Google can't access/crawl my site!
-
Hi
I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings.
[URL Errors: 1st photo]
8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up.
The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages.
After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked.
Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get:
[Fetch as Google: 2nd photo]
From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles).
What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings?
Thanks a lot
Granit -
What did you do specifically to mitigate the problem? You can PM me, if you would like.
-
This applies to the guy from Albania.
Oh, this IS the guy from Albania. Never mind.
-
Great, thanks for letting us know what happened with this!
-
Hi all
Just wanted to let you know that we fixed the problem. We disabled CloudFlare which we found out was blocking Google bots. More about this issue can be found at: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169806-I-m-getting-Google-Crawler-Errors-What-should-I-do-
-
Hi Travis, thank you for your time.
Great for your friend, I also suggest to visit Kosovo someday, you will have great time here, for sure
Back to the issue:
Here is an interesting issue that is happening with the crawler.
Our own cms uses htaccess for rewrite purposes. I created 2 new files that are independent from CMS and tried to fetch them with WMT, and it worked like a charm.
These 2 independent files are:
www.gazetaexpress.com/test_manaferra.php
www.gazetaexpress.com/xhezidja.php
Then, I created an ajax page with our CMS, which contains only plain text, tried to fetch it by WMT and strangely enough it didn't work. To make sure that the .htaccess file is not affecting this behavior, I deleted the htaccess and tried to fetch it, but it didn't worked.
The ajax page is: www.gazetaexpress.com/page/xhezidja/?pageSEO=false
The site works perfectly for humans which access it via the browser.
I'm more than confused now!
-
A friend of mine just got back from Kosovo. It was the last stop on a tour of the Balkans. He had a pretty good time. Moving along...
I crawled about 12K URLs and hit almost 90 Internal Server Errors (500). It's probably not your core problem, but it's something to look at. Here are a few examples:
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/blihet/?search_category_id=1&searchFilter=1
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/shitet/?category_id=134&searchFilter=1
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/me-qera/?category_id=131&searchFilter=1
There was one actual page that threw a 500 at the time of crawl:
http://www.gazetaexpress.com/mistere/edhe-kesaj-i-thuhet-veze-22591/
The edhe kesaj page now resolves fine. (I'm not even going to pretend to understand or write Albanian.)
So there may be some issues with the server or hosting. If you haven't already, try this troubleshooter from Cloudflare.
-
Ah OK - well keep us updated with what you find. Someone else will chip in with other info if they have some
-Andy
-
We are suspecting that CloudFlare might be causing these troubles. We are trying everything, in the meantime i'm looking here to see if anyone has any similar experience or an idea for solution.
As for warnings, the only warning we had was the one last week (8/23/14) saying that Google bot can't acces our site:
Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 316 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 7.5%.
-Granit
-
It doesn't look like a firewall, as I can crawl it with Screaming Frog. However, the server logs will be able to answer that one for you.
Without looking in depth, I'm not seeing anything that stands out to me - do you think that there have been changes to the server that could cause issues? What firewall is the server running? Also, if there were errors in crawling the site, you would see a warning about this.
-Andy
-
In mid-march website changed it's CMS but i don't think that could be the reason because until this week everything was working perfectly. I don't think it could have been compromised too. I'm still suspecting it could be the firewall blocking bots from crawling the site, but the server administrator couldn't find any evidence of this.
-
Hi Granit,
Has any work been done to the site in the last 2-3 months? Have you had any warnings in webmaster tools at all? I did once see a strange problem where Google wasn't crawling a site correctly because it had been compromised, but after checking, there is nothing like this on yours.
-Andy
-
No prb. Thanks a lot for your time. Let just hope that someone in the community will help with a solution
-
Unfortunately, I don't have a quick answer for you. Looking forward to seeing what other community members have to say on this one!
-
I'm looking at the http version in GWT
-
If I do a site:gazetaexpress.com in Google, I get some results that are http, and some results that are https. The https ones say there is an SSL connection error.
Are you looking at the http or https version in GWT?
