Accidental No Index
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Hi everyone,
We control several client sites at my company. The developers accidentally had a no index robot implemented in the site code when we did the HTTPS upgrade without knowing it (yes it's true). Ten days later we noticed traffic was falling. After a couple days we found the no index tags and removed them and resumbitted the sitemaps. The sites started ranking for their own keywords again within a day or two. The organic traffic is still down considerably and other keywords they are not ranking for in the same spot as they were before or at all.
If I look in Google Search console, it says we submitted for example 4,000 URLs and only 160 have been indexed. I feel like maybe Google is taking a long time to re-index to remainder of the sites?? Has anyone has this issue?? We're starting to get very concerned so any input would be appreciate. I read an article on here from 2011 about a company that did the same and they were ranking for their keywords within a week. It's been 8 days since our fix.
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- Make sure the redirects from http --> https are 301 redirects
- Make sure the canonical URLs have been updated to https
- Make sure your sitemap URLs have been updated to https
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Thank you for your reply and sorry for the delay in mine. We have the https versions of our site in GA and GSC. The https versions of the sites were not fully indexed. We noticed when traffic was falling significantly on all the sites.
Unfortunately according to GSC, Google has still only crawled a small fraction of all client sites and rankings/organic traffic are slightly improving but still not back to normal. We submitted the site maps and have re-submitted some. We can try to again?
Any other input would be appreciated.
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Great suggestions by Oleg.
Yoast wrote an article last fall that talks about some of the reasons a site might be slow getting indexed and how to get it indexed faster. They have some worthwhile suggestions.
Did you submit the new (https) version of your website to both google search console and google analytics? Is that what you're looking at? Was the https version of the site fully indexed before you noticed the noindex tags?
Have you confirmed every page on the site was converted to https and there aren't any remaining pages (images or pdfs, for example) that are still http and therefore not showing up in your reports?
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- Crawl the entire site and make sure no noindex tags remain
- Keep resubmitting the sitemap(s)
- If you have an HTML sitemap, you can do "Fetch as Google" then "Index this page and internal links" which will help recrawl the pages
Don't think there is much else you can do but send Google signals to recrawl the site and see that the noindex tag was removed.
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