Blog page won't get indexed
-
Hi Guys,
I'm currently asked to work on a website. I noticed that the blog posts won't get indexed in Google. www.domain.com/blog does get indexed but the blogposts itself won't. They have been online for over 2 months now.
I found this in the robots.txt file:
Allow: / Disallow: /kitchenhandle/ Disallow: /blog/comments/ Disallow: /blog/author/ Disallow: /blog/homepage/feed/
I'm guessing that the last line causes this issue. Does anyone have an idea if this is the case and why they would include this in the robots.txt?
Cheers!
-
Thanks alot!
-
Hi Dirk,
Good observation, I missed the canonical part somehow. So, google is indexing the canonical URLs here which doesn't have /blog/ in it and that's the problem. Have a look at the indexed page for this particular instance here. Non /blog/ instance is indexed, which will take you to its /blog/ version with wrong canonical URL.
Solution: Either remove the canonical URLs on these pages to point them to the current page itself. And yeah! As rightly mentioned by Dirk, do a proper /blog/ page linking from the blog page and other pages from where you're linking these articles.
-
This is definitely the issue. Fix that canonical and they'll be indexed.
-
To update - even worse: on the blog itself you are linking to the canonical version - not to the /blog/ version. So it would be impossible for Google to index /blog/ type of content.
If you do woontrends 2016 site:www.keukensduitsland.nl you will notice that the canonical version is properly indexed (even with the strange js redirect.
Dirk
-
It's not related to the robots.txt - you can easily check that in Webmastertools (Crawl > Robots.txt tester)
First issue is the location of the link - if you put a small link to the blog hidden in the left corner at the bottom of the page Google is not going to attribute a lot of importance to this link.
Most important issue on your blog articles is the canonical - example:
http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/blog/woontrends-2016/ has as canonical url: http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/woontrends-2016/ - however this page will redirect you with javascript to the blog article.
Make the canonical self referencing and do a proper redirect on the other pages (301 rather than js redirect)
Dirk
-
Hi Happy SEO,
Well, the robots.txt looks find here. Could you try to fetch any of the blog page/post as google in the search console and share the screenshot here?
Also, to cross check the robots.txt (which looks fine though), you have robots.txt tester in search console where you can put any blog page/post to check if bots can crawl it. Please share a screenshot of that as well.
On a separate note, the sitemap.xml link mentioned in the robots.txt (http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/sitemap.xml) is broken. Fix that as well.
-
Hi Nitin,
The URL is www.keukensduitsland.nl (/blog). The link to the blog page is in the bottom left corner called "Keukennieuws".
-
Hi Happy SEO,
Could you please share the blog URL here? Sounds like an interesting issue and would love to give a try to help you with this
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
-
Old pages not mobile friendly - new pages in process but don't want to upset current traffic.
Working with a new client. They have what I would describe as two virtual websites. Same domain but different coding, navigation and structure. Old virtual website pages fail mobile friendly, they were not designed to be responsive ( there really is no way to fix them) but they are ranking and getting traffic. New virtual website pages pass mobile friendly but are not SEO optimized yet and are not ranking and not getting organic traffic. My understanding is NOT mobile friendly is a "site" designation and although the offending pages are listed it is not a "page" designation. Is this correct? If my understanding is true what would be the best way to hold onto the rankings and traffic generated by old virtual website pages and resolve the "NOT mobile friendly" problem until the new virtual website pages have surpassed the old pages in ranking and traffic? A proposal was made to redirect any mobile traffic on the old virtual website pages to mobile friendly pages. What will happen to SEO if this is done? The pages would pass mobile friendly because they would go to mobile friendly pages, I assume, but what about link equity? Would they see a drop in traffic ? Any thoughts? Thanks, Toni
Technical SEO | | Toni70 -
How do I handle a redirect chain issue pertaining to a page that doesn't actually exist on my site?
I have a page showing up on the insights report as being a redirect chain. This page however does not exist as far as I can tell. It is not on my dashboard anywhere and pointing a browser to it produces a messy page with Wordpress theme error code spit out. How do I track this down to clean it up if the page does not exist within my Wordpress installation? The page for reference is https://butlermobility.com/dealers/downloads. As it stands today the dealers and downloads pages are separate. There is no downloads sub page within the dealers section.
Technical SEO | | NiteSkirm0 -
Landing pages showing up as HTTPS when we haven't made the switch
Hi Moz Community, Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now. However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change. HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem. Anyone have any other ideas?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Getting Google to index a large PDF file
Hello! We have a 100+ MB PDF with multiple pages that we want Google to fully index on our server/website. First of all, is it even possible for Google to index a PDF file of this size? It's been up on our server for a few days, and my colleague did a Googlebot fetch via Webmaster Tools, but it still hasn't happened yet. My theories as to why this may not work: A) We have no actual link(s) to the pdf anywhere on our website. B) This PDF is approx 130 MB and very slow to load. I added some compression to it, but that only got it down to 105 MB. Any tips or suggestions on getting this thing indexed in Google would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BBEXNinja0 -
Pages Indexed Not Changing
I have several sites that I do SEO for that are having a common problem. I have submitted xml sitemaps to Google for each site, and as new pages are added to the site, they are added to the xml sitemap. To make sure new pages are being indexed, I check the number of pages that have been indexed vs. the number of pages submitted by the xml sitemap every week. For weeks now, the number of pages submitted has increased, but the number of pages actually indexed has not changed. I have done searches on Google for the new pages and they are always added to the index, but the number of indexed pages is still not changing. My initial thought was as new pages are added to the index, old ones are being dropped. But I can't find evidence of that, or understand why that would be the case. Any ideas on why this is happening? Or am I worrying about something that I shouldn't even be concerned with since new pages are being indexed?
Technical SEO | | ang1 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
What happens to content under a category page that is not indexed?
We are reevaluating our URL structure. We have a flat architecture but would like to add subfolders per recommendations here and elsewhere. Some of our category pages are ad heavy/content light so we have them no indexed. We do have lots of quality content on the site that we would like to put under some of these keyword categories. Should we leave it flat? If Google does not see that category page then there will be no link from the homepage to the content page? Now: homepage/content-page Proposed: homepage/category/content-page (category is not indexed)
Technical SEO | | hoch0 -
Could Having Blog Posts as Home Page Cause Keyword Dilution?
Something I've never been a fan of is having a blog as the home page of a site. I've always thought that it's a bit like walking into someone's house through the kitchen out back.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay
If it's a vistors first time, it can be a little disconcerting or ackward even if they are not familiar with the writers style. But something just dawned on me, and I'd love a second opinion on this. For websites that focus on multiple keywords (in my most of my client's case it's usually a mix of Wedding Photography, Engagement Photography, Portrait Photography, Family Photography, etc). A lot of these clients will include the photos in a blog post along with a snippet of text that may talk about the people they're photographing and maybe a bit about where they photographed. But they're usually optimizing for the overarching keyword (Wedding... Portrait..., etc as per above). Now I'm wondering if having three or 5 posts on the home page, where most of them are focusing on a specific keyword like New York Wedding Photographer, is actually diluting the keyword they are trying to rank for. My theory is that if I have them move their blog to a domain.com/blog, and solely focus on the desired keyword on the home page, that they would do substantially better in the SERPs. Can anyone subtantiate this? Thanks!0