Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
-
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum.
We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index."
No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file.
Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping.
We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter.
It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas?
I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
-
I'm sure you've gone over this and if so feel free to ignore me but did you make sure your sitemap is up to scratch - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/184732?hl=en
You can also look to see if your data is up to par - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
You can always work back from the date it stopped working see if you've done anything that may have caused this (some one changing a tag etc.) lastly there is always the giant list of things to check for Google news - http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/
Best of luck and let us know how you get on.
-
Of course, I should have included that: Fabiusmaximus.com
-
Are you able to share the website that we're talking about?
-
Thanks for the ingenious advice, out of the box thinking. However, we're still in Google News. When we force Google to index a post via Fetch, it shows up in News. Plus the New Publisher page tells you that you're in News.
It's some sort of technical problem. A weird one.
-
My guess is that it's less of a technical constraint and more of a non-match for Google News guidelines. There are several things in there that could trigger the boot, (https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787) such as:
Stick to the news--we mean it! Google News is not a marketing service. We don't want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism. If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content. Otherwise, if we find non-news content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.
Journalistic standards. Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.
News content. Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. We generally do not include how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.
And so on... If you think you're in the clear try going to the Google News specific help center (on the previously linked page) and submit your site for inclusion.
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
-
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Tools/Software that can crawl all image URLs in a site
Excluding Screaming Frog, what other tools/software to use in order to crawl all image URLs in a site? Because in Screaming Frog, they don't crawl image URLs which are not under the site domain. Example of an image URL outside the client site: http://cdn.shopify.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png If the client is: http://www.example.com, Screaming Frog only crawls images under it like, http://www.example.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png
Technical SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?
hello Moz We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
Technical SEO | | joony
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above) We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess. How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it? Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint) Thank you in advance for your reply.0 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia0 -
How to stop Search Bot from crawling through a submit button
On our website http://www.thefutureminders.com/, we have three form fields that have three pull downs for Month, Day, and year. This is creating duplicate pages while indexing. How do we tell the search Bot to index the page but not crawl through the submit button? Thanks Naren
Technical SEO | | NarenBansal0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0