Site De-Indexed except for Homepage

[emerald]

Hi Mozzers,
Our site has suddenly been de-indexed from Google and we don't know why. All pages are de-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools (except for the homepage and sitemap), starting after 7 September:

Please see screenshot attached to show this:

• 7 Sept 2014 - 76 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools
• 28 Sept until current - 3-4 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools including homepage and sitemaps.

Site is: (removed)

As a result all rankings for child pages have also disappeared in Moz Pro Rankings Tracker. Only homepage is still indexed and ranking.

It seems like a technical issue blocking the site. I checked for robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, canonical and site crawl for any 404 errors but can't find anything. The site is online and accessible. No warnings or errors appear in Google Webmaster Tools.

Some recent issues were that we moved from Shared to Dedicated Server around 7 Sept (using same host and location). Prior to the move our preferred domain was www.domain.com WITH www. However during the move, they set our domain as domain.tld WITHOUT the www. Running a site:domain.tld vs site:www.domain.tld command now finds pages indexed under non-www version, but no longer as www. version. Could this be a cause of de-indexing? Yesterday we had our host reset the domain to use www. again and we resubmitted our sitemap, but there is no change yet to the indexing.

What else could be wrong?

Any suggestions appeciated. Thanks.

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[emerald]

Resolved!

Thanks for your replies everyone.

The strange thing was that even though the www version of pages did seem to 301 to non-www version (I checked headers were indeed 301), all our pages had disappeared from Google index and rankings too (exept homepage).

The resolution came after we had our host reset the domain to www version on the server to the original state. Within days of changing that, all our deindexed pages (the whole site) jumped back into the original ranking positions in Google with www version and are re-indexed like nothing had happened.

Hope this helps someone else.

[DennisSeymour]

Hi Emerald

Enter both www and non www to webmaster tools

pages like http://www.toursistanbul.com/bosphoruscruises.htm are set to noindex

There are 30+ pages indexed in google right now

It's a mix of www and non www

Webmaster tools treats this as different so you will see a drop.

Go to your webmaster tools and set a preferred version. (which is www.)

If you plan to move to https then you need to  also enter both https (www and non www versions)

BTW, be sure your analytics is using the new code as well.

Good luck!

[RafalJ]

There is nothing you can do now. You have made a mistake and fixed it. Since then you have submitted a sitemap, "fetched" the site and redirected non-www traffic to www in your htaccess... There are no other ways to speed the process up. Just sit and wait for Google crawler to fully re-crawl the site and the number of indexed pages will come back to what it was.

You said all rankings disappeared in Moz Tracker, but what about the actual rankings in Google search results? Have you checked that? What are WMT and GA saying about your rankings/traffic?

My gut feeling tells me your pages are still ranking as they were, but since your WMT was still set to show data for www domain you weren't seeing any... am I correct?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Without digging in detail, it is always awkward to suggest possible issues - simply because there are so many possibilities.

That said, what you mentioned about the move could cause a temporary drop while Google corrects the indexation of the site. The site has gone from www.site.com to http://site.com and now back to www.site.com again. That is a lot of movement for Google to try and make sense of.

I am guessing also that because this was not a planned move from www to non-www, that no 301's were implemented, which means that Google would effectively see the site as having just gone and now returned again.

I would assume that the site will recover, but this can take time.

Use webmaster tools to 'Fetch as Google' at the root of the site and see the site is back again.

-Andy