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
-
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
Wrong URLs indexed, Failing To Rank Anywhere
I’m struggling with a client website that's massively failing to rank. It was published in Nov/Dec last year - not optimised or ranking for anything, it's about 20 pages. I came onboard recently, and 5-6 weeks ago we added new content, did the on-page and finally changed from the non-www to the www version in htaccess and WP settings (while setting www as preferred in Search Console). We then did a press release and since then, have acquired about 4 partial match contextual links on good websites (before this, it had virtually none, save for social profiles etc.) I should note that just before we added the (about 50%) new content and optimised, my developer accidentally published the dev site of the old version of the site and it got indexed. He immediately added it correctly to robots.txt, and I assumed it would therefore drop out of the index fairly quickly and we need not be concerned. Now it's about 6 weeks later, and we’re still not ranking anywhere for our chosen keywords. The keywords are around “egg freezing,” so only moderate competition. We’re not even ranking for our brand name, which is 4 words long and pretty unique. We were ranking in the top 30 for this until yesterday, but it was the press release page on the old (non-www) URL! I was convinced we must have a duplicate content issue after realising the dev site was still indexed, so last week, we went into Search Console to remove all of the dev URLs manually from the index. The next day, they were all removed, and we suddenly began ranking (~83) for “freezing your eggs,” one of our keywords! This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, but once again, the positive sign was dampened by the fact it was non-www page that was ranking, which made me wonder why the non-www pages were still even indexed. When I do site:oursite.com, for example, both non-www and www URLs are still showing up…. Can someone with more experience than me tell me whether I need to give up on this site, or what I could do to find out if I do? I feel like I may be wasting the client’s money here by building links to a site that could be under a very weird penalty 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Wrong pages ranking for key terms
Hi, I have a website that was rebuilt and redesigned earlier this year, and it's struggling to rank. The problem is that the wrong pages are ranking for the key terms. For example, there is a page for 'Loft Conversions Essex' but the page that's ranking is actually the FAQ page (which doesn't mention the word 'Essex' at all). I have been through all of the usual items, and none of them seem to apply: The landing pages have been properly optimised (not overly so), while the pages that rank only contain the terms within the menu (the link that goes to the actual landing page) We thought it may be a redirect issue since the site was a bit of a mess before the rebuild, so we removed all of the redirects and resubmitted the htaccess file but that hasn't helped Internal anchor text is relevant There aren't a huge number of external links to the old site pages, and many of these pages didn't exist at all so I don't think that's an issue Most of the pages were built at the same time so there's no real reason why one would have more authority than another There are no canonicals interfering with these pages I can't really canonical these since we do want the pages to rank, it's just that they're all ranking for the wrong thing (so the SERPs are a lot lower than they should be). Most of these pages are pretty new, as I said, so while we have tried smaller content changes I don't think a full refresh will really help. To make it even weirder, the pages that rank for each term change regularly but it's never the right page. Help! EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innermedia10 -
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results. Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination? I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB1 -
Why extreme drop in number of pages indexed via GWMT sitemaps?
Any tips on why our GWMT Sitemaps indexed pages dropped to 27% of total submitted entries (2290 pages submitted, 622 indexed)? Already checked the obvious Test Sitemap, valid URLs etc. We had typically been at 95% of submitted getting indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jkinnisch0 -
How many links would you need to rank up in page rank?
White hat **** Can 20 website with page rank of 3 make your site rank higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spidersite0 -
404'd pages still in index
I recently launched a site and shortly after performed a URL rewrite (not the greatest idea, i know). The developer 404'd the old pages instead of a permanent 301 redirect. This caused a mess in the index. I have tried to use Google's removal tool to remove these URL's from the index. These pages were being removed but now I am finding them in the index as just URL's to the 404'd page (i.e. no title tag or meta description). Should I wait this out or now go back and 301 redirect the old URL's (that are 404'd now) to the new URL's? I am sure this is the reason for my lack of ranking as the rest of my site is pretty well optimized and I have some quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
Duplicate content on index.htm page
How do I avoid duplicate content on the index.htm page . I need to redirect the spider from the /index.htm file to the main root of http://www.manandhisvan.com.au and hence avoid duplicate content. Does anyone know of a foolproof way of achieving this without me buggering up the complete site Cheers Freddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fatfreddy0