Site Not Indexing After 2 Weeks - PA at 1
-
Hi Moz Community!
I'm working as a digital marketing consultant for an organization that uses us for their online registration - we do not manage their web page. The issue that I am hoping you might have some ideas on is that their SERPS still aren’t making much of a recovery since they revamped their site in mid August. I ran a MOZ campaign for them and despite that they (eventually) got all their 301s in place, they submitted an updated sitemap to Google, aren’t hitting any crawl errors, and have a working robots.txt over two-thirds of their site pages don’t seem to be indexing. MOZ is giving most of them a Page Authority of 1, and when I login to their GWT, it’s showing me that only 3 pages have been indexed of the 315 URLs submitted.
I know Google doesn’t make any guarantees in index update timelines, but 2+ weeks seems like a long time
Their website is https://www.northshoreymca.org/. The site has a DA of 43 but most of the pages on the main nav are still at 1. They gave me permission to share in this forum because we're really trying to figure out a recovery strategy.
Any thoughts or ideas as to what might be causing this? Is there anything else that you think I should check or that might be causing an issue? Is it possible that Google is just taking this long to index their page? Note: this page is built with Drupal.
THANK YOU!
-
being a standard drupal setting doesn't mean it makes SE friendly anyway I have no backup for that theory, I'm just assuming that new sites should be as simple as possible in order to google to get a better grasp of them and start trusting before complicating thing in an unnecessary way, unless the node url is adding any value to you, I would get rid of it and 301 it to its canonical.
-
Thanks again! I noticed all of this too before I submitted to Q&A but doing a little bit of research (and with my admittedly limited knowledge of the topic) I thought that this was pretty standard for how clean Drupal URLs are setup? Is that incorrect?
-
I would not focus too much on GSC if the site has been recently built, the place where you want your pages to be is google index
The place I would check is GA to see how many of your pages are getting at least 1 visits and which ones don't. You can then look for the pages which are not getting traffic and understand if they are not being indexed or not ranking high.
This page for example https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts I've noticed that you're using the rel="<a class="attribute-value">shortlink</a>", which I don't think it's adding too much value, probably is making things messier, as you two different version of your page, in fact if you check for /node/ folder you're finding pages you don't want (ex.https://www.northshoreymca.org/node/145 instead of this <a class="attribute-value">https://www.northshoreymca.org/content/ymca-north-shore-annual-gala</a>) I would set up a 301 at least so you ensure that google is not deciding which is the best page to index and serve to users, I know you hav a canonical but it could be something you could test, and help google not making too many decisions, especially because canonical is just a recommendation done to bots, and which google normally doesn't follow boldly for new sites.
hoep this helps, let me know how it goes!
-
Yes! Better safe than sorry!
-
Dont get spammy and add all your 300 pages. You cant never know when google pisses off. Be discrete and and dont try to rush all the indexed.
(this is just a myth, but lets not try to probe it). -
You are too kind! I thought we checked into all that stuff too. I'm glad to at least know that we're probably just up against a waiting game and there isn't something fundamentally wrong with the page that's preventing the index. I'll start manually adding main nav links from addurl and cross my fingers.
Thank you again!
-
Yeap. Just wait.
I've checked if there was a problem with robots.txt or the meta robots tag, and there isnt any problem with that particularly page.
You can speed up the indexing of some pages with google.com/addurl -
So here's an example of a page from the main nav on their site that is a problem page:
site:https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts
I guess we're just stuck in a waiting game for pages like this?
Thanks again!
-
You're welcome. We are here to help.
I cannot specify an exact amount of time. I've had sites that were fully indexed and informed in WMT in 3 weeks, and other sites that took over 2 months and only got informed roughly 90% of pages.
Sorry, Google is that way. Sometimes gives is a buch of information and sometimes nothing.
Again, i'd trust what you get in the search results, not what appears in WMT. -
Thanks for the input Oleg. I did verify that in GSC that they are pointing to https://www. so I'm not sure what gives in terms of the discrepancy between the index of 3 pages showing in GSC vs. the several hundred pages showing when you hit site:https://www.northshoreymca.org.
Very new to MOZ and SEO so I really appreciate your time and input!
-
Thanks Gaston! In your experience, are there some generalities you can speak to for the length of time it takes to index a site? I understand that the response to that question is probably relative given a site's size, age, update frequency etc. but would you care to ballpark it?
I'm really new to SEO (and entirely self-taught) so appreciate all the info! Thanks again!
-
Thanks so much! Any thoughts on why their GSC is saying 3 pages indexed? I checked as Oleg suggested above that it was referencing https:www. and verified that it is. I'm very new to the technical side of things so thanks for the help!
