Previously ranking #1 in google, web page has 301 / url rewrite, indexed but now showing for keyword search?
-
Two web pages on my website, previously ranked well in google, consistent top 3 places for 6months+, but when the site was modified, these two pages previously ending .php had the page names changed to the keyword to further improve (or so I thought). Since then the page doesn't rank at all for that search term in google.
I used google webmaster tools to remove the previous page from Cache and search results, re submitted a sitemap, and where possible fixed links to the new page from other sites. On previous advice to fix I purchased links, web directories, social and articles etc to the new page but so far nothing... Its been almost 5 months and its very frustrating as these two pages previously ranked well and as a landing page ended in conversions.
This problem is only appearing in google. The pages still rank well in Bing and Yahoo. Google has got the page indexed if I do a search by the url, but the page never shows under any search term it should, despite being heavily optimised for certain terms. I've spoke to my developers and they are stumped also, they've now added this text to the effected page(s) to see if this helps.
Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
$newurl=SITE_URL.$seo;
Header("Location:$newurl");Can Google still index a web page but refuse to show it in search results? All other pages on my site rank well, just these two that were once called something different has caused issues?
Any advice? Any ideas, Have I missed something? Im at a loss...
-
Do you want to give me the old url to double check for you? You can personal message me if you don't want it to be public.
-
I should also say that was for the old URL it says Success with the button "submit to index" no mention of any 301?
-
Ran the fetch as google, says Success with a button "submit to index". Should I click the submit button?
-
If you used the remove URL tool to only remove page 1 from the index then that's why it won't be ranking, I'm guessing page 2 wasn't removed using this tool? I don't think the canonical tag would help you in this situation as you're now telling Google that page 2 is the same as a page you've already told them not to index!
Just to confirm, when you used the redirect checker did you put in the old url and it says 301? It's worth using the fetch as GoogleBot tool inside Webmaster tools and then adding the old url to be crawled again so that they can see it has been moved permanently. If the 301 was only implemented properly 2 weeks ago there is still the chance it will come back!
-
Thanks for the advice, just checked and it is saying "301 Moved Permanently" Which I'm assuming is correct.
But I must admit Im confused as to why the page is not ranking well. The page is a list of products and it ran on to a second page, the url being the same just with /page-2 at the end. Weirdly the page 2 started ranking but not the original. I then added rel="canonical" back to the original page, thinking this would help, but all this did was stop indexing page 2 and the original page still doesn't show...
Tearing my hair out!!!
The latest 301 redirect code was added 2 weeks ago, it did have 301 redirect before, but it was done in a different way...
**Previous Code : **
Header("Location:/$seo,true,301"); -
It sounds like you went about this in the wrong way. What you should have done first is 301 redirect the old url to the new url and then update all you sites links to also point to the new url. You have used webmaster tools to specifically tell Google not to index that page and therefore it has lost all of it's authority (the 301 would have passed most of the authority on from the start)
Use this tool and insert your old url and make sure the header returned definitely says "301 Moved permanently". How long ago was the 301 implemented? It may still recover once Google picks up the redirect.
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
-
News articles on our website are being indexed, but not showing up for search queries.
News articles on distributed.com are being indexed by Google, but not showing up for any search queries. In Google Search, I can copy and paste the entire first paragraph of the article, and the listing still won't show up in search results. For example, https://distributed.com/news/dtcc-moves-closer-blockchain-powered-trades doesn't rank AT ALL for "DTCC Moves Closer to Blockchain-Powered Trades", the title of the article. We've tried the following so far: re-submitted sitemap to search console checked manual actions in search console checked for any no-index/no-follow tags Please help us solve this SEO mystery!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BTC_Inc0 -
Is it best to 301 redirect or use canonical Url when consolidating two pages?
I have build several pages (A and B) with high quantity content. Page A is aged and gets lots of organic traffic, ranks for lots of valuable keywords, and has only internal links to this page. Page B is newer (6 months) and gets little traffic, ranks for no keywords, but has terrific content and many high value external links. As Page A and B are related to a similar theme, I was going to merge content from page B onto page A, but don't know which would be the best approach for handling the links going to page B. For the purposes of keep as much link equity as possible, is it best to us a 301 redirect from B to A or use a canonical URL from B to A?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia0 -
Organic Listings showing Google Tag Manager + Google Page Title...?
I'm a bit stumped with this. I optimise all my titles etc for Australia - and now the organic liatings are showing something strange. For example ( we sell health supplements ) Meta title = "My Product , Buy Online Australia" If I type "My Product" - the title in the organic listings says "My Product - My Company Limited" - and the only place I can see it getting that from is a combination of Meta Data used in Google Tag Manager + the Name on my Google places page. This is much more obvious for categories.. but it's a pain in the butt. If I type "My Product Australia" Then the original "My Product , Buy Online Australia" comes up. Any ideas on policy etc? I have taken the "Limited" off the Google business page - so hopefully this will change over time - but I can't find any information on why google would do something like this. If you had shed any light on this - would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search?
How to setup multiple pages in Google Search? I have seen sites that are arranged in google like : Website in Google
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael
About us. Contact us
Services. Etc.. Kindly review screenshot. Is this can achieved by Yoast Plugin? X9vMMTw.png0 -
Homepage not showing up in Google even when searching exact title tag
why does my site not show up in Google even when you search exact homepage title tag or business name (Brand-It Web Design)? You can even search the exact title tag for my site and it does not show up. If you search site:branditwebdesign.com you will see that it is there. But just the homepage doesn't show up in search for anything else. We have probably tried everything in the world to get this working. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brand_It_Web_Design0 -
Thousands of Web Pages Disappered from Google Index
The site is - http://shop.riversideexports.com We checked webmaster tools, nothing strange. Then we manually resubmitted using webmaster tools about a month ago. Now only seeing about 15 pages indexed. The rest of the sites on our network are heavily indexed and ranking really well. BUT the sites that are using a sub domain are not. Could this be a sub domain issue? If so, how? If not, what is causing this? Please advise. UPDATE: What we can also share is that the site was cleared twice in it's lifetime - all pages deleted and re-generated. The first two times we had full indexing - now this site hovers at 15 results in the index. We have many other sites in the network that have very similar attributes (such as redundant or empty meta) and none have behaved this way. The broader question is how to do we get the indexing back ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | suredone0 -
Howcome Google is indexing one day 2500 pages and the other day only 150 then 2000 again ect?
This is about an big affiliate website of an customer of us, running with datafeeds... Bad things about datafeeds: Duplicate Content (product descriptions) Verrryyyy Much (thin) product pages (sometimes better to noindex, i know, but this customer doesn't want to do that)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Why will google not index my pages?
About 6 weeks ago we moved a subcategory out to becomne a main category using all the same content. We also removed 100's of old products and replaced these with new variation listings to remove duplicate content issues. The problem is google will not index 12 critcal pages and our ranking have slumped for the keywords in the categories. What can i do to entice google to index these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0