Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Fetch as Google temporarily lifting a penalty?
-
Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't!
We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword.
I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds.
I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax.
Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied.
Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh!
So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas?
Thanks.
-
Unfortunately it's going to be difficult to dig deeper into this without knowing the site - are you able to share the details?
I'm with Martijn that there should be no connection between these features. The only thing I have come up with that could plausibly cause anything like what you are seeing is something related to JavaScript execution (and this would not be a feature working as it's intended to work). We know that there is a delay between initial indexing and JavaScript indexing. It seems plausible to me that if there were a serious enough issue with the JS execution / indexing that either that step failed or that it made the site look spammy enough to get penalised that we could conceivably see the behaviour you describe - where it ranks until Google executes the JS.
I guess my first step to investigating this would be to look at the JS requirements on your site and consider the differences between with and without JS rendering (and if there is any issue with the chrome version that we know executes the JS render at Google's side).
Interested to hear if you discover anything more.
-
Hey, it’s good to have a fresh pair of eyes on it. There may something else as simple that I’ve missed.
Rankings check on my Mac, 2 x webservers via Remote Desktop in different locations, 2 x independent ranking checkers and they all show the same... recovery for 12ish hours, along with traffic and conversions. Then nothing.
When the rankings dissapear I can hit fetch as again straight away and they come straight back. If I leave it for days, then they’re gone for days, until I hit fetch then straight back.
cheers
-
Ok, that still doesn't mean that they're not personalized. But I'll skip on that part for now.
In the end, the changes that you're seeing aren't triggered by what you're doing with Fetch as Google. I'll leave it up to some others to see if they'll shine a light on the situation. -
Hi,
Thanks,
They’re not personalised as my ranking checkers don’t show personalised results
-
Hi,
I'm afraid I have to help you with this dream, there is no connection whatsoever between the rankings and the feature to Fetch as Google within Google Search Console. What likely is happening is that you're already getting personalized results and within a certain timeframe, the ads won't be shown as the results will be different as Google thinks that you've already seen the first results on the page the first time that you Googled this.
Fetch as Google doesn't provide any signal to the regular ranking engines to say: "Hey, we've fetched something new and now it's going to make an impact on this". Definitely not at the speed that you're describing (within seconds).
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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Google News and Discover down by a lot
Hi,
Technical SEO | | SolenneGINX
Could you help me understand why my website's Google News and Discover Performance dropped suddenly and drastically all of a sudden in November? numbers seem to pick up a little bit again but nowhere close what we used to see before then0 -
Wrong page title in Google
Hi there, A while ago we took over the domain www.hoesjes.nl and forwarded it to our website www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. If you perform a search for the keyword 'hoesjes' in Google then we (www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl) show up on an organic number 1 position. The problem is that the page title isn't correct. Google shows the page title of the website hoesjes.nl we took over and (correctly?) redirected to our domain www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. Does anybody have any idea how to get rid of this wrong page title in Google?
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Here you can find a screenshot of what I mean. Thanks! Marcel0 -
My video sitemap is not being index by Google
Dear friends, I have a videos portal. I created a video sitemap.xml and submit in to GWT but after 20 days it has not been indexed. I have verified in bing webmaster as well. All videos are dynamically being fetched from server. My all static pages have been indexed but not videos. Please help me where am I doing the mistake. There are no separate pages for single videos. All the content is dynamically coming from server. Please help me. your answers will be more appreciated................. Thanks
Technical SEO | | docbeans0 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | | sparts1 -
Why has Google removed meta descriptions from SERPS?
One of my clients' sites has just been redesigned with lots of new URLs added. So the 301 redirections have been put in place and most of the new URLs have now been indexed. BUT Google is still showing all the old URLs in the SERPS and even worse it only displays the title tag. The meta description is not shown, no rich snippet, no text, nothing below the title. This is proving disastrous as visitors are not clicking on a result with no description. I have to assume its got something to do with the redirection, but why is it not showing the descriptions? I've checked the old URLs and he meta description is definitely still in the code, but Google is choosing not to show it. I've never seen this before so I'm struggling for an answer. I'd like to know why or how this is happening, and if it can be resolved. I realise that this may be resolved when Google stops showing all the old URLs but there's no telling how long that will take (can it be speeded up?)
Technical SEO | | Websensejim0 -
Does Google index XML files?
Does Google or other search engines include XML files in their index? More specifically, I am wondering how Google knows the difference between an xml filetype and an RSS feed.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0