Site De-Indexed except for Homepage
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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?
-
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
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
-
Scraped site, hijacked searches for business name.
Hello, I have a site that was scraped (possibly by a competitor's seo company), who then built links to the duplicate site. When people do a search for the name of the business the scraped site is all that comes up along with the usual third-party sites. They seem to take the site down and put it back up every couple of weeks to maintain the rankings in Google. Has anyone ever dealt with something like this? Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated. Search: LIC Dental Associates Scraped site: old-farmshow.net Legit site: licdentalassociates.com Thanks, Emery
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tntdental1 -
Site traffic halved not sure why
Hi guys, not sure if anyone can help, but we had a client's google organic traffic literally halve from the week at the end of August to September (29 Aug 2016 to be precise) and it hasn't recovered since (here's a screenshot from GA http://puu.sh/sAmd3/b071dd1e57.png) I've been doing a lot of digging around on Moz and elsewhere about any Google updates that may have gone through around that time and there doesn't seem to be anything that I would think would affect it. I thought it might be to do with Penguin, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A while ago before then we did have some domains and pages 301 redirected to the main site when multiple other sites were rolled into the one, but I wouldn't have thought that should affect it. After that I've also gone and removed all those sites and redirects too (couple of weeks ago) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. There's no black hat SEO done on the site so very odd to have this happen. I'm rather out of ideas what it could be that has impacted things so suddenly and that we couldn't get it recovered from. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BrisbaneSEOWorks0 -
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Competitors Linking to My Site
One of the more successful competitors in my niche has embarked on new strategy that seems to be working well for him. I noticed that many new links began to appear to my site from my competitor's stable of many websites. It appears that he has setup a link wheel to benefit a site that has been in the top Google position for several months now. The rim of the wheel links back to authority sites, including my own main site (established 7 years, now hanging on to the lowly 10th place on the serp). So the strategy seems to be: a) create a dozen sites that no-follow link back to authority sites including competitors, b) place links in a such a manner (bottom of page, uncolored links, from images) that a customer is unlikely to ever click on it, c.) do-follow to your own site and blast it to the top of Google. I don't think this competitor is worried about getting penalized. I've been watching this for years. When one site gets burned, he just shifts things around and brings up another one of his sites. He seems to age them for years, calling them up one by one as they are needed. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a trend? Because it sure seems to work. He's crowded the front page now with 4 of his sites. Would it be appropriate for me to "disavow" his links? Would it matter?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DarrenX0 -
Site-wide links: Nofollow or eliminate altogether?
As a web developer, it's not uncommon for me to place a link in the footer of a website to give myself credit for the web design/development. I recently decided to go back and nofollow all these site-wide footer links, to avoid potentially looking spammy. I wanted to know if I should remove these links altogether, and just give myself text credit without a link at all? I would like for a potential client who is interested in my work to still be able to get to my site if they like my work - but I want to keep my link profile squeaky clean. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brad.s.knutson0 -
How can I tell if my site was penalized from the most recent penguin update?
Hey all, I want to be able to see if my website was penalized from the most recent penguin update because we have several hundred websites built and at the bottom of each on it says something along the lines Website by, Web Design by, Hosting by and links back to our homepage. Could this possibly be penalizing us since these links have similar anchor text and on sites that have nothing to do with our services? Thanks, Ryan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
How Does This Site Get Away With It?
The following site is huge in the movie trailer industry: http://bit.ly/18B6tF It ranks #3 in Google for "Movie Trailers" and has high rankings for multiple other major keywords in the industry. Here's the thing; virtually all of their movie trailer pages contain copy/pasted content from other sites. The movie trailer descriptions are the ones given by the movie companies and therefor the same content is on thousands of websites/blogs. We all know Google hates duplicate content at the moment... so how does this site get a away with it? Does it's root-domain authority keep it up there?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | superlordme0 -
Will my association's network of sites get penalized for link farming?
Before beginning I found these similar topics here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-domains-on-same-ip-address-same-niche-but-different-locations http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-domains-on-1-ip-address We manage over two dozen dental sites that are individually owned through out the US. All these dentists are in a dental association which we also run and are featured on (http://www.acedentalresource.com/). Part of the dental associations core is sharing information to make them better dentists and to help their patients which in addition to their education, is why they are considered to be some of the best dentists in the world. As such, we build links from what we consider to be valuable content between the sites. Some sites are on different IPs and C-Blocks, some are not. Given the fact that each site is only promoting the dentist at that brick and mortar location but also has "follow" links to other dentists' content in the network we fear that we are in the grey area of link building practices. Questions are: Is there an effective way to utilize the power of the network if quality content is being shared? What risks are we facing given our network? Should each site be on a different IP? Would having some of our sites on different servers make our backlinks more valuable than having all of our sites under the same server? If it is decided that having unique IPs is best practice, would it be obvious that we made the switch? Keep in mind that ALL sites are involved in the association, so naturally they would be linking to each other, and the main resource website mentioned above. Thanks for your input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DigitalElevator0