Homepage is deindexed in Google
-
Happened sometime on the 12th or 13th of Feb (is there a way to tell exactly besides referring to GA?).
I've been on the Google Webmasters Tools forums trying to nail this down - https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/OgpmNCc3IFA/mmtgUilyXUUJI can only think that Google is viewing this as duplicate content from an internal page for example: http://mudlifeled.com/shop
Very frustrating because we were moving up on the first page for some good brand key words and traffic was climbing.
Now I've got my hands up and am at a loss to what I can do.
-
Glad I could help
-
Back in business! Thanks for the help Chris!
-
ok...think we are getting somewhere. When I typed this in google by accident: site://www.mudlifeled.com
The page shows up:
https://www.mudlifeled.com
Since I had the https page set to noindex - Google was not indexing it. But it still doesn't explain why the http was not indexed and why all of a sudden it is now deindexed when the way I had the site setup has been crawled like this for almost a year? Maybe Google saw enough backlinks to https and said: "hey - we want to use the https version instead. Too bad you have it set to noindex"?Now that I have the canonical displaying from https to http on all pages - I'm hoping it reverts back to the http version and I get my keyword rank back. As of right now - I'm not seeing it in G's SERPs. fingers crossed
-
It could have just needed some more time for the canonical to work, still a bit on the odd side of things..
-
Now the index is showing:
<cite class="_Rm">www.mudlifeled.com/?taxonomy=product_type&term=simple</cite>
as the first result of a site: lookup
ugh
-
Yeah me too
It seems others can see the home page with site:www.mudlifeled.com outside the USA. But not inside of the USA.
Everything is good from the the suggested link.
I'm banging my head against my desk...lol
-
I'm a little stumped, as it should be working (and is for me) you could try giving it a bit more time with that canonical to take affect. I've tried looking via a proxy and i can't see it in American search compared to the UK search.
did you try looking through here - http://moz.com/ugc/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed
-
I'm not seeing the homepage yet :(. Though using the canonical method did jiggle some lower level pages back into the index. Yikes - this is weird. Any other suggestions?
-
Just an update: seems to be working now for me (I was unable to see homepage before)
-
No the canonical makes the robots surplus, it tells Google its a duplicate of where ever you pointed the tag to, this also means any links also sort of get redirected too (in a sense)
-
I ask because it seems that viewers can see the homepage outside the USA.
One of the first things I did when I took over the site in April of 2014 was claim both in webmasters tools.
I have made the canonical change as suggested. Should I keep the meta robots tag as well?
-
I am located in the UK, however I am also finding it odd.
Couple of things I'd look into is to claim both http & https in webmaster tools, rather than block the robots, change it for a canonical tag which tells Google you're preferred domain and also can help with your link juice flow.
Have to admit I'm in a bit of a pickle though..
-
Fetch is good. No errors with fetch or render.
The only update I made was from WooCommerce 2.2 to 2.3. This has not effected the output or markup of anything of importance.
Are you located in the USA?
-
No manual webspam actions found.
-
You can check here - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
your site >Search Traffic > Manual actions
-
From what I can tell - I have no manual penalty.
Is there a way to check this outside Webmasters Tools?
I'm not seeing the homepage at all in the index. I've checked on outside computers with myself not being logged into google here in Florida.
My analytic data is confirming that there is a definite drop of hits to the homepage. -
a canonical link would work better and mean you're not shooting your self in the foot so much see more here -
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
how does fetch as Google work out for you? Did you also review what you were doing prior to this happening to see if a change you made has triggered this?
edit
One quick thought did you set up https redirects on the main homepage correctly and that's whats causing you an issue?
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the reply.
All HTTPS is blocked by design to keep from any possible duplicates with HTTP.
Michael Shinosky
-
Hi Keszi,
Thanks for the reply.
Being a WordPress site - I have not touched the format of the canonical tags since I took over managing the website in April of 2014.
Michael Shinosky
-
Your main site is index when I'm looking, you've blocked some of your pages with a noindex and nofollow tag in your meta robots which wont be helping you
e.g. https://www.mudlifeled.com/product-category/aurora-d-series/
try to remove the meta robots tag, (this overrides the robots.txt)
Good news your main page is indexed by Google, also if you do have to noindex a page at least it follow.
EDIT I also assume you don't have any sort of manual penalty and that you have checked
-
Hi Michael,
I am not quite sure, but I have a gut feeling telling me it has something to do with your canonical tags. When did you implement those? (cannot run a crawl now, but I will surely check it out in the evening).
