Site Not Indexing After 2 Weeks - PA at 1
-
Hi Moz Community!
I'm working as a digital marketing consultant for an organization that uses us for their online registration - we do not manage their web page. The issue that I am hoping you might have some ideas on is that their SERPS still aren’t making much of a recovery since they revamped their site in mid August. I ran a MOZ campaign for them and despite that they (eventually) got all their 301s in place, they submitted an updated sitemap to Google, aren’t hitting any crawl errors, and have a working robots.txt over two-thirds of their site pages don’t seem to be indexing. MOZ is giving most of them a Page Authority of 1, and when I login to their GWT, it’s showing me that only 3 pages have been indexed of the 315 URLs submitted.
I know Google doesn’t make any guarantees in index update timelines, but 2+ weeks seems like a long time
Their website is https://www.northshoreymca.org/. The site has a DA of 43 but most of the pages on the main nav are still at 1. They gave me permission to share in this forum because we're really trying to figure out a recovery strategy.
Any thoughts or ideas as to what might be causing this? Is there anything else that you think I should check or that might be causing an issue? Is it possible that Google is just taking this long to index their page? Note: this page is built with Drupal.
THANK YOU!
-
being a standard drupal setting doesn't mean it makes SE friendly anyway I have no backup for that theory, I'm just assuming that new sites should be as simple as possible in order to google to get a better grasp of them and start trusting before complicating thing in an unnecessary way, unless the node url is adding any value to you, I would get rid of it and 301 it to its canonical.
-
Thanks again! I noticed all of this too before I submitted to Q&A but doing a little bit of research (and with my admittedly limited knowledge of the topic) I thought that this was pretty standard for how clean Drupal URLs are setup? Is that incorrect?
-
I would not focus too much on GSC if the site has been recently built, the place where you want your pages to be is google index
The place I would check is GA to see how many of your pages are getting at least 1 visits and which ones don't. You can then look for the pages which are not getting traffic and understand if they are not being indexed or not ranking high.
This page for example https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts I've noticed that you're using the rel="<a class="attribute-value">shortlink</a>", which I don't think it's adding too much value, probably is making things messier, as you two different version of your page, in fact if you check for /node/ folder you're finding pages you don't want (ex.https://www.northshoreymca.org/node/145 instead of this <a class="attribute-value">https://www.northshoreymca.org/content/ymca-north-shore-annual-gala</a>) I would set up a 301 at least so you ensure that google is not deciding which is the best page to index and serve to users, I know you hav a canonical but it could be something you could test, and help google not making too many decisions, especially because canonical is just a recommendation done to bots, and which google normally doesn't follow boldly for new sites.
hoep this helps, let me know how it goes!
-
Yes! Better safe than sorry!
-
Dont get spammy and add all your 300 pages. You cant never know when google pisses off. Be discrete and and dont try to rush all the indexed.
(this is just a myth, but lets not try to probe it). -
You are too kind! I thought we checked into all that stuff too. I'm glad to at least know that we're probably just up against a waiting game and there isn't something fundamentally wrong with the page that's preventing the index. I'll start manually adding main nav links from addurl and cross my fingers.
Thank you again!
-
Yeap. Just wait.
I've checked if there was a problem with robots.txt or the meta robots tag, and there isnt any problem with that particularly page.
You can speed up the indexing of some pages with google.com/addurl -
So here's an example of a page from the main nav on their site that is a problem page:
site:https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts
I guess we're just stuck in a waiting game for pages like this?
Thanks again!
-
You're welcome. We are here to help.
I cannot specify an exact amount of time. I've had sites that were fully indexed and informed in WMT in 3 weeks, and other sites that took over 2 months and only got informed roughly 90% of pages.
Sorry, Google is that way. Sometimes gives is a buch of information and sometimes nothing.
Again, i'd trust what you get in the search results, not what appears in WMT. -
Thanks for the input Oleg. I did verify that in GSC that they are pointing to https://www. so I'm not sure what gives in terms of the discrepancy between the index of 3 pages showing in GSC vs. the several hundred pages showing when you hit site:https://www.northshoreymca.org.