-
hey camarin, so far I see 271 URLS indexed for the search "site:https://www.northshoreymca.org". There are of course a couple of changes I would do like try to have a friendlier look to the tag URLs instead of having the tag parameter, but anyway it seems that it's working. Also PA for this page https://www.northshoreymca.org/locations/haverhill/ is 33. I think as you said it was just a matter of time. I hope your problem got fixed.
-
Hi there,
There are some points to mark here:
1- The site was redisigned, as you say there has been restructured the site completely.
2- As some of the URLs seem to be new, still none of them were crawled by roger (moz's bot) and/or they are likely to be considered to no have any leverage. That's some explanation for the PA1.
3- It's known that google takes its time to index the whole site. And also takes its time to inform it in WMT. My advise is to do a search with: 'site;yoursite.com' and check whether there has been an improval in the indexation. Just now im getting 620 results in that search.
4- Being built in Dupal is no metric to google (at least as fas as my knoledge) in order to harm or benefit you. It's transparent for Google.Hope I've helped.
GR. -
I see a good amount of pages indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.northshoreymca.org%2F
Make sure the profile you are using in GSC (formerly GWT) is the https://www. version of the website (any other profile will show fewer/no indexed pages).
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
-
Redirecting 2 established websites to 1 new one.
I have 2 websites that I've built up for a few years decent DA. I'm thinking of making one new website and directing the two websites to it. Is Google going to find that suspicious, or will the new site benefit from the DA from both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdShull0 -
Google Indexing Stopped
Hello Team, A month ago, Google was indexing more than 2,35,000 pages, now has reduced to 11K. I have cross-checked almost everything including content, backlinks and schemas. Everything is looking fine, except the server response time, being a heavy website, or may be due to server issues, the website has an average loading time of 4 secs. Also, I would like to mention that I have been using same server since I have started working on the website, and as said above a month ago the indexing rate was more than 2.3 M, now reduced to 11K. nothing changed. As I have tried my level best on doing research for the same, so please if you had any such experiences, do share your valuable solutions to this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreyjohnson0 -
Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario..... BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store. BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team. The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain. The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other. We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer. BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OPM
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year old Our SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?0 -
"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
Greetings MOZ community: If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"? My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense. What is proper form? As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Sitemap for SmartPhone site
Hello I have a smartphone site (e.g.m.abc.com). To my understanding we do not need a mobile sitemap as its not a traditional mobile site. Shall I add those mobile site links in my regular www XML sitemap or not bother to add the links as we already have rel = canonical (on m.abc.com ) and rel= alternate in place (on www site) to respective pages. Please suggests a solution. I really look forward to an answer as I haven't found the "official" answer to this question anywhere.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdobeVAS0 -
Need your thoughts on my site
Hi, This is my site: http://hemorrhoidssuccess.com/ I have got some decent natural links with a mix of different anchor texts. My main keyword is "Hemorrhoids Treatment", And i got very less exact match anchor texts. Now i was able to rank for "Top Hemorrhoid Treatment" on #2 Page, but i was not in the index for the my main keyword "Hemorrhoids Treatment". Can you review my site and let me know, what i am missing? Do i need to get more links? If so with what anchor texts? Will be waiting for your replies.. Thanks in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitss
Dhee0 -
Google & Bing not indexing a Joomla Site properly....
Can someone explain the following to me please. The background: I launched a new website - new domain with no history. I added the domain to my Bing webmaster tools account, verified the domain and submitted the XML sitemap at the same time. I added the domain to my Google analytics account and link webmaster tools and verified the domain - I was NOT asked to submit the sitemap or anything. The site has only 10 pages. The situation: The site shows up in bing when I search using site:www.domain.com - Pages indexed:- 1 (the home page) The site shows up in google when I search using site:www.domain.com - Pages indexed:- 30 Please note Google found 30 pages - the sitemap and site only has 10 pages - I have found out due to the way the site has been built that there are "hidden" pages i.e. A page displaying half of a page as it is made up using element in Joomla. My questions:- 1. Why does Bing find 1 page and Google find 30 - surely Bing should at least find the 10 pages of the site as it has the sitemap? (I suspect I know the answer but I want other peoples input). 2. Why does Google find these hidden elements - Whats the best way to sort this - controllnig the htaccess or robots.txt OR have the programmer look into how Joomla works more to stop this happening. 3. Any Joomla experts out there had the same experience with "hidden" pages showing when you type site:www.domain.com into Google. I will look forward to your input! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Indexing non-indexed content and Google crawlers
On a news website we have a system where articles are given a publish date which is often in the future. The articles were showing up in Google before the publish date despite us not being able to find them linked from anywhere on the website. I've added a 'noindex' meta tag to articles that shouldn't be live until a future date. When the date comes for them to appear on the website, the noindex disappears. Is anyone aware of any issues doing this - say Google crawls a page that is noindex, then 2 hours later it finds out it should now be indexed? Should it still appear in Google search, News etc. as normal, as a new page? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0