Webpages look like they have been de-indexed
-
Hi there,
My webpages seem that they have been de-indexed, I have no page rank anymore for my webpages, my homepage which was a PR4, is now saying N/A, plus lots of my rankings have dropped, what check should I been making to identify that this is the case?
Kind Regards
-
No problem Gary, good luck.
Matt.
-
Thanks for your help Matt, will keep you posted on the progress of this.
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
I would assume that this is the root of the problem. Google themselves have said the following:
"If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search."
Once you have addressed the issues, go into Webmaster Tools and go to your website. Then click on 'Health' then 'Fetch as Google'. Fetch your homepage and then click on 'Submit URl and Linked Pages to Index'.
Only do this once you have rectified your server issues though.
Matt.
-
Hi Matt,
I have just checked webmaster tools and saw that there is over 900 server errors, it does seem likely this is the reason why all of these pages have dropped and no page has any PR, what do you think?
Is there a way of submitting all of these at once?
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
Yes that sounds like a server error. If you are getting a lot of 500 errors then Google will punish your website for this as they will assume that it isn't functioning correctly.
Take a look into the pages that are getting 500 errors and have a word with your web hosting company to see if they can look into the root of the problem with the server.
Once you have managed to sort out the issues with your server, go into Google Webmaster Tools and ask Google to fetch your site using Googlebot, then if there are no errors, re-submit the site to be crawled and indexed.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
-
Hi Matt,
It all happened the other day. I just recieved a notice that SEOmoz have crawled my website and noticed that there is literally hundreds of 500 errors on my webpages, could this be the reason why there is no PR and all my rankings have dropped?
Kind Regards
-
Hi Gary,
This could be for a number of reasons, bearing in mind that there has been a shed load of new algorithm updates from Google recently! The first step to take is to try and identify the rough date that you started to lose rankings.
This way you will be able to understand which update may have affected your website. Go into your Google Analytics and have a look at the organic search traffic coming to your website; if it is showing a dip around the end (24th) of April, then you may have been hit by the Penguin update (like a lot of us).
The Penguin update punished a lot of websites for their linking methods, i.e. having a lot of the same anchor text on links back to your website, having links in the footer areas of websites, duplicating links across single domains many times, linking from link-network websites, etc. If you think that your website may have any links like these then you may be at risk.
Take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools as well as http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and take a deeper look into your linking profile to see who is linking to you and how they are linking. If you start to see a pattern emerging, contact the sites and see if you can get those bad links changed.
If you think that everything in terms of links looks good then let me know and I will try to help find what else it could be.
Matt.
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
-
Potential issue: Page design might look like keyword stuffing to a web crawler
We have an interesting design element we might try on our home page. Here's a mockup: https://codepen.io/dsbudiac/pen/Bwrgjd I'm worried web crawlers will interpret this as keyword stuffing and affect our rankings. It features: Mostly transparent/hidden text Repeating keyword list I could try a couple methods to skirt around crawling concerns: Load keywords through an iframe Make the keywords an image (would significantly increase page load) Inject keywords after page load into a container w/ javascript (prob not effective as crawlers are only getting better at indexing javascript) Load the keywords into an svg element Load the keywords into a canvas element via javascript I have a few questions: Should I be concerned about any potential keyword stuffing / SEO issues with this design? Can you comment on the effectiveness (with proof) of the above strategies? Am I better off just abandoning this type of design?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
How can a Page indexed without crawled?
Hey moz fans,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
In the google getting started guide it says **"
Note: **Pages may be indexed despite never having been crawled: the two processes are independent of each other. If enough information is available about a page, and the page is deemed relevant to users, search engine algorithms may decide to include it in the search results despite never having had access to the content directly. That said, there are simple mechanisms such as robots meta tags to make sure that pages are not indexed.
" How can it happen, I dont really get the point.
Thank you0 -
Recovering from index problem (Take two)
Hi all. This is my second pass at the problem. Thank you for your responses before, I think I'm narrowing it down! Below is my original message. Afterwards, I've added some update info. For a while, we've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/. Everything was going swimmingly, and we had a top 5 ranking for the term 'bird hides' for this page - http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/bird-hides. Then disaster struck! The client added a link with a faulty parameter in the Joomla back end that caused a bunch of duplicate content issues. Before this happened, all the site's 19 pages were indexed. Now it's just a handful, including the faulty URL (thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/index.php?id=13) This shows the issue pretty clearly. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Athewilddeckcompany.co.uk&oq=site%3Athewilddeckcompany.co.uk&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2178j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 I've removed the link, redirected the bad URL, updated the site map and got some new links pointing at the site to resolve the problem. Yet almost two month later, the bad URL is still showing in the SERPs and the indexing problem is still there. UPDATE OK, since then I've blocked the faulty parameter in the robots.txt file. Now that page has disappeared, but the right one - http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/bird-hides - has not been indexed. It's been like this for several week. Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
What Does Penguin Recover Look Like?
Is a recovery from Penguin immediate once Google recognized that you've fixed the problem or is it a slow and steady recovery? I think we may have fixed our issue which is why we're seeing an immediate spike in traffic from Google organic search results. Our daily traffic was up more than 100% in a single day. Is this a recovery? At which speed have other sites you manage recovered? EoZJDZ2.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | voicesdotcom0 -
Duplicate Sub-domains Being Indexed
Hi all, I have this site that has a sub-domain that is meant to be a "support" for clients. Some sort of FAQ pages, if you will. A lot of them are dynamic URLs, hence, the title and most of the content are duplicated. Crawl Diagnostics found 52 duplicate content, 138 duplicate title and a lot other errors. My question is, what would be the best practice to fix this issue? Should I noindex and nofollow all of its subdomains? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardDennis0 -
Indexing an e-commerce site
Hi all, My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category. The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress. In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress? More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jenga110 -
Sudden Change In Indexed Pages
Every week I check the number of pages indexed by google using the "site:" function. I have set up a permanent redirect from all the non-www pages to www pages. When I used to run the function for the: non-www pages (i.e site:mysite.com), would have 12K results www pages (i.e site:www.mysite.com) would have about 36K The past few days, this has reversed! I get 12K for www pages, and 36K for non-www pages. Things I have changed: I have added canonical URL links in the header, all have www in the URL. My questions: Is this cause for concern? Can anyone explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
No index, follow vs. canonical url
We have a site that consists almost entirely as a directory of videos. Example here: http://realtree.tv/channels/realtreeoutdoorsclassics We're trying to figure out the best way to handle pagination and utility features such as sort for most recent, most viewed, etc. We've been reading countless articles on this topic, but so far have been unable to determine what might be considered the industry standard. Two solutions seem to stand out... Using the canonical url on all the sorted and paginated pages. However, after reading many blog posts, it seems that you should NEVER use the canonical url to solve the issue of paginated, and thus duplicated content because the search bots will never crawl past the first page leaving many results not in the index. (We are considering ruling this method out.) Another solution seems to be using the meta tag for noindex, follow so that a search engine like Google will crawl your directory pages but not add them to the index themselves. All links are followed so content is crawled and any passing link juice remains unchanged. However, I did see a few articles skeptical of this solution as well saying that there are always better alternatives, or that there is no verification that search engines obey this meta tag. This has placed some doubt in our minds. I was hoping to get some expert advice on these methods as it would pertain to our site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0