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
-
Can anyone help me diagnose an indexing/sitemap issue on a large e-commerce site?
Hey guys. Wondering if someone can help diagnose a problem for me. Here's our site: https://www.flagandbanner.com/ We have a fairly large e-commerce site--roughly 23,000 urls according to crawls using both Moz and Screaming Frog. I have created an XML sitemap (using SF) and uploading to Webmaster Tools. WMT is only showing about 2,500 urls indexed. Further, WMT is showing that Google is indexing only about 1/2 (approx. 11,000) of the urls. Finally (to add even more confusion), when doing a site search on Google (site:) it's only showing about 5,400 urls found. The numbers are all over the place! Here's the robots.txt file: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webrocket
Allow: /
Disallow: /aspnet_client/
Disallow: /httperrors/
Disallow: /HTTPErrors/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /test/ Disallow: /i_i_email_friend_request
Disallow: /i_i_narrow_your_search
Disallow: /shopping_cart
Disallow: /add_product_to_favorites
Disallow: /email_friend_request
Disallow: /searchformaction
Disallow: /search_keyword
Disallow: /page=
Disallow: /hid=
Disallow: /fab/* Sitemap: https://www.flagandbanner.com/images/sitemap.xml Anyone have any thoughts as to what our problems are?? Mike0 -
Staging/Development Site Indexed?
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well. I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site. I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Google crawling different content--ever ok?
Here are a couple of scenarios I'm encountering where Google will crawl different content than my users on initial visit to the site--and which I think should be ok. Of course, it is normally NOT ok, I'm here to find out if Google is flexible enough to allow these situations: 1. My mobile friendly site has users select a city, and then it displays the location options div which includes an explanation for why they may want to have the program use their gps location. The user must choose the gps, the entire city, or he can enter a zip code, or choose a suburb of the city, which then goes to the link chosen. OTOH it is programmed so that if it is a Google bot it doesn't get just a meaningless 'choose further' page, but rather the crawler sees the page of results for the entire city (as you would expect from the url), So basically the program defaults for the entire city results for google bot, but for for the user it first gives him the initial ability to choose gps. 2. A user comes to mysite.com/gps-loc/city/results The site, seeing the literal words 'gps-loc' in the url goes out and fetches the gps for his location and returns results dependent on his location. If Googlebot comes to that url then there is no way the program will return the same results because the program wouldn't be able to get the same long latitude as that user. So, what do you think? Are these scenarios a concern for getting penalized by Google? Thanks, Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Google de-indexed a page on my site
I have a site which is around 9 months old. For most search terms we rank fine (including top 3 rankings for competitive terms). Recently one of our pages has been fluctuating wildly in the rankings and has now disappeared altogether from the rankings for over 1 week. As a test I added a similar page to one of my other sites and it ranks fine. I've checked webmaster tools and there is nothing of note there. I'm not really sure what to do at this stage. Any advice would me much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deelo5550 -
How can I rank a national site for local terms
Hi All I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on. In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful. Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
E-Commerce site - How do I geo-target towns/cities/states if there aren't any store locations?
Site = e-commerce Products = clothing (no apparel can be location specific like sports gear where you can do the location specific team gear (NBA, NFL, etc)) Problems = a. no store front b. I don't want to do any sitewides (footers, sidebars, etc) because of the penguin update Question = How do you geo-target these category pages and product pages? Ideas = a. reviews with clients locations b. blog posts with clients images wearing apparel and location description and keywords that also links back to that category or be it product page (images geo- targeted, tags, and description) c. ? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cyclone0 -
How can I block unwanted urls being indexed on google?
Hi, I have to block unwanted urls (not that page) from being indexed on google. I have to block urls like example.com/entertainment not the exact page example.com/entertainment.aspx . Is there any other ways other than robot.txt? If i add this to robot.txt will that block my other url too? Or should I make a 301 redirection from example.com/entertainment to example.com/entertainment.aspx. Because some of the unwanted urls are linked from other sites. thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VipinLouka780 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840