[wtf] Mysterious Homepage De-Indexing
-
Our homepage, as well as several similar landing pages, have vanished from the index. Could you guys review the below pages to make sure I'm not missing something really obvious?!
URLs: http://www.grammarly.com http://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker
- It's been four days, so it's not just a temporary fluctuation
- The pages don't have a "noindex" tag on them and aren't being excluded in our robots.txt
- There's no notification about a penalty in WMT
Clues:
-
WMT is returning an "HTTP 200 OK" for Fetch, is showing a redirect to grammarly.com/1 (alternate version of homepage, contains rel=canonical back to homepage) for Fetch+Render. Could this be causing a circular redirect?
-
Some pages on our domain are ranking fine, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=grammarly+answers
-
A month ago, we redesigned the pages in question. The new versions are pretty script-heavy, as you can see.
-
We don't have a sitemap set up yet.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance, friends!
-
Did this get resolved? I'm seeing your home-page indexed and ranking now.
I'm not seeing any kind of redirect to an alternate URL at this point (either as a browser or as GoogleBot). If you 301'ed to an alternate URL and then rel=canonical'ed back to the source of the 301, that could definitely cause problems. It's sending a pretty strong mixed-signal. In that case you'd probably want to 302 or use some alternate method. Redirects for the home-page are best avoided, in most cases.
-
Are you sure it was missing for a time? Ultimately I wouldn't use a third-party (Google) as a tool to diagnose problems (faulty on-site code) that I know are problems and need to be fixed.I'd fix the problems I know are issues and then go from there. Or hire someone capable of fixing the problems.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I'll get to work on the issues you mentioned.
I do have one question for you - grammarly.com/proofreading (significantly fewer links, identical codebase) is now back on the index. If the issue was too many scripts or HTML errors, wouldn't both pages still be de-indexed?
-
Here are some issues just going down the first few lines of code...
- There's a height attribute in your tag.
- Your cookie on the home page is set to expire in the past, not the future
- Your tag conflicts with your script and other code issues (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21363090/doctype-html-ruins-my-script)
- Your Google Site Verification meta tag is different than other pages.
- Your link to the Optimizely CDN is incorrect... (missing 'http:' so it's looking for the script on your site)
- You have many other Markup Issues.
And that's prior to getting into the hundreds of lines of code preceding the start of your page at the tag... 300 lines or so on your other indexed pages 1100+ on your home page. So not only are you not following best practices as outlined by Google, but you have broken stuff too.
-
The saga continues...
According to WMT, there are no issues with grammarly.com The page is fetched and rendered correctly.
Google! Y u no index? Any ideas?
-
Like Lynn mentioned below, if you're having redirection take place across several portions of the site, that could cause the spikes, and a big increase in total download time is worrying if you're crossing the average bounce rate threshold for most people's patience.
Here's the Google Page speed take on it: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgrammarly.com&tab=desktop. They go over both desktop and mobile.
-
Hmm, was something done to fix the googlebot redirect issue or did it just fix itself? Here it states that googlebot will often identify itself as mozilla and your fetch/render originally seemed to indicate that at least some of the time that was the page google was getting. It is a bit murky technically what exactly is going on there but if google is getting redirected some of the time then as you said you are getting into a circular situation between the redirect and the canonical where it is a bit difficult to predict what will happen. If that is 100% fixed now and google sees the main page all the time then I would wait a day or two to see if the page comes back into the index (but be 100% sure that you know it is fixed!). I still think that is the most likely source of your troubles...
-
Excellent question, Lynn. Thank you for chiming in here. There's a user agent based javascript redirect that keeps Chrome visitors on grammarly.com (Chrome browser extension) and sends other browsers to grammarly.com/1 (Web app that works on all browsers).
UPDATE: According to WMT Fetch+Render, the Googlebot redirection issue has been fixed. It is no longer being redirected anywhere and returning a 200 OK for grammarly.com.