Gr., Keszi
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 Not Picking Up Posts
I am trying to work out why from March 4th Google is not seeing my posts. Our google impressions have dropped from 8,000 to 40. If you put in the full article name with speach marks it does not find it, and instead shows the home page in google. We have not had any warnings. We did have work done on our site but nothing else i could think of to cause this. Can anyone let me know what may have caused this. All articles are original
Technical SEO | | headlinesplus0 -
Redirecting homepage to subdirectory
Any issues with 301 redirecting a site's homepage to the English version subdirectory? Example: Original homepage: www.mysite.com New homepage: www.mysite.com/en/ The site is very old and very authoritative and trusted with lots of traffic.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Google Indexing - what did I missed??
Hello, all SEOers~ I just renewed my web site about 3 weeks ago, and in order to preserve SEO values as much as possible, I did 301 redirect, XML Sitemap and so on for minimize the possible data losses. But the problem is that about week later from site renewal, my team some how made mistake and removed all 301 redirects. So now my old site URLs are all gone from Google Indexing and my new site is not getting any index from Google. My traffic and rankings are also gone....OMG I checked Google Webmaster Tool, but it didn't say any special message other than Google bot founds increase of 404 error which is obvious. Also I used "fetch as google bot" from webmaster tool to increase chance to index but it seems like not working much. I am re-doing 301 redirect within today, but I am not sure it means anything anymore. Any advise or opinion?? Thanks in advance~!
Technical SEO | | Yunhee.Choi0 -
Missing meta descriptions from Google SERPs
Hullo all, I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully. Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given. I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs. Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap! Thank you in advance! aE9RKXJ
Technical SEO | | suchde0 -
How is Google finding our preview subdomains?
I've noticed that Google is able to find, crawl and index preview subdomains we set up for new client sites (e.g. clientpreview.example.com). I know now to use "meta name="robots" and robots.txt) to block the search engines from crawling these subdomains. My question though, is how is Google finding these subdomains? We don't link to these preview domains from anywhere else, so I can't figure out how Google is even getting there. Does anybody have any insight on this?
Technical SEO | | ZeeCreative0 -
Google Custom Site Search
I am an admin on a google custom site search account. I am also the owner of a verified webmaster tools account for the same site. The Custom Search control panel will not let me add URL's or a Site map for on demand indexing, but says "you must submit a sitemap of your own verified sites". Has anyone else has this issue? Does the Owner of the custom search account have to be the owner of the webmaster account, or can the logged in admin be? Thanks
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
Google causing Magento Errors
I have an online shop - run using Magento. I have recently upgraded to version 1.4, and I installed a extension called Lightspeed, a caching module which makes tremendous improvements to Magento's performance. Unfortunately, a confoguration problem, meant that I had to disable the module, because it was generating errors relating to the session, if you entered the site from any page other than the home page. The site is now working as expected. I have Magento's error notification set to email - I've not received emails for errors generated by visitors. However over a 72 hour period, I received a deluge of error emails, which where being caused by Googlebot. It was generating an erro in a file called lightspeed.php Here is an example: URL: http://www.jacksgardenstore.com/tahiti-vulcano-hammock IP Address: 66.249.66.186 Time: 2011-06-11 17:02:26 GMT Error: Cannot send headers; headers already sent in /home/jack/jacksgardenstore.com/user/jack_1.4/htdocs/lightspeed.php, line 444 So several things of note: I deleted lightspeed.php from the server, before any of these error messages began to arrive. lightspeed.php was never exposed in the URL, at anytime. It was referred to in a mod_rewrite rule in .htaccess, which I also commented out. If you clicked on the URL in the error message, it loaded in the browser as expected, with no error messages. It appears that Google has cached a version of the page which briefly existed whilst Lightspeed was enabled. But I though that Google cached generated HTML. Since when does cache a server-side PHP file ???? I've just used the Fetch as Googlebot facility on Webmaster Tools for the URL in the above error message, and it returns the page as expected. No errors. I've had to errors at all in the last 48 hours, so I'm hoping it's just sorted itself out. However I'm concerned about any Google related implications. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | atticus70 -
Homepage display for seo
hi, Which is the best , seo speaking, about the homepage display with a CMS (joomla here). 1/ To display articles as "blog" and thus articles are always recent but not the same (chronological).. 2/ To display always a same article (just 1) but updated sometimes to times ? 3/ Both of them are good ? Tks a lot in advance..
Technical SEO | | mozllo0