Why isn't our new site being indexed?
-
We built a new website for a client recently.
Site: https://www.woofadvisor.com/
It's been live for three weeks. Robots.txt isn't blocking Googlebot or anything.
Submitted a sitemap.xml through Webmasters but we still aren't being indexed.
Anyone have any ideas?
-
Hey Dirk,
No worries - I visited the question first time today and considered it unanswered as the site is perfectly accessible in California. I like to confirm what Search Console says as that is 'straight from the horses mouth'.
Thanks for confirming that the IP redirect has changed, that is interesting. It is impossible for us to know when that happened - I would have expected thing to get indexed quite fast when it changed.
With the extra info I'm happy to mark this as answered, but would be good to hear from the OP.
Best,
-Tom
-
Hi Tom,
I am not questioning your knowledge - I re-ran the test on webpagetest.org and I see that the site is now accessible for Californian ip (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150911_6V_14J6/) which wasn't the case a few days ago (check the result on http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150907_G1_TE9/) - so there has been a change on the ip redirection. I also checked from Belgium - the site is now also accessible from here.
I also notice that if I now do a site:woofadvisor.com in Google I get 19 pages indexed rather than 2 I got a few days ago.
Apparently removing the ip redirection solved (or is solving) the indexation issue - but still this question remains marked as "unanswered"
rgds,
Dirk
-
I am in California right now, and can access the website just fine, which is why I didn't mark the question as answered - I don't think we have enough info yet. I think the 'fetch as googlebot' will help us resolve that.
You are correct that if there is no robots.txt then Google assumes the site is open, but my concern is that the developers on the team say that there IS a robots.txt file there and it has some contents. I have, on at least two occasions, come across a team that was serving a robots.txt that was only accessible to search bots (once they were doing that 'for security', another time because they mis-understood how it worked). That is why I suggested that Search Console is checked to see what shows up for robots.txt.
-
To be very honest - I am quite surprised that this question is still marked as "Unanswered".
The owners of the site decided to block access for all non UK / Ireland adresses. The main Googlebot is using a Californian ip address to visit the site. Hence - the only page Googlebot can see is https://www.woofadvisor.com/holding-page.php which has no links to the other parts of the site (this is confirmed by the webpagetest.org test with Californian ip address)
As Google indicates - Googlebot can also use other IP adresses to crawl the site ("With geo-distributed crawling, Googlebot can now use IP addresses that appear to come from other countries, such as Australia.") - however it's is very likely that these bots do not crawl with the same frequency/depth as the main bot (the article clearly indicates " Google might not crawl, index, or rank all of your locale-adaptive content. This is because the default IP addresses of the Googlebot crawler appear to be based in the USA).
This can easily be solved by adding a link on /holding-page.php to the Irish/UK version which contains the full content (accessible for all ip adresses) which can be followed to index the full site (so - only put the ip detection on the homepage - not on the other pages)
The fact that the robots.txt gives a 404 is not relevant: if no robots.txt is found Google assumes that the site can be indexed (check this link) - quote: "You only need a
robots.txt
file if your site includes content that you don't want Google or other search engines to index." -
I'd be concerned about the 404ing robots.txt file.
You should check in Search Console:
-
What does Search Console show in the robots.txt section?
-
What happens if you fetch a page that is no indexed (e.g. https://www.woofadvisor.com/travel-tips.php) with the 'Fetch as Googlebot' tool?
I checked and do not see any obvious indicators of why the pages are not being indexed - we need more info.
-
-
I just did a quick check on your site with Webpagetest.org with California IP address http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150907_G1_TE9/ - as you can see here these IP's also go to the holding page - which is logically the only page which can be indexed as it's the only one Googlebot can access.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi,
I can't access your site in Belgium - I guess you are redirecting your users based on ip address. If , like me, they are not located in your target country they are 302 redirected to https://www.woofadvisor.com/holding-page.php and there is only 1 page that is indexed.
Not sure which country you are actually targeting - but could it be that you're accidentally redirecting Google bot as well?
Check also this article from Google on ip based targeting.
rgds
Dirk
-
Strangely, there are two pages indexed on Google Search.
The homepage and one other
-
I noticed the robots.txt file returned a 404 and asked the developers to take a look and they said the content of it is fine.
Sometimes developers say this stuff. If you are getting a 404, demonstrate it to them.
-
I noticed the robots.txt file returned a 404 and asked the developers to take a look and they said the content of it is fine.
But yes, I'll doublecheck the WordPress settings now.
-
Your sitemap all looked good, but when I tried to view the robots.txt file in your root, it returned a 404 and so was unable to determine if there was an issue. Could any of your settings in your WordPress installation also be causing it to trip over.