Very new to MOZ and SEO so I really appreciate your time and input!
-
Thanks Gaston! In your experience, are there some generalities you can speak to for the length of time it takes to index a site? I understand that the response to that question is probably relative given a site's size, age, update frequency etc. but would you care to ballpark it?
I'm really new to SEO (and entirely self-taught) so appreciate all the info! Thanks again!
-
Thanks so much! Any thoughts on why their GSC is saying 3 pages indexed? I checked as Oleg suggested above that it was referencing https:www. and verified that it is. I'm very new to the technical side of things so thanks for the help!
-
hey camarin, so far I see 271 URLS indexed for the search "site:https://www.northshoreymca.org". There are of course a couple of changes I would do like try to have a friendlier look to the tag URLs instead of having the tag parameter, but anyway it seems that it's working. Also PA for this page https://www.northshoreymca.org/locations/haverhill/ is 33. I think as you said it was just a matter of time. I hope your problem got fixed.
-
Hi there,
There are some points to mark here:
1- The site was redisigned, as you say there has been restructured the site completely.
2- As some of the URLs seem to be new, still none of them were crawled by roger (moz's bot) and/or they are likely to be considered to no have any leverage. That's some explanation for the PA1.
3- It's known that google takes its time to index the whole site. And also takes its time to inform it in WMT. My advise is to do a search with: 'site;yoursite.com' and check whether there has been an improval in the indexation. Just now im getting 620 results in that search.
4- Being built in Dupal is no metric to google (at least as fas as my knoledge) in order to harm or benefit you. It's transparent for Google.Hope I've helped.
GR. -
I see a good amount of pages indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.northshoreymca.org%2F
Make sure the profile you are using in GSC (formerly GWT) is the https://www. version of the website (any other profile will show fewer/no indexed pages).
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
-
Two sites with same content
Hi Everyone, I am having two listing websites. Website A&B are marketplaces Website A approx 12k listing pages Website B : approx 2k pages from one specific brand. The entire 2k listings on website B do exist on website A with the same URL structure with just different domain name. Just header and footer change a little bit. But body is same code. The listings of website B are all partner of a specific insurance company. And this insurance company pays me to maintain their website. They also look at the traffic going into this website from organic so I cannot robot block or noindex this website. How can I be as transparent as possible with Google. My idea was to apply a canonical on website B (insurance partner website) to the same corresponding listing from website A. Which would show that the best version of the product page is on website A. So for example :www.websiteb.com/productxxx would have a canonical pointing to : www.websitea.com/productxxxwww.websiteb.com/productyyy would have a canonical pointing to www.websitea.com/productyyyAny thoughts ? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evoe0 -
Traffic drop on this site
I am SEO'ing this site but need some assistance in the analysis. it was doing not too bad but in the last 4 months the google traffic has really fallen off, i suspect the keywords may need improving but any tips or observations would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crowng0 -
Indexing isolated webpages
Hi all,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tarek_Lel
We are running a classifieds website.Due to technical limitations, we will probably not be able to list or search expired ads, but we still can view ad details view page if you landed on expired ad from external page (or google search results).Our concern is, if the ad page is still exists, but it's totally isolated from the website (i.e not found by search option on the website and no following site links) will google remove it from the index?Thanks, T0 -
Why is my m-dot site outranking my main site in SERPs?
My client has a WP site and a Duda mobile site that we inherited. For some reason their m-dot site is ranking on P1 of Google for their top KWs instead of the main site which is much more robust. The main site might rank beyond page 5 when the generic home page for their m-dot site appears on P1. Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
1 Ecommerce site for several product segments or 1 Ecommerce site for each product segment ?
I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella domain. Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment. Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics- Any thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Is this ok for content on our site?
We run a printing company and as an example the grey box (at the bottom of the page) is what we have on each page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html We used to use this but tried to get most of the content on the page, but we now want to add a bit more in-depth information to each page. The question i have is - would a 1200 word document be ok in there and not look bad to Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10