Help my site it's not being indexed
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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
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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!
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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
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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.
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Great tool I'm taking a look right now
thanks
Dan
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I check GWT everyday, not even one page has been indexed... Nor We have any manual action suggested by google
Thanks
Dan
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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!
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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.
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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
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