Two high ranking pages instantly dropped from index - no manual penalty notification
-
We are facing an issue where two of our major rankings pages have just completely disappeared from search results.
This has happened in the last 24 - 48 hours and there has been no changes made to the site. From what we can tell, it's only impacted two pages (but two very important category pages).
I have double and triple checked all standard indexing protocols - Search Console URL inspection says the pages are fine to crawl and index. URLs have been requested to re-index but nothing has worked.
This would have me to believe it could be a manual action yet there are no notifications in Search Console and we are listed as 'No issues detected' in all versions of our web property.
Can anyone else think what could be the reason?
-
Those URLs don't index because they result in 301 redirects. Google only indexes the redirect destination URL, this is to cut down on people clicking SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) and then getting redirected (slow) instead of heading straight to the web-page
https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/swingsets (no hyphen) 301 redirects to https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/swing-sets (with a hyphen)
https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/trampolines (ends with "s", pluralised) 301 redirects to https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/trampoline (non-plural)
You can see Google has indexed the redirect destination URLs here
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Avulyplay.com%2Fen-AU%2Fswing-sets
and here
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Avulyplay.com/en-AU/trampoline
-
We have received no notifications for anything.
The URLs in question are -
https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/trampolines
https://www.vulyplay.com/en-AU/swingsets
It's impossible to know what the best course of action is. We don't know if they have been manually reviewed or if a error has occurred or what.
Worst timing for this to happen as well.
-
Yes, they will notify you.... but.... they must be able to find your contact information.
If they notify you, they will provide information about the infringing resource and they will let you know who complained.
-
Thank you this information EGOL.
Do you know if you get notified if a DMCA is filed against you?
Still no notifications at all and no manual actions reported under any of our web properties.
-
Here are some of the many things that can cause a page to disappear from the SERPs.
** Another webmaster grabbed your page and published it on his domain and now he is ranking for your keywords instead of you.
** You grabbed another webmaster's page and published it on your site and now that page on your site has disappeared from the SERPs.
** You have built or received links on other websites with anchor text that matches the keywords that you are no longer ranking for. (a page falling from the SERPs for this usually has a number of exact match keyword links)
** Your page has text or an image or other intellectual property on it that belongs to another person and they filed DMCA to Google. Now your page is not ranking.
** Another person has filed a false DMCA to Google that accuses you of taking their content.
** You have accidentally placed a no index for this page on your website.
** A hacker has placed a no index for this page on your website.
** These pages are relatively new and are in-and-out of the SERPs like many new pages do.
** You have done (intentionally or innocently) some sin and now Google has whacked your page.
Usually one of the above will account for a page missing from the SERPs. There are other reasons... but the above usually nail it. Rarely, Google will temporarily lose track of a page (really rare but can happen).
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
-
Anchor text penalties and indexed links
Hi! I'm working on a site that got hit by a manual penalty some time ago. I got that removed, cleaned up a bunch of links and disavowed the rest. That was about six months ago. Rankings improved, but the big money terms still aren't doing great. I recently ran a Searchmetrics anchor text report though, and it said that direct match anchors still made up the largest part of the overall portfolio. However, when I started looking at individual links with direct anchors, nearly every one had been removed or disavowed. My question is, could an anchor text penalty be in place because these removed links have not been reindexed? If so, what are my options? We've waited for this to happen naturally, but it hasn't occurred after quite a few months. I could ping them - could this have any impact? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Indexing Dynamic Pages
http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/search/Wiper+Blade/03300/C0047.oap?make=Honda&model=Accord&year=2005&vi=1430764 How is O'Reilly getting this page indexed? It shows up in organic results for [2005 honda accord windshield wiper size].
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Home page not being indexed
Hi Moz crew. I have two sites (one is a client's and one is mine). They are both Wordpress sites and both are hosted on WP Engine. They have both been set up for a long time, and are "on-page" optimized. Pages from each site are indexed, but Google is not indexing the homepage for either site. Just to be clear - I can set up and work on a Wordpress site, but am not a programmer. Both seem to be fine according to my Moz dashboard. I have Webmaster tools set up for each - and as far as I can tell (definitely not an exper in webmaster tools) they are okay. I have done the obvious and checked that the the box preventing Google from crawling is not checked, and I believe I have set up the proper re-directs and canonicals.Thanks in advance! Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Yellow pages, how to improve rankings?
We have a huge database of companies in the baltic region (www.business-baltics.com) the page is completely yellow pages with no unique texts or anything. How would you improve the Search Engine Rankings for a website like this? And how do you do a link building for a page like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkasKR0 -
How can I see all the pages google has indexed for my site?
Hi mozers, In WMT google says total indexed pages = 5080. If I do a site:domain.com commard it says 6080 results. But I've only got 2000 pages in my site that should be indexed. So I would like to see all the pages they have indexed so I can consider noindexing them or 404ing them. Many thanks, Julian.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julianhearn0 -
Google Ranking Wrong Page
The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords. A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website. Our URL structures now look something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cpapciak
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4 Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city. My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical. Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!0 -
Sudden Index drop, but traffic increased?
Here are the numbers- Pages submitted on sitemap- About 18k Total Pages indexed on 12/30- About 250k Total Pages indexed on 1/6- About 81k We made no site changes in that week, why the sudden drop? Also why is total pages indexed so much higher than sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Why are new pages not being indexed, and old pages (now in robots.txt) remain in the index?
I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page. To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index? Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corp08030