Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)
-
When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do.
The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again.
When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search.
Any ideas?
[see images where you can see the problem]
-
Thanks. I'm going to try that and I'll let you know if this helps.
-
Yup, an "empty" robots.txt file should look like this:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: -
Thank you for your answer.
You're right. There is no robots.txt file. You're saying that I should get one in place, just for housekeeping.
But will it help if I just leave it empty? Because I do not need to disallow something, right now...
Thanks.
-
Thank you for your answer.
- I do not have any errors in Search console regarding the homepage.
- There is no robots.txt file.
-
Looks like the site is missing a robots.txt file; that could cause some issues (hit tip, Tim Holmes). I'd get one in place, just for housekeeping - search engines have been known behave oddly sometimes when they can't find a robots.txt file.
I'm struggling to see anything obvious that would cause this behaviour, but equally, I wouldn't be too concerned about it - the page is clearly indexed and discoverable, so this may just be a quirk.
-
To all intents and purposes it would appear the Homepage file has been indexed as it can be found via branded search etc. From viewing the sites source you are not blocking anything or have any funny canonical issues. Do you have any errors in your Google Search Console.crawl reports.
Also have you anything in your robots.txt file that could be causing an issue?
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
-
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Stuck trying to deindex pages from google
Hi There, We had developers put a lot of spammy markups in one of our websites. We tried many ways to deindex them by fixing it and requesting recrawls... However, some of the URLs that had these spammy markups were incorrect URLs - redirected to the right version, (ex. same URL with or without / at the end) so now all the regular URLs are updated and clean, however, the redirected URLs can't be found in crawls so they weren't updated, and couldn't get the spam removed. They still show up in the serp. I tried deindexing those spammed pages by making then no-index in the robot.txt file. This seemed to be working for about a week, and now they showed up again in the serp Can you help us get rid of these spammy urls? edit?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Ruchy0 -
Hey guys, for some reason my homepage has gone down in rankings though other pages on my site have not.
This is not something I have ever seen before. The site is still indexed if I search for it directly, but not in top 100 rankings for keywords even though sub-pages are ranking for the given keyword. Changes I have made recently include site transfer to wordpress, force redirect http to https removal of www by redirect and adding new property instance in Google Search Console. I have checked htaccess file and sitemap and all seem fine. ideas? Site: https://dublinSEO.co
Technical SEO | | HappyApple840 -
Has anyone tested or knows whether it makes a difference to upload a disavow file to both www. and non-www. versions of your site in GWMT?
Although Google treats both as separate sites, I always assumed that uploading the disavow file to the canonical version of your site would solve the problem. Is this the case, or has anyone seen better results uploading to both versions?
Technical SEO | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Google Indexed Only 1 Page
Hi, I'm new and hope this forum can help me. I have recently resubmit my sitemap and Google only Indexed 1 Page. I can still see many of my old indexed pages in the SERP's? I have upgraded my template and graded all my pages to A's on SEOmoz, I have solid backlinks and have been building them over time. I have redirected all my 404 errors in .htaccess and removed /index.php from my url's. I have never done this before but my website runs perfect and all my pages redirect as I hoped. My site: www.FunerallCoverFinder.co.za How do I figure out what the problem is? Thanks in Advance!
Technical SEO | | Klement690 -
What is the best way to find stranded pages?
I have a client that has a site that has had a number of people in charge of it. All of these people have very different opinions about what should be on the site itself. When I look at their website on the server I see pages that do not have any obvious navigation to them. What is the best way to find out the internal linking structure of a site and see if these pages truly are stranded?
Technical SEO | | anjonr0 -
Google Custom Site Search
I am an admin on a google custom site search account. I am also the owner of a verified webmaster tools account for the same site. The Custom Search control panel will not let me add URL's or a Site map for on demand indexing, but says "you must submit a sitemap of your own verified sites". Has anyone else has this issue? Does the Owner of the custom search account have to be the owner of the webmaster account, or can the logged in admin be? Thanks
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0