Specific pages won't index
-
I have a few pages on my site that Google won't index, and I can't understand why. I've looked into possible issues with Robots, noindex, redirects, canonicals, and Search Console rules. I've got nothing.
Example:
I want this page to index https://tour.franchisebusinessreview.com/services/franchisee-satisfaction-surveys/
When I Google the full URL, I get results including the non-subdomain homepage, and various pages on the subdomain, including a child page of the page I want, but not the page itself.
Any ideas? Thanks for the help!
-
You can also submit to Google without using Search Console. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=submit+url+to+google&oq=submit+url+to+google&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2372j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 (Search "Submit URL To Google") and then just paste your url in. You can do this to any url.
-
Thanks, Sergio. I'm not an expert but I don't see why the sitemap wouldn't pick it up. The page is linked to the homepage via the top navigation. Other pages in that navigation have been indexed.
-
Thanks Martijn and Joe. I'll try submitting the page as you recommend. Our site relaunched in November 2016 so this particular page (and many others) are new to the site as of that date.
-
I agree with Martijn here, the XML sitemap is certainly important but you can also request that Google index this URL specifically through the 'Fetch as Google' Tool. Just FETCH that URL and select "Request indexing" once it has completed.
As for why Google has not indexed this page before now, I not seeing too many reasons other than what has been mentioned. When did this page go live?
-
Yeps, what I want to add here is that Sitemaps will only help in getting Google to crawl and know about the more pages when they're in the sitemaps. For small sites I really doubt it will have an impact on getting them indexed.
-
The answer has to be at sitemaps of the website...
You can submit a url to Google with: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?hl=es
Have you looked that the structure of the web does not make the sitemaps obviate it?
-
That would definitively help. In addition I would look into still adding the pages manually through the Submit to Index feature.
-
Thanks, Martijn. Our webmaster discovered that the page in question was not included in the sitemap we submitted to SC. The question of why still needs to be answered.
-
Hi,
That's not fun, have you tried adding these pages to Google Search Console and submitting them to the Index from there?
Martijn.
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
-
Large Drop in Indexed Pages But Increase in Traffic
We run a directory site and noticed about a week ago that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting a huge drop in indexed pages (from around 150,000 down to 30,000). In the same time, however, our traffic has increased. Has anyone seen this before or have any ideas on why this could happen? I have search for technical errors but nothing has changed on our site or our content.
Technical SEO | | sa_787040 -
Finding websites that don't have meta descriptions
Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian
Technical SEO | | agencepicnic0 -
Site went down and traffic hasn't recovered
Very curious situation. We have a network of sites. Sunday night one (only one) of our sites goes down, and since then we've seen a loss in traffic across all our sites!! Not only have we seen a loss of traffic, we also saw a loss of indexed pages. A complete drop off from 1.8 million to 1.3 million pages indexed. Does anyone know why one site outtage would affect the rest of them? And the indexed pages? Very confused. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | TMI.com0 -
Why can't I rank for my brand name?
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Startupfactory0 -
Skip indexing the search pages
Hi, I want all such search pages skipped from indexing www.somesite.com/search/node/ So i have this in robots.txt (Disallow: /search/) Now any posts that start with search are being blocked and in Google i see this message A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. How can i handle this and also how can i find all URL's that Google is blocking from showing Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Merging sites, ensuring traffic doesn't die
Wondering if I could get a second opinion on this, please. I have just taken on a new client, they own about 6 different niched car experience websites (hire an Aston Martin for the day, type thing). All the six sites they have seem to perform reasonably well for the brand of car they deal with, the average DA of the sites is about 24. The client wishes to move all of these different manufacturers into one site and have sections of the site, they can then also target more generic experience day type keywords. The obvious way of dealing with this move would be to 301 the old sites to the relevant places on the new site and wait for that to rank. However, looking at the backlinks profile of the niched sites, they seem to have very few backlinks and i feel the reason they are ranking so well for all the individual manufacturers is because they all feature the name in the domain. Not exact match, but the name is there. If I am thinking right, with the 301 we want to tell Google page x is now page y, index this one instead. Because the new site has a more generic name I don't think it will enjoy any of the domain keyword benefits which are helping the sub sites, and as a result I expect the rankings and traffic to drop (at least in the short term). Am I reading this correct. Would people use a 301 in this case? The easiest thing to do would be to leave the 6 sub sites up and running on their own domain and launch the new site to run alongside them, however the client doesn't want this. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Wrong page version in the index
Hi, my site is currently accessible through URL with and without www. The Version with www has 10 times more Backlinks (PA 45 vs 38) but is not listet into the google Index. As far as I know there was never made a google Webmaster account or declared otherwise the version without www to be 'cannonical'. Basically I think that for SEO reasons it would be much better to declare the with www version to be cannonical and redirect the without www version to it. My questions are: Do you have an idea why the with www version is not indexed?
Technical SEO | | Naturalmente
How long does Google usually take to change the version in the index?
Do I risk my site to be thrown out of the index for some days untill the change is made? Thanks in advance.0 -
Google has not indexed my site in over 4 weeks, what's the problem?
We recently put in permanent redirects to our new url, but Google seems to not want to index the new url. There was no problems with the old url and the new url is brand new so should have no 'black marks' against it. We have done everything we can think off in terms of submitting site maps, telling google our url has changed in webmaster tools, mentioning the new url on social sites etc...but still nothing. It has been over 4 weeks now since we set up the redirects to the url, any ideas why Google seems to be choosing not to index it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cewe0