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
-
Country and Language tags-Running an SEO audit on a site that definitely has more than one language, but nothing is pulling up. I don't quite understand href lang or how to go about it. HELP HELP!
Ran an SEO audit and I don't really understand country and language tags. For example, sony.com definitely has more than one language, but how do I seo check href lang ? Do I inspect the page? etc?
Technical SEO | | Mindgruver0 -
What to do about spam links I didn't create?
I have dropped in rankings 3-5 points over the past 6 months and have been trying to figure out why. One thing I found was a ton of my pictures on a image net ring. I obviously didn't put those photos there or give permission to use them. It looks like an offshore website. How do we deal with these type of bad links?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
How do I ensure that colour variant products aren't flagged for being duplicate?
I have a site with 12 colour variants of 1 style. How do I ensure that these are not flagged as duplicate content as they currently have been?
Technical SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
Falling rankings - can't figure out why
I am still fairly green on in depth SEO, however I have a good grasp on making a site SEO friendly, as my skills are more down to website construction than technical SEO, however, I am working on a site at the moment which just continues to lose rankings and is slipping further and further. Keywords are dropping week on week in rankings Search visibility is also dropping week on week On site sales have fallen massively in the last quarter We have made huge improvements on the following; Moved the site to a faster stand alone cloud vps server - taken page rank scores from 54 to 87%. Added caching (WP Rocket) & CDN support. Improved URL structure (Woocommerce) removed /product and or /product-category from URLS to give more accurate & relevant structures. Added canonical URLs to all product categories (We use Yoast Premium) Amended on page structures to include correct H tags. Improved Facebook activity with a huge increase in engagements These are just some of the improvements we have made, yet we're still seeing huge drops in traffic and rankings. One insight I have noted which may be a big pointer, is we have 56 backlinks.... which I know is not good and we are about to address this. I suspect this is the reason for the poor performance, but should I be looking at anything else? Is there anything else we should be looking at? As I said, I'm no SEO specialist, but I don't think there's been any Penguin penalty, but my expertise is not sufficient enough to dig deeper. Can anyone offer any constructive advice at this stage? I'm thinking things to look at that could be hurting us that isn't immediately obvious? The site is www.glassesonspec.co.uk Thanks in advance Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK0 -
Site address change: new site isn't showing up in Google, old site is gone.
We just transitioned mccacompanies.com to confluentstrategies.com. The problem is that when I search for the old name, the old website doesn't come up anymore to redirect people to the new site. On the local card, Google has even taken off the website altogether. (I'm currently still trying to gain access to manage the business listing) When I search for confluent strategies, the website doesn't come up at all. But if I use the site: operator, it is in the index. Basically, my client has effectively disappeared off the face of the Google. (In doing other name changes, this has never happened to me before) What can I do?
Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory0 -
'No Follow' and 'Do Follow' links when using WordPress plugins
Hi all I hope someone can help me out with the following question in regards to 'no follow' and 'do follow' links in combination with WordPress plugins. Some plugins that deal with links i.e. link masking or SEO plugins do give you the option to 'not follow' links. Can someone speak from experience that this does actually work?? It's really quite stupid, but only occurred to me that when using the FireFox add on 'NoDoFollow' as well as looking at the SEOmoz link profile of course, 95% of my links are actually marked as FOLLOW, while the opposite should be the case. For example I mark about 90% of outgoing links as no follow within a link masking plugin. Well, why would WordPress plugins give you the option to mark links as no follow in the first place when they do in fact appear as follow for search engines and SEOmoz? Is this a WordPress thing or whatnot? Maybe they are in fact no follow, and the information supplied by SEO tools comes from the basic HTML structure analysis. I don't know... This really got me worried. Hope someone can shed a light. All the best and many thanks for your answers!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
Getting Google to index new pages
I have a site, called SiteB that has 200 pages of new, unique content. I made a table of contents (TOC) page on SiteB that points to about 50 pages of SiteB content. I would like to get SiteB's TOC page crawled and indexed by Google, as well as all the pages it points to. I submitted the TOC to Pingler 24 hours ago and from the logs I see the Googlebot visited the TOC page but it did not crawl any of the 50 pages that are linked to from the TOC. I do not have a robots.txt file on SiteB. There are no robot meta tags (nofollow, noindex). There are no 'rel=nofollow' attributes on the links. Why would Google crawl the TOC (when I Pinglered it) but not crawl any of the links on that page? One other fact, and I don't know if this matters, but SiteB lives on a subdomain and the URLs contain numbers, like this: http://subdomain.domain.com/category/34404 Yes, I know that the number part is suboptimal from an SEO point of view. I'm working on that, too. But first wanted to figure out why Google isn't crawling the TOC. The site is new and so hasn't been penalized by Google. Thanks for any ideas...
Technical SEO | | scanlin0