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
-
Bing search results - Site links
My site links in Bing search results are pulling through the footer text instead of the meta description (see image). Is there any way of controlling this? 2L2VusT
Technical SEO | | RWesley0 -
Why is my entire page appearing as a video result (and only a video result)?
A page on my site is appearing as a video result. When you click on the link, it takes you to the page. The page does have a video on it, but it seems weird that the entire page would appear as (and only as) a video...
Technical SEO | | andrew.baldinger0 -
301 redirected all my pages to my new domain, now I have a problem with Google Search Console
Hi guys! I bought a new domain name and redirected all my URLs from the old domain to the new one. Everything worked perfectly but now I have a little problem. I want to use the option 'Address Change' in google search console. Step 1 Works (Select new website in the list) Step 2 Works (Confirm that the 301 are working) Step 3 Asks me to Verify the old domain (huh!?) in order to complete the request. Obviously that doesn't work because my 301s WORKS! So if I try to verify the old website by putting a google file in the root of my domain Google tries to access it and it automatically redirects to the new domain. I must be missing something lol help!
Technical SEO | | benoit_20180 -
How fast should a page load to get a Green light at Googles PageSpeed?
So, trying to get e big e-commerce site to work on their page loading issuses. Their question left me without an answer, so how fast should a site be, so that it will get a Green light at the Googles Page Speed test? Is there a number in seconds? Do we know that?
Technical SEO | | ziiiva1230 -
PDF in search results?
Hello community! I am not an SEO professional, though I am a practitioner, I would say. I am seeking a solution on behalf of a friend. If you search the term "Peter Blatt" you will discover a "black eye" on the first page, towards the bottom of SERPs. It's a PDF published on the Florida Department of Financial Services website regarding the final order for a settlement he and his company ("Blatt Financial Group") reached with the state as it related to professional conduct allegations. Does anyone have any advice on how to address this? I don't want "game" the search engines, but at the same time, this document looks really scary and much worse than it actually is to people, and I would love for it do drop below page one. Any advice or suggestions from the community? Thanks! Tom
Technical SEO | | 800GoldLaw0 -
Search Term not appearing in On-Page Grader but is in code?
Hi, I have never had this issue in the past, but I am working on a website currently which is - http://hrfoundations.co.uk I didn't develop this website and the pages are in separate folders on the FTP which I have never come across before but hey ho. Anyway I have added the search term (HR Consultancy West Midlands) to the about us page in the h1, title and description however when I run the On-Page Grader it only says that I have entered it within the body which I haven't even done yet. When I view the page source it has defiantly been uploaded and the search terms are there, I have tried checking the spelling incase I spelt it incorrectly and I still can't seem to find the issue. Has anyone else experience this in the past, I'm going to go away now and check the code for any unclosed divs etc to see if that may be causing any issue's. Thanks Chris
Technical SEO | | chrissmithps0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
One Page - Targeting Multiple Low Searched Keywords.
Hi, First "Question" on SEOmoz, A client has requested me to have all the traffic going to the main/home page. In total its 25 Keywords and competition is pretty low, lets say "Builder In City", all the keywords are the sames except for the citys. "Builder In London" "Builder in Birmingham" Builder in Cardiff" .. and so on. Will it be ok and do-able to target 1 homepage with 25 keywords and expect decent results.
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0