Blog page won't get indexed
-
Hi Guys,
I'm currently asked to work on a website. I noticed that the blog posts won't get indexed in Google. www.domain.com/blog does get indexed but the blogposts itself won't. They have been online for over 2 months now.
I found this in the robots.txt file:
Allow: / Disallow: /kitchenhandle/ Disallow: /blog/comments/ Disallow: /blog/author/ Disallow: /blog/homepage/feed/
I'm guessing that the last line causes this issue. Does anyone have an idea if this is the case and why they would include this in the robots.txt?
Cheers!
-
Thanks alot!
-
Hi Dirk,
Good observation, I missed the canonical part somehow. So, google is indexing the canonical URLs here which doesn't have /blog/ in it and that's the problem. Have a look at the indexed page for this particular instance here. Non /blog/ instance is indexed, which will take you to its /blog/ version with wrong canonical URL.
Solution: Either remove the canonical URLs on these pages to point them to the current page itself. And yeah! As rightly mentioned by Dirk, do a proper /blog/ page linking from the blog page and other pages from where you're linking these articles.
-
This is definitely the issue. Fix that canonical and they'll be indexed.
-
To update - even worse: on the blog itself you are linking to the canonical version - not to the /blog/ version. So it would be impossible for Google to index /blog/ type of content.
If you do woontrends 2016 site:www.keukensduitsland.nl you will notice that the canonical version is properly indexed (even with the strange js redirect.
Dirk
-
It's not related to the robots.txt - you can easily check that in Webmastertools (Crawl > Robots.txt tester)
First issue is the location of the link - if you put a small link to the blog hidden in the left corner at the bottom of the page Google is not going to attribute a lot of importance to this link.
Most important issue on your blog articles is the canonical - example:
http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/blog/woontrends-2016/ has as canonical url: http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/woontrends-2016/ - however this page will redirect you with javascript to the blog article.
Make the canonical self referencing and do a proper redirect on the other pages (301 rather than js redirect)
Dirk
-
Hi Happy SEO,
Well, the robots.txt looks find here. Could you try to fetch any of the blog page/post as google in the search console and share the screenshot here?
Also, to cross check the robots.txt (which looks fine though), you have robots.txt tester in search console where you can put any blog page/post to check if bots can crawl it. Please share a screenshot of that as well.
On a separate note, the sitemap.xml link mentioned in the robots.txt (http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/sitemap.xml) is broken. Fix that as well.
-
Hi Nitin,
The URL is www.keukensduitsland.nl (/blog). The link to the blog page is in the bottom left corner called "Keukennieuws".
-
Hi Happy SEO,
Could you please share the blog URL here? Sounds like an interesting issue and would love to give a try to help you with this
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
-
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Large Drop in Indexed Pages But Increase in Traffic
We run a directory site and noticed about a week ago that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting a huge drop in indexed pages (from around 150,000 down to 30,000). In the same time, however, our traffic has increased. Has anyone seen this before or have any ideas on why this could happen? I have search for technical errors but nothing has changed on our site or our content.
Technical SEO | | sa_787040 -
Getting the SEO right for blog on different server
Hi There This must be a common scenario but there's very little help on it. Right now I have: www.domain.com hosted on a Windows dedicated server. I have blog.domain.com hosted on a separate hosted Wordpress server and I use an A Record at the DNS level to make sure the sub domain works. Easy peasy! However we want to move our blog so its at www.domain.com/blog as we're definitely seeing an issue with the sub domain hosting of the blog in terms of SEO. My problem is that I cannot install WP onto the windows server, its' just not feasible as too much is going on with it, so i can;t simply redirect my blog.subdomain.com to www.domain.com/blog as it won't exist. How do I do this and maintain the SEO/link juice? Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Raptor-crew0 -
Post Site Migration - thousands of indexed pages, 4 months after
Hi all, Believe me. I think I've already tried and googled for every possible question that I have. This one is very frustrating – I have the following old domain – fancydiamonds dot net. We built a new site – Leibish dot com and done everything by the book: Individual 301 redirects for all the pages. Change of address via the GWT. Trying to maintain and improve the old optimization and hierarchy. 4 months after the site migration – we still have to gain back more than 50% of our original organic traffic (17,000 vs. 35,500-50,000 The thing that strikes me the most that you can still find 2400 indexed pages on Google (they all have 301 redirects). And more than this – if you'll search for the old domain name on Google – fancydiamonds dot net you'll find the old domain! Something is not right here, but I have no explanation why these pages still exist. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | skifr0 -
Why wont google Index this page?
A week ago i accidentally changed this page settings in my CMS to "disable & dont index" as i was going to replace this page with another, but this didnt happen, but i forgot to switch the settings back! http://www.over50choices.co.uk/funeral-planning/funeral-plans Anyhow in an effort to get it back up quickly i submitted in GWTs but its still not indexed. When i use several SEO on page checking tools it has the Meta Title data as "Form" and not the correct title. Any ideas please? Yours frustrated Ash
Technical SEO | | AshShep10 -
De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
TalkInThePark0 -
How to block "print" pages from indexing
I have a fairly large FAQ section and every article has a "print" button. Unfortunately, this is creating a page for every article which is muddying up the index - especially on my own site using Google Custom Search. Can you recommend a way to block this from happening? Example Article: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/idx.php/11/183/Maintenance-of-Mature-Locks-6-months-/article/How-do-I-get-sand-out-of-my-dreads.html Example "Print" page: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/article.php?id=052&action=print
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0 -
Diagnostic says too many links on a page and most of the pages are from blog entries. Are tags considered links? How do I decrease links?
I just ran my first diagnostic on my site and the results came back were negative in the area of too many links one a page. There were also quite a few 404 errors. What is the best way to fix these problems? Most of the pages with too many links are from blog posts, are the tags counted as well and is this the reason for too many links?
Technical SEO | | Newport10300