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.
Page disappears from Google search results
-
Hi, I recently encountered a very strange problem.
One of the pages I published in my website ranked very well for a couple of days on top 5, then after a couple of days, the page completely vanished, no matter how direct I search for it, does not appear on the results, I check GSC, everything seems to be normal, but when checking Google analytics, I find it strange that there is no data on the page since it disappeared and it also does not show up on the 'active pages' section no matter how many different computers i keep it open.I have checked to page 9, and used a couple of keyword tools and it appears nowhere!
It didn't have any back links, but it was unique and high quality. I have checked on the page does still exist and it is still readable. Has this ´happened to anyone before?
Any thoughts would be gratefully received.
-
@joelssonmedia said in Page disappears from Google search results:
I've had quite a lot of similar cases like this. The reason it happens is that Google crawls and indexes the pages in many phases. First phase is URL discovery, where it just discovers a new URL via links on your site or sitemap.
Second phase is indexing and first-pass deduplication. If your page has a good quality (in google's eyes) and is not a duplicate to another page on your site, it usually gets indexed. If your page does not pass this phase - it usually appears in "Crawled but not indexed" section.
Third and further phases are connected to further deduplication algorithms, and very few people know exactly what's "under the hood". One of the discoveries that I've had is that if a page does not have sufficient number of incoming links from your site, and Googlebot is not able to discover it from your homepage, it usually won't get indexed. So, my recommendation is:-
check if your page has incoming links from your site and can be discovered from homepage. If not, put a link to your page from your homepage or from one of the first-level pages, and see if it resolves your issue.
-
check if your page is accessible with JavaScript turned off (you can do it in browser settings or with one of the Chrome plugins). In many cases, you may see that the content of the page appears only partially, or may be even completely blank. If yes, speak to you developers to make sure that the page is fully rendered with JS turned off.
-
if nothing works, try to change the top paragraphs of your content and titles/headers and change the URL slightly, while making sure that there are no issues with points (1) and (2). It may happen, that during the crawl, search bot received a server error, in this case you can either wait for the next crawl (I don't know how often Googlebot crawls your website, it usually depends on how high is the Domain Authority of your site), or resubmit the page, as I suggested.
Wishing you luck! These indexing issues are always the trickiest to figure out. If nothing works, feel free to post some more details and we'll try to figure out.
-
-
@joelssonmedia Hi Joe, I will be happy to take a look at it but I would need to see what you're doing, to be honest with you without that I can only guess it could be something like /robots.txt
Robots.txt file URL: www.example.com/robots.txt
User-agent: * Disallow: /
=Blocking all web crawlers from all content
https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxtHope this helps,
Tom
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 Search Console "Text too small to read" Errors
What are the guidelines / best practices for clearing these errors? Google has some pretty vague documentation on how to handle this sort of error. User behavior metrics in GA are pretty much in line with desktop usage and don't show anything concerning Any input is appreciated! Thanks m3F3uOI
Technical SEO | | Digital_Reach2 -
Indexed, but not shown in search result
Hi all We face this problem for www.residentiebosrand.be, which is well programmed, added to Google Search Console and indexed. Web pages are shown in Google for site:www.residentiebosrand.be. Website has been online for 7 weeks, but still no search results. Could you guys look at the update below? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Inurl: search shows results without keyword in URL
Hi there, While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this. The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created. Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search
Dear Mozer's Today I get from Google Webmaster tools a "Notice of DMCA removal" I'll paste here the note to get your opinions "Hello, Google has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that some of your materials allegedly infringe upon the copyrights of others. The URLs of the allegedly infringing materials may be found at the end of this message. The affected URLs are listed below: http://www.freesharewaredepot.com/productpages/Ultimate_Spelling__038119.asp" So I perform these steps: 1. Remove the page from the site (now it gives 404). 2. Remove it from database (no listed on directory, sitemap.xml and RSS) 3. I fill the "Google Content Removed Notification form" detailing the removal of the page. My question is now I have to do any other task, such as fill a site reconsideration, or only I have to wait. Thank you for your help. Claudio
Technical SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia0 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0