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
-
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Help with Best Content Posting Approach - WordPress site
I have a word document that i would like to add to my wordpress site as a page. The document has a large detailed flow chart of a complex legal process. (about 20+ boxes in the flow chart). I do not want to add it as an image because i want search engines to read/index the information in the flow chart. any suggestions to post this detailed flow chart on a WP page in the best SEO manner? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CamiloSC0 -
Please help :) Troubles getting 3 types of content de-indexed
Hi there,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ltsmz
I know that it takes time and I have already submitted a URL removal request 3-4 months ago.
But I would really appreciate some kind advice on this topic. Thank you in advance to everyone who contributes! 1) De-indexing archives Google had indexed all my:
/tag/
/authorname/
archives. I have set them as no-index a few months ago but they still appear in search engine.
Is there anything I can do to speed up this de-indexing? 2) De-index /plugins/ folder in wordpress site They have also indexed all my /plugins/ folder. So I have added a disallow /plugin/ in my robots.txt 3-4 months ago, but /plugins/ still appear in search engine. What can I do to get the /plugins/ folder de-indexed?
Is my disallow /plugins/ in robots.txt making it worse because google has already indexed it and not it can't access the folder? How do you solve this? 3) De-index a subdomain I had created a subdomain containing adult content, and have it completely deleted it from my cpanel 3months ago, but it still appears in search engines. Anything else I can do to get it de-indexed? Thank you in advance for your help!0 -
Where's all the text?
Hi, We recently (yesterday) had a developer make a new site for us on Wix http://www.appointeddhq.com/ as the one we were planning to put up had a few teething issues (the beackend booking system wasn't ready and we needed something up immediately for a TV show we were being featured in). Having now had the chance to look through it, I'm not quite sure what's going on. None of the text appears to be there on any page, I can't find any of the descriptions we gave the developer, the alt tags behind pictures (and even the pics themselves) don't appear to be there, the URLs are messed up, titles are incorrect and there are no title tags to be found. Am I misunderstanding or is the whole site built in java? Obviously, this is quite a huge issue and I'll want to get it sorted immediately, but I thought it best to see what the good folks here though. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
DCMI and Google's rich snippets
I haven't seen any consistent information regarding DCMI tags for organic SEO in a couple of years. Webmaster Tools obviously has a rich set of instructions for microdata. Has there been any updated testing on DCMI or information above the whisper/rumor stage on whether engines will be using Dublin? As a final point, would it be worth going back to static pages that haven't been touched in a couple of years and updating them with microdata? It seems a natural for retail sites and maybe some others, but what about content heavy pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyseo0