Very well established blog, new posts now being indexed very late
-
I have an established blog.We update it on daily basis. In the past, when I would publish a new post, it would get indexed within a minute or so.
But since a month or so, its taking hours. Sometimes like 10-12 hours for new posts to get indexed. Only thing I have changed is robots.txt.
This is the current robots file.
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content/plugins Disallow: /wp-content/cache Disallow: /wp-content/themes Disallow: /wp-login.php Disallow: /*wp-login.php* Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /feed Disallow: /comments Disallow: /author Disallow: /category Disallow: */trackback Disallow: */feed Disallow: */comments Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /wget/ Disallow: /httpd/ Disallow: /*.php$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*.js$ Disallow: /*.inc$ Disallow: /*.css$ Disallow: /*.gz$ Disallow: /*.wmv$ Disallow: /*.cgi$ Disallow: /*.xhtml$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*? Allow: /wp-content/uploads User-agent: TechnoratiBot/8.1 Disallow: # ia_archiver User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / # disable duggmirror User-agent: duggmirror Disallow: / # allow google image bot to search all images User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /wp-includes/ Allow: /* # allow adsense bot on entire site User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: Allow: /* Sitemap: http://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.gz
Site has tons of backlinks. Just wondering if something is wrong with the robots file or if it could be something else.
-
The robots.txt file is designed to completely block content. Normally, if your robots.txt file was a factor then your content would not appear in SERPs at all.
It is possible for content to appear in SERPs even though it is blocked by robots.txt if it is linked from other sources. Since this is new content, it is less likely that is the case unless you are immediately sharing links and Google is seeing those links within the time frame you shared.
The first place I would look is your sitemap or whatever tool is used to inform Google that you have new content. When you publish a new blog article, your software should ping Google and inform them there is new content. That is where any investigation should begin. Next step is to check server logs to see how long it takes Google to respond to the alert. If it takes them 12 hours, then there is nothing further you can do about it.
I would be interested in a lot more detail. How many articles how you confirmed as being affected by this issue. Exactly how did you confirm the issue?
As a side note, your robots.txt file is bloated and doesn't adhere to any standards I have seen. How exactly was it created? Did someone go in and make manual modifications to the file?
-
Are you using Feedburner? Has the feed publishing service gotten out of sync? You can re-sync it under the Troubleshootize section.
-
Yes, its a wordpress site and I always had the all in one SEO plugin enabled.
-
Do you use a word press platform? If so do you use a SEO plug in. Different plug ins can effect the index time.
-
Do you use a word press platform? If so do you use a SEO plug in. Different plug ins can effect the index time.
-
Could you possibly reverse the changes of the robots.txt to a previous "working" version where your site was getting indexed quicker?
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
-
Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
I have this problem for the site's blog
Technical SEO | | seomozplan196
There is no problem when I check the yoast plugin setting , but some of my blog content is not on the map site but indexed. Did you have such a problem? What is the cause? my website name is missomister1 -
Google Not Indexing Submitted Images
Hi Guys! My question isn't too dissimilar to one asked a couple of years ago, regarding Google and image indexing, but having put my web address into a Google image search, I get a return of 15 images, so something isn't right. 5 months ago I submitted our 'new' site to Google webmaster. We have just moved it onto a Shopify platform. They (Shopify) are good at providing places to add titles and Alt tags and likewise we fill them in (so that box ticked!) However I have noticed over the last couple of months that despite 161 images being submitted, only 51 have been indexed. Furthermore and as I said earlier, when you put our site, site:http://www.hartnackandco.com into Google images, it only returns a total of 15 images. Any suggestions and help would be wonderful! Cheers Nick
Technical SEO | | nick_HandCo0 -
Is this a Risky Blog Move?
I have a client who's thinking of placing their blog on a separate domain because the plug-ins and various other functionality is becoming bulky and slowing things down for the main site. There will be a 'Blog' link on the company's website navigation, just as there is now, that will take people to the blog. As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones. In my research I came across these two points: All backlinks to blog posts contribute directly to a website’s OVERALL SEO strength because those backlinks are pointing to your main domain. Removing them may reduce overall link juice to the site. Simply having fewer content pages on the site will cause entire site to rank lower because Google loves content-rich authority sites. Does anyone know this to be true for sure? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
~Caro0 -
Changing URL of posts
HI, I need to change the urls and permalink structure of my blogposts. How I have to deal all this with google? Do I have to re-submit the pages to google with fetch as google? Will google display duplicate content of the same article ( having changed the url) or will it automatically replace the old url with the new ones? Tx for your support guys!
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
I'm getting duplicate content created with a random string of character added to the end of my blog post permalinks?
In an effort to clean up my blog content I noticed that I have a lot of posts getting tagged for duplicate content. It looks like ... http://carwoo.com/blog/october-sales-robust-stateside-european-outlook-poor-for-ford http://carwoo.com/blog/october-sales-robust-stateside-european-outlook-poor-for-ford/954bf0df0a0d02b700a06816f2276fa5/ Any thoughts on how and why this would be happening?
Technical SEO | | editabletext0 -
Spam posts indexed, what to do now?
Hi, So we had a staff problem last week and we let some spam posts (cheap nike jerseys etc.) that also got indexed by Google. (We just checked and there are lik 105 already indexed) Of course we have now removed all these spam posts but what is the best practice at this point? Are we supposed to do something else to remove these from Google's index? (maybe through google webmaster tools?) We have already edited robots.txt to disallow those pages as a quick remedy. And finally, could this have done any harm? We were quite slow noticing these posts to remove them. They were there for about 12 days. thanks
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
Instant Indexing
I've been working on a site for a while now, methodically building content and building trust and authority. Lately I've noticed that anything I publish there appears to be instantly indexed by Google, which surprises me. I haven't had this happen before so I'm curious. I'd be interested to hear the experience of others.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Supplementary Index
Hi - Is there a way of checking whether pages are in the supplementary index? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110