Home Page Deindexed overnight?
-
Hi,
Hope you guys can help. I run an e-commerce site https://alloywheels.com Last night our home page (and a few other pages, but not all) were de-indexed by Google. The site has been ranking (UK) for years in P1 for the "alloy wheels" keyword and on the whole been running very successfully. However recently I have noticed from fluctuation on the "alloy wheels" keyword, dropping to P3 then P5 then back to P3, but this morning I noticed we were not even ranking on the first page.
When I check inside Search Console there are no messages or warnings but the "/" page was de-indexed. There were a few other key pages that were also de-indexed. I have request reindexing and they have come back, P7 for the home page for "alloy wheels"
The only thing I have changed was I realised yesterday there was no robots.txt on the site and was being recommended by web.dev to add one, so I did. It was just an allow all:
User-agent: *
DisallowSitemap: https://alloywheels.com/sitemap.xml
I ran tests on the robots.txt before it was uploaded and it all came green. I have removed the robots.txt for now.
Has anybody seen anything like this before? With the recent ranking fluctuation I am not sure whether it is to do with that, the robots.txt or something different altogether?
Thanks in advance,
James
-
Lots of people facing this same problem. It happening because Google has some technical issues.
-
The issue is now being reported as fixed, with a response from Google’s John Mueller saying it was a technical issue their end. https://searchengineland.com/google-de-indexing-issue-now-fixed-result-of-technical-issues-315058
-
Myself and a friend (who is a competitor) both had the same problem. Doing a URL Inspection in Google Search Console - specifically the Test Live URL thing - fixed it immediately.
-
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Certainly seems the same as others are reporting, so makes me feel a little better!
-
Someone else in the forum has posted a very similar question to you! My response there:
"It looks like you're not the only one: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dropping-pages-out-of-the-search-index-27369.html
No response from Google yet."
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
Overdynamic Pages - How to Solve it?
Hi everyone, I'm running a classified real estate ads site, where people can publish their apartment or house they want to sell, so we use multiple filters to help people find what they want. Lately we added multiple filters to the URL to make the search more precise, things like: Prices (priceAmount=###) Bedrooms (BedroomsNumber=2) Bathrooms (BathroomsNumber=3) TotalArea (totalArea=1_50) Services (Elevator, CommonAreas, security) Among other Filters so you see the picture, all this filters are on the URL so that people can share their search on multiple social media, that makes two problems for moz crawl: Overdynamic URLs Too long URLs Now what would be a good solution for this 2 problems, would a canonical to the original page before the "?" would be ok? Example:
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ
http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium The problem I have with this solution is that I also have a pagination parameter (page=2), and I'm using prev and next tags, if I use a such canonical will break the prev and next tag? http://urbania.pe/buscar/venta-de-propiedades?bathroomsNumber=2&services=gas&commonAreas=solarium&page=2 Also thinking if adding a noindex on pages with paramters could also be an option. Thanks a lot, I'm trying to address this issues.0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content Crawl Diagnostics
I have Pages with Duplicate Page Content in my Crawl Diagnostics Tell Me How Can I solve it Or Suggest Me Some Helpful Tools. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nomyhot0 -
Duplicate page issue
Hi, i have a serious duplicate page issue and not sure how it happened and i am not sure if anyone will be able to help as my site was built in joomla, it has been done through k2, i have never come across this issue before i am seem to have lots of duplicate pages under author names, example http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker this page is showing the full articles which is not great for seo and it is also showing that there are hundreds more articles at the bottom on the semoz tool i am using, it is showing these as duplicates although there are hundreds of them and it is causing google to see lots of duplicate pages. Diane Walker
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-2 5 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-210 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-297 1 1 0
Diane Walker
http://www.in2town.co.uk/blog/diane-walker/Page-3 5 1 0
Diane Walker can anyone please help me to sort this important issue out.0 -
How many pages should my site have?
Right now I think I only have 36. What is a good amount of pages to have? Any ideas on ways to add relevant pages to my site? I was thinking about starting a message board. Also, I have a free tech support chat room, and was thinking about posting the logs somewhere on the site. Does that sound like a good idea? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
Home page penalty?
What does it mean when your home page has a penalty? I have a site that has good rankings for many pages, but my home page seems to be penalized by Google. I tried searching for my home page URL in Google, www.xxxxxx.com and my page doesn't show up, but sub pages do show up? What would cause this penalty and how do you correct this issue.
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Is this 404 page indexed?
I have a URL that when searched for shows up in the Google index as the first result but does not have any title or description attached to it. When you click on the link it goes to a 404 page. Is it simply that Google is removing it from the index and is in some sort of transitional phase or could there be another reason.
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0