexterminating.com" or "amco exterminating" into Google search, the site would be the first result (as you'd expect since those are the words that make up the actua domain). But we tried this yesterday and the site did not come up at all. NOT GOOD. It would work in Yahoo or Bing, but not in Google. So obviously, the problem with Google search directly affected the daily visitors.
We just checked Webmaster tools yesterday (yes, this should have been done sooner, lesson learned) and it said "Site has severe health issues - Important page blocked by robots.txt". It listed the "important" page URL and it was just a link to an image. Regardless, I wiped out the Joomla created robots.txt file and added a new one and made it just say...
User-agent: *Allow: /
About 14 hours later, after the new robots.txt file was recognized by Google, the "severe health" message went away. However if I search in Google for "amcoexterminating.com", it still doesn't show up and the client is concerned (as they should be).
Do you think the search engines just need more time to refresh? If so, once it refreshes, should the site show up first again right away?
Or is it possible the robots.txt file had nothing to do with the issue? If so, what other things could I check into that might cause Google search to not find a site even if you search for exact domain name?
Please share any and all things I should look into as I need to get this site showing in Google search again (as it was before moving to the CMS).
Thanks!
-
Sorry I never replied...It all looks good now.
-
Hi Rob,
How are things going on this site? Are your rankings back, or are you still looking for some help?
-
Yes thats all you needed to do.
it should come back, with ine a few weeks
-
Update: I found this code in my htaccess file...
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
So I commented it out like so..
#Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
And resaved it.
I imagine this is all I needed to do. If you think I should have done something else, please let me know.
-
Thanks Robert, the answer to your two "Edit" questions is Yes (htaccess.txt was renamed to .htaccess and "seo friendly URLs" was selected as YES).
It makes sense that what Alan suspects is my main problem (i.e. there is a no-index, no-follow on the homepage) so I'm hoping he can point me in the right direction to correct it. If you know and see my reply before he does, please let me know
-
Thanks for the heads up on the canonical issues, will correct that.
As for this X-robots header, do you know where I can find that code to either change the no-index, no-follow to index, follow, or delete it completely? I tried to view what you said in IE, but when I click F12, the window that pops up doesn't have a "Networks" tab.
I am searching my site files for X-robots header and can't find this area, so if you could give me any insight on correcting this, I would be very appreciative. If that is the problem (and I trust that it is), I really gotta get it fixed ASAP
Side note you may not know: If I correct the X-robots header to be index, follow, should the site start showing up again in Google results immediately or could it take longer?
-
Rob, you have a problem. Or two.
First, somehow your images files are showing up and I believe this is causing a duplicate content issue. If I were to guess, I would say that you are new to joomla and may have set something up incorrectly. Without seeing your Joomla dashboard, it is hard to say exactly what is going on though.
When you do a Site:www.amcoexterminating.com or Site:amcoexterminating.com you get mostly images and pdfs. You also see excluded content and when you click on it you see the same.
The only site url that is not a pdf is http://www.amcoexterminating.com/images/ so Google is not seeing any other url. This is due to Robots.txt or bad site map, Joomla settings that control these, etc.
I wish I could be of more help, but without seeing what the settings are in the dashboard, I cannot find the issue (using firebug, etc.).
Best
Edit: Alan has some good info in his response. Also, in Joomla on the Global Configuration there is an SEO Settings near top on right. Within that is a selection for Use Apache mod_rewrite if you selected this did you rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before you activated this?
Above it is a selection for search engine friendly urls, have you selected that? -
No I cant see one image blocked being the problem, you should not block images, js or css files that are used on pages that are not blocked, it is not a problem alone, but if there are any other signals of spam, then the fact that you hide these files is then seen as a suspicious signal.
I am not a fan of CMS, as they do not write clean code. I had a look at your site and found many problems. The worst is canonical issues, you home page rank is split between
http://www.amcoexterminating.com/index.php
http://www.amcoexterminating.com
http://amcoexterminating.com/index.php
http://amcoexterminating.comYou need to fix your canonical issues.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issuesbut the reason you cant find your page in Google is you have a X-robots header of no-index, no-follow. You have a index, follow meta tag, but the header must be overruling it.
If you want to see this for yourself. in IE press F12, select the network tab and start capturing. Load your home page, then click on the home page url in the results and select response headers.
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
-
Do more links from sub-domains to domain (website) hurt rankings?
Hi all, If there are multiple sub-domains like abc.website.com, 123.website.com, etc...and if the top pages of website are linked from multiple sub-domains via top menu or footer links; will this hurts? Will too much interlinking of few top pages of a website from it's sub-domains dilute link juice? How many links ideally we can add to website from a sub-domain? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
URLs appear in Google Webmaster Tools that I can't find on my own site?!?
