Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
-
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name.The Robot.txt contains:
Default Flywheel robots file
User-agent: *
Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem.
Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro -
Woot! So glad to see it wasn't a penalty!
-
Michael,
Duplicate content wasn't the issue in the end, but your response prompted me to analyse their home page text more closely and I discovered that there was room for improvement - too much of the home page content was also present on other pages of the site. Thanks for that!
-
Everyone, this has been resolved! The problem turned out to be a code error in the canonical tag for the page. There was an extra space and slash. Ironically, the canonical tag was one of the first things we looked at, yet we all overlooked that error
Thank you all so much for your input and assistance.
-
Thank you Michael...I'll do that.
-
I've seen a client have an internal page just suddenly be de-indexed. What appears to have happened is that Google saw it as a near duplicate of another page on their site, and dropped it from the index for that reason. Then, magically, it reappeared a week later.
You may be seeing something like this here. See what Moz Pro thinks in terms of duplicate content on your site, and if the home page gets called out along with another page.
-
Thanks so much for that info. I had not heard of Kerboo...I'll definitely check that out right away. Your input has been extremely helpful Kristina.
Caro
-
I would be incredibly surprised if internal links to the homepage caused the issue. Google expects you to have a bunch of internal links to the homepage.
What you're going to need to do now is do a thorough review of all of the external links pointing to your homepage. I would do this with a tool - I recommend Kerboo, although I'm sure there are others that could do the same thing. Otherwise, you can look through all of the links yourself and look for spam indications (steps outlined in this handy Moz article).
Either way, make sure that you pull your list of links from Ahrefs or Majestic. Ideally both, and merge the lists. Moz doesn't crawl nearly as many links.
Since you haven't gotten a manual penalty warning, you're going to have to take as many of the spammy links you find down as you can and disavow the others. For speed, I'd recommend that you immediately upload a list of spammy links with Google's disavow tool, then start asking for an actual removal.
Keep in mind that you're probably going to disavow links that were helping rankings, so expect that your homepage won't come back ranking as well for nonbranded search terms as it used to. You'll probably want to start out uploading a very conservative set of URLs to the disavow tool, wait a couple of days to see if that fixes the problem, upload a bigger set, check, etc.
Good luck!
-
No luck Kristina
I'm wondering if it's an algorithmic penalty in response to back links. We've never done shady linking, but over the years the site has gathered some strange links. Or, is there some chance that about two dozen anchor text links from their blog to the home page could have done it? I deleted them. But I can't request reconsideration if the penalty isn't manual.
-
Any luck so far? Usually it only takes a few hours for Google to crawl new pages after you submit them in GSC, in my experience.
-
I see no serious crawl issues. Mostly things we're already addressing, like duplicate content caused by blog tags and categories, missing meta descriptions (mostly in our knowledge base, so not an issue) and stuff like that.
When I checked the home page alone it said zero high, medium or low priority issues.
The page only de-indexed very recently. Maybe the next crawl will catch something. Same with GSC...it looks like the last 2 days of info is not available yet.
I should mention the home page Optimizely test had been running for at least a week before the page got dropped (will get actual date from client) , plus they have had a product page running a test for weeks with no problem. But I still think your suggestion to pause the test is a good one as I don't want anything to hinder the process of fixing this.
Update: Optimizely has been paused, code removed, home page submitted in GSC.
-
Okay, I ran some tests, and can't see anything that could've gone wrong. That does make it seem like a penalty, but given that this coincided with setting up Optimizely, let's go down that path first.
While your team is taking down the test - have you checked Moz to see if its crawler sees anything that could be causing an issue? I set up my Moz crawler to look into it, but it'll take a few days.
-
Thanks Kristina,
We have not tried pausing the test, but I can request they do that. It may be a good idea to do it regardless of whether it's causing the problem or not, while we get this issue sorted out.
Fetch as Google gave this result:HTTP/1.1 200 OK - so looks ok. I understand this also submits your page to Google as an actual indexing request?
site:https://website.com shows all our pages except the home page.