Kelly, if that was causing the problem, how long should I hold my breath for re-indexing after re-submitting the homepage?
-
Yup definitely. Whether you're completely removed or simply dropped doesn't matter. If you're not there anymore, for some reason Google determined you're no longer an authority for that keyword. So you need to find out why. Since you just redesigned, the way way is to back track, double check all the old tags and compare them to the new site, check the text and keyword usage on the website, look for anything that's changed that could contribute to the drop. If you don't find anything, tools like majesticSEO are handy to checking if your backlinks are still healthy.
-
Hi Alex, Thank you for your response. The pages didn't suffer in ranking, they were completely removed from the index. Based on that, do you still think it could be a keyword issue?
-
That's actually a great point. I suppose Google could have been holding on to a pre-redesign cached version of the pages.
There has been a 50-100% increase in page download times as well as some weird 5x spikes for crawled pages. I know there could probably be a million different reasons, but do any of them stick out at you as being potential sources of the problem?
-
How does that second version of the homepage work and how long has it been around for? I get one version of the homepage in one browser and the second in another, what decides which version is served and what kind of redirect is it? I think that is the most likely source of your troubles.
-
Yes, but the pages were indexed prior to the redesign, no? Can you look up your crawl stats in GWT to see if there's been a dramatic up tick in page download times, and a down trend in pages crawled. That will at least give you a starting point as to differences between now and then: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-stats
-
Logo definitely needs to be made clickable to Home.
Did you compare the old design and the new design's text to make sure you're still covering the same keywords. In many cases a redesign is more "streamlined" which also means less text or a re-write which is going to impact the keywords your site is relevant for.
-
Thanks, Ryan. Improving our code-to-text ratio is on our roadmap, but could that really be the issue here? The pages were all fully indexed without problems for a full month after our redesign, and we haven't added any scripts. Was there an algorithm update on Monday that could explain the sudden de-indexing?
-
VERY script heavy. Google has recently released updates on a lot of this (Q4 2014) here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.mx/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html. With further guidance given here: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-encoding-and-transfer. Without doing a deep dive that's the most glaring issue and obvious difference between pages that are still being indexed and those that are not.
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
-
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages
Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow." These old pages are in Google's index. At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?
We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why. If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site? Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content. For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems. Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result? For example: Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed? Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Mystery: Ranking in Amazon for a product page?
My client has a product on Amazon that has more reviews and better rankings. However, their competitor with less reviews and lower ratings are ranking #1 for our primary keyword in Google. Our product page doesn't even rank on Google, but I'm assuming Google doesn't want to display two results from Amazon. The only difference is they have 1 link pointed to the product page that has a small PA of 10 and DA of 15. Do you think this link could be the only thing making a difference? Should we start building more links to this product page in addition to their website? Any other tips to help our Amazon page rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stryde0 -
Content not indexed
How come i google content that resides on my website and on my homepage and my site doesn't come up? I know the content is unique i wrote that. I have a feeling i have some kind of a crawling issue but cannot determine what it is. I ran the crawling test and other tools and didn't find anything. Google shows me that pages are indexed but yet its weird try googling snippets of content and you'll see my site isnt anywhere. Have you experienced that before? First i thought it was penalized but i submitted the reconsideration request and it came back clear, No manual spam action found. And i did not get any message in my GWMT either. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMTM0 -
Do my redirects on my homepage need to be 301?
Our domain name is something like www.I-am-cool.com but most people just type in iamcool.com After doing some research I found that those are 302 redirects and I think they should be 301. If I am correct do I need to redirect www.iamcool.com and iamcool.com or just one or the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Indexing issue?
Hey guys when I do a search of site:thetechblock.com query in Google I don't seem to see any recent posts (nothing for August). In Google webmaster I see that the site is being crawled (I think), but I'm not sure. I also see the the sitemaps are being indexed but again it just seems really odd that I'm not seeing these in Google results. SEO seems all good too with SEO Moz. Is there something I'm not getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0