Hi, I have a Magento e-commerce site (clothing) and when I had a look through some of the sections in Google Webmaster Tools I found URLs that I can't find on my site. For example, a product url maybe http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/ which is fine. In that product there maybe three sizes of the product (Small, Medium, Large) and for some reason Googlebot is sometimes finding a url like: http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/1202/ has been found and when clicked on is a live url (Status code: 200) with is one of the sizes (medium). However I have ran a site crawl in Screaming Frog and other crawl tests and can't seem to find where Googlebot is finding these URLs. I think I need to: 1. Find how Googlebot is finding these urls? 2. Find out how to keep out of index (e.g. robots.txt, canonical etc.... Any help would be much appreciated and I'm happy to share the URL with members if they think they can have a look and help with this problem. I can share specific URLs which might make the issue seem clearer, let me know? Thanks, Darrell
Web Design | | clickyleap0 -
Website spread over two domains - The Good,The Bad and the Ugly ?
Hi, I am wondering if the way I have set up our website site is creating more harm than good ? All our SEO efforts and content is located @ www.sparrowmakeup.com.au however our portfolio is located at www.make-up-artists.com.au. Questions ? Will Analytic bounce rates effect my SERP, as most people click on the portfolio link in the first 5-15 sec of landing on our page ?? Is there a better way of setting it up ? the reason I set it up like this in the first place was because we wanted a different look/theme for the portfolio. (using WP) Is there any other issues that this setup might have in the SEO / SERP department ?? Is there any benefits and how can I maximize on them (silver lining) Your help and experience is greatly appreciated. Regards Ed
Web Design | | EdsonGroupMedia0 -
Google Tag Manager
I recently discovered the Google Tag Manager and I am in the process of updating many of my websites with this feature. I am using Tag Manager to mange Google Analytics, Google Remarketing, Alive Chat, Woopra, etc. I have one question about how Tag Manager actually works. As best I can tell, the Tag Manager code snippet that I insert into my web pages is the same for all my websites and does not include a unique ID. If that is the case, then Tag Manager must search all the URLs in the TM database to find a match. What is to stop someone else from adding some rules for my URLs to their containers? I expect Google has a method to ensure proper matching, but I'm not clear on how that is enforced. Best,
Web Design | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
How to fix and issue with robot.txt ?
I am receiving the following error message through webmaster tools http://www.sourcemarketingdirect.com/: Googlebot can't access your site Oct 26, 2012
Web Design | | skehoe
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 35 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%. The site has dropped out of Google search.0 -
.me.uk or .com domain with hyphen?
Hi Mozzers Just after some opinions really. Basically a client wants a restaurant website developing and had already chosen a name for it as (example) "englishroserestaurant.co.uk". They wanted to register it themselves but unfortunately before they had time to someone else did. Now they have come back to me and said about using the name (example) "englishrose.me.uk". I know these .me.uk names are supposedly for personal websites and not businesses but I assume that, by itself, shouldn't be an issue as there are many commercial sites that do use them. However as all the combinations have been taken I have suggested that they use a "domain-domain.com as an alternative so just wanted to know which option you guys would go for out of: 1. englishrose.me.uk 2. english-rose.com Although I avoid hyphens whenever I can in this instance 100% I would go for number 2 as it's only one hyphen and it's a business and looks more professional......having said that I would welcome any comments or opinions. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | TrevorJones0 -
International SEO issues for multiple sites
We currently have 3 websites: oursite.co.uk oursite.fr oursite.ch We also own Oursite.com, and that URL currently redirects to Oursite.fr. We are considering a complete site redesign and a possible merge of the 3 sites. Assumptions: ** the 3 sites currently receive organic search traffic to varying degrees
Web Design | | darkgreenguy
** Oursite.ch is almost identical to Oursite.fr in terms of the site content
** Our target market is NOT the USA for English-language searches. It is the UK. With a re-design, we see our options as follows: Merge the 3 sites and make Oursite.com the "main site" and then have subfolders as follows: /uk /fr /ch Keep the 3 sites as they are. We see Option 1 as the best in terms of saving time when updating the site, and saving money paid to the site developers (1 site vs 3 sites). We see Option 2 as the best in terms of ability of the site to rank, as well as confidence of searchers when seeing our site in the search results (in other words, a person searching in France would be more likely to buy and/or submit a form on our site if they saw Oursite.fr vs Oursite.com/fr). I guess we're looking for some suggestions/guidance here. Are we missing any big issues? Does anyone have experience with an issue such as this? Thank you in advance...
-Shawn0 -
How long does Google take to re-cache a site?
Specifically, I just redesigned my site. I'm reading Danny Dovers book, and learned about checking the cache version of the site to see what google is REALLY seeing . . . . . . which evidently is my old site. Obviously, my sites not going to make any real progress with SEO as long as the site is out of date. It says it last checked the site on 5/5 and I launched the site on 5/9. Obviously, it does not do these things immediately, but anyone have any ideas on how long it should take before google starts to show me some love?
Web Design | | damon12120