So, it looks like it's decided not to rank it for some reason.
I deleted some links from the blog to the home page - they had a keyword phrase as the anchor text. There were about 20 links that had accumulated over a few months. Not sure if that's the issue.
Still no manual penalty notice from Google.
-
Hm, I've done a lot with Optimizely in the past, and it's never caused an SEO problem, but it's completely possible something went wrong. Since that's your first inkling, have you tried pausing that test and removing the Optimizely code from the homepage? Then you can determine whether or not it's an Optimizely problem.
Another thing you can do is use the Fetch as Googlebot feature in GSC. Does GSC say it can fetch the page properly?
If it says it can, try searching for "site:www.yourcompanysite.com". This will show if Google's got your URL in its index. If nothing comes up, it's not there; if it comes up, Google's decided not to rank it for some reason.
After those steps, get back to us so we can figure out where to go from there!
Good luck,
Kristina
-
Jordan, not on the original version of the home page, but there is on the B test version.
The way I understand it the B version is a javascript page that is noindexed. Their redirect system seems to leave the original page looking like there is no redirect. Are you suggesting we use a 302 instead? -
Also, Google recommends you 302 those url's instead of returning a 200 http code. You can read more about their best practices about a/b testing.
-
Is there a 'meta no index no follow tag' implemented by chance?
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
-
What are best page titles for sub-domain pages?
Hi Moz communtity, Let's say a website has multiple sub-domains with hundreds and thousands of pages. Generally we will be mentioning "primary keyword & "brand name" on every page of website. Can we do same on all pages of sub-domains to increase the authority of website for this primary keyword in Google? Or it gonna end up as negative impact if Google consider as duplicate content being mentioned same keyword and brand name on every page even on website and all pages of sub domains? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Removing pages from index
My client is running 4 websites on ModX CMS and using the same database for all the sites. Roger has discovered that one of the sites has 2050 302 redirects pointing to the clients other sites. The Sitemap for the site in question includes 860 pages. Google Webmaster Tools has indexed 540 pages. Roger has discovered 5200 pages and a Site: query of Google reveals 7200 pages. Diving into the SERP results many of the pages indexed are pointing to the other 3 sites. I believe there is a configuration problem with the site because the other sites when crawled do not have a huge volume of redirects. My concern is how can we remove from Google's index the 2050 pages that are redirecting to the other sites via a 302 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tinbum0 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
Page 1 Reached, Further Page Improvements and What Next ?
Moz, I have a particularly tricky competitive keyword that i have finally climbed our website to the 10th position of page 1, i am particularly pleased about this as all of the website and content is German which i have little understanding of and i have little support on this, I am pleased with the content and layout of the page and i am monitoring all Google Analytics values very closely, as well as the SERP positions, So as far as further progression with this page and hopefully climbing further up page 1, where do you think i should focus my efforts ? Page Speed optimization?, Building links to this page ?, blogging on this topic (with links) , Mobile responsive design (More difficult), further improvements to pages and content linked from this page ? Further improvements to the website in general?,further effort on tracking visitors and user experience monitoring (Like setting up Crazyegg or something?) Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated, Thanks all, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Home Page or Internal Page
I have a website that deals with personalized jewelry, and our main keyword is "Name Necklace".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
3 mounth ago i added new page: http://www.onecklace.com/name-necklaces/ And from then google index only this page for my main keyword, and not our home page.
Beacuase the page is new, and we didn't have a lot of link to it, our rank is not so well. I'm considering to remove this page (301 to home page), beacause i think that if google index our home page for this keyword it will be better. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but i know that our home page have a lot of good links and maybe our rank will be higher. Another thing, because google index this internal page for this keyword, it looks like our home page have no main keyword at all. BTW, before i add this page, google index our main page with this keyword. Please advise... U5S8gyS.png j50XHl4.png0 -
De-indexing product "quick view" pages
Hi there, The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure: www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700 where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number. Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be: Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=* Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0