Help my site it's not being indexed
-
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design....
The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site.
After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do....
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Dan
-
If it makes you feel any better, this is the solution about once a month in Q&A. You're not the first, and you certainly won't be the last!
-
This is way I love the SEOMOZ community no matter how stupid the solution to your problem might be people will let you know.
I feel like an amateur (cause I'm) I think I overtrusted yoast's plugin, Because whenever your are blocking the robots it will tell you, hoewever this time it didn't and the site, through wordpress config, was blocking the site.
I changed it, resubmited the sitemaps, checked the code and updated yoast's great plugin....
Thanks guys... I SEOPromise to check always the code myself
Dan
-
When I go to your page and look at the source code I see this line:
name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />
You are telling the bots not to index the page or follow any links on the page. This is in the source code for your home page.
I'd go back into the wordpress settings (you are using Yoast) and make sure to enable the site for search engine visibility!
Once you do that, and verify that the code is changed to "='index,follow'" then resubmit your sitemaps via webmaster tools.
-
Great tool I'm taking a look right now
thanks
Dan
-
I check GWT everyday, not even one page has been indexed... Nor We have any manual action suggested by google
Thanks
Dan
-
-
A suggestion for the future: use some type of code monitoring service, such as https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php (no relationship with the company, it's just what I use), and have it alert you to any changes in the robots.txt file on both the live and staging environments.
I was in a situation at a previous employment where the development team wasn't the best at SEO, and I had experienced the robots.txt from the dev site being put on the live site, and the other way around, and also things being added to or removed from the robots.txt without our request or knowledge. The verification files for Google and Bing Webmaster Tools would sometimes go missing, too.
I used that code monitor to check once a day and email me if there were changes to the robots.txt or verification files on the live site and the robots.txt of all of our dev and staging sites (to make sure they weren't accidentally indexed). Was a huge help!
-
Yes take another look at that robots file for sure. If you provided us with the domain we might be able to better help you.
Also, go into Webmaster Tools and poke around. Check how many pages are being indexed, look at sitemaps, do a fetch-as-google, etc.
-
Hi Dan
It sounds like your robot.txt are still blocking your site despite the redirects. You might be best getting rid of the robot.txt and starting again ensuring nothing is blocked that it shouldn't.
regards, David
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
-
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Weird behavior with site's rankings
I have a problem with my site's rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mcurius
I rank for higher difficulty (but lower search volume) keywords , but my site gets pushed back for lower difficulty, higher volume keywords, which literally pisses me off. I thought very seriously to start new with a new domain name, cause what ever i do seems that is not working. I will admit that in past (2-3 years ago) i used some of those "seo packages" i had found, but those links which were like no more than 50, are all deleted now, and the domains are disavowed.
The only thing i can think of, is that some how my site got flagged as suspicious or something like that in google. Like 1 month ago, i wrote an article about a topic related with my niche, around a keyword that has difficulty 41%. The search term in 1st page has high authority domains, including a wikipedia page, and i currently rank in the 3rd place. In the other had, i would expect to rank easily for a keyword difficulty of 30-35% but is happening the exact opposite.The pages i try to rank, are not spammy, are checked with moz tools, and also with canirank spam filters. All is good and green. Plus the content of those pages i try to rank have a Content Relevancy Score which varies from 98% to 100%... Your opinion would be very helpful, thank you.0 -
Someone asked me: What's the latest in SEO?
Hi, I'm wondering how others would respond to this question. "What's the latest in SEO?" Someone random asked me this on a plane that does not know much about digital marketing, but has someone else do for their business. I told them the google algortithm is constantly changing and it's always new, that there are about 500 changes a year (thought that was close to right) and then got down to some basic principals. I'm asking how you might answer as I could see someone asking me this within my organization as well. Thanks for any tips on a great answer or resources. Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson321 -
Any reasons why social media properties are ranking higher than the site's own name?
The site below has social media properties and other sites coming up before it's own listing even for the exact search of the site name. Any ideas why this is happening? Link Any input is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
There's NO reason these sites should be beating mine...Or is there?
Hi Over the past 10 months, my internal page rankings (previously excellent) have plummeted. I'm now trying to recover them. I haven't received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, I used to have hundreds of internal links to each of these 21 pages using the same exact-match anchor text eg, Tuscany real estate, Umbria real estate, etc. I changed this about 6 months ago. So why am I still ranking poorly for these (only moderately competitive keywords) behind sites with poorer metrics? 1) Keyword: lake como real estate My page here – **http://tinyurl.com/d34k8m ** -- used to rank No1 or No2 neck-and-neck with this page www.immobiliarevacanzelago.com/. He's still No1 but I’m down to about No13. Yet when I look in Open Site Explorer virtually all my metrics beat his.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Google Site Extended Listing Not Indexed
I am trying to get the new Site map to be picked up by Google for the extended listing as its pulling from the old links and returning 404 errors. How can I get the site listing indexed quickly and have the extended listing get updated to point to the right places. This is the site - http://epaperflip.com/Default.aspx This is the search with the extended listing and some 404's - Broad Match search for "epaperflip"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intergen0 -
Domain Age. What's a good age?
I have a new site that ranks very well and is rich with content. I know that it would rank better but since it's new I'm assuming that it is being held back. My question is how long does it take for a site to mature?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0