Google refuses to index our domain. Any suggestions?
-
A very similar question was asked previously. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-google-did-not-index-our-domain) We've done everything in that post (and comments) and then some.
The domain is http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/ and, so far, we have:
- put "User-agent: * Allow: /" in the robots.txt (We recently removed the "allow" line and included a Sitemap: directive instead.)
- built a few hundred links from various pages including multiple links from .gov domains
- properly set up everything in Webmaster Tools
- submitted site maps (multiple times)
- checked the "fetch as googlebot" display in Webmaster Tools (everything looks fine)
- submitted a "request re-consideration" note to Google asking why we're not being indexed
Webmaster Tools tells us that it's crawling the site normally and is indexing everything correctly. Yahoo! and Bing have both indexed the site with no problems and are returning results. Additionally, many of the pages on the site have PR0 which is unusual for a non-indexed site. Typically we've seen those sites have no PR at all.
If anyone has any ideas about what we could do I'm all ears. We've been working on this for about a month and cannot figure this thing out.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
-
You make excellent points. I'll escalate this to "the pros" and see if they're able to bring their guru powers to bear on the trouble.
Thanks again Ryan for all your advice. It is greatly appreciated.
-
Looking at the site I can confirm the following:
-
the home page is tagged index follow
-
the status code for the home page is 200, an OK response
-
the robots.txt file is valid and clear
-
your crawl reports look fine to me
-
you stated your sitemap is received and 73 of 75 pages are indexed
-
your site is clearly not in Google's index as a site:miwaterstewardship.org search shows nothing.
-
I looked at your sitemap. I am not familiar with .aspx sitemaps but it does contain valid html links which apparently is enough for Google to utilize
-
you stated your site is not under penalty, as per Google
The possibilities are:
-
one of the pieces of information we are depending on is incorrect
-
we are overlooking a key piece of information
-
our understanding of SEO in this case is not complete
-
there is an issue with Google which is preventing your site from being indexed.
At this point I would suggest using your 1 PRO question on this issue, and reference this Q&A thread. While I don't believe we missed anything we should get the team to look at this issue and rule out every last possibility.
-
-
Thanks for the suggestions, Ryan. All of the previous changes were made before Google did it's last crawl. Here's the other info...
URLs Submitted = 78 / URLs in Web Index = 75 / The sitemap status is green check mark and it was downloaded today--June 14.
Geographic target has not been selected. Google has always been able to determine the crawl rate. I just changed the preferred domain to www.miwaterstewardship.org. That's the only change made recently.
This is another piece that baffles me. Check out the crawl stats for the site here: http://netvantagemarketing.com/temp/miws-crawl-stats.png
The bot is crawling an average of 63 pages per day and there's crawling activity since the middle of March. STILL, though...the domain absolutely will not appear in the index.
We're working with the client right now to see if we can get the site changed to a new IP address. The thought is that perhaps Google has somehow historically blocked the IP that it lives on now and changing to a new IP might get us out of jail. SUPER long shot...but those are the kinds of things we're trying now.
Thanks again for the help.
-
I was able to verify your robots.txt file is correctly set up. Did you make the changes before Google crawled the site on Saturday? You are correct that your site is not in the index. I would guess the robots.txt file was not modified until after the crawl. If it was adjusted pre-crawl, below are the next steps you can take.
Let's take a fresh look at your site:
-
you have a valid robots.txt file
-
your home page has a valid "index, follow" tag (not necessary, but it doesn't hurt either)
-
you have checked WMT and confirmed your site was crawled
In WMT, Site Configuration > Sitempas there is a "URLs submitted" field and a "URLs in web index field". What are those numbers please?
- It's a bit far reaching but while you are there please go over to your Settings tab in WMT. Geographic Target should not be checked, or if it is then Target Users in US should be selected. Preferred domain should be "www.miwaterstewardship.org" and I would recommend "Let Google determine my crawl rate" option unless you have a specific reason for doing otherwise.
-
-
Well...we're still in the virtual doghouse so-to-speak...
I made the changes that Ryan suggested on Friday. Webmaster Tools reports that the GoogleBot crawled the site on Saturday and that everything is OK in its eyes. Google responded to our reconsideration request over the weekend and stated very specifically that no actions were taken by the Google Spam team which would affect the rankings of our site or domain.
Still, if you search info:miwaterstewardship.org in The Ol' Goog, it continues to report that the site does not exist in the Google database.
Are there any other ideas of what we might be able to try?
This is a Dot Net Nuke site. Is there a DNN setting somewhere which might indicate to Google that it should not report our domain in search results?
Thanks for the looks and the help.
-
I agree with Ryan, your backlinks look great, website is structured well and has a great looking design. No signs of you breaking any of googles TOS.
-
Thank you EGOL. I consider myself a student of SEO, definitely not a master.
The Q&A forums here have given me a great opportunity to learn about SEO. I have been spending all my time this past month un-learning all the bad information I gathered from the internet, and learning SEO the right way.
The Matt Cutts videos, SEOmoz webinars, blogs and pro Q&A have all been immensely helpful. Those resources, along with the replies you and other mozzers offer have provided me an incredibly rich learning experience.
Thanks for noticing.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I noticed this as well but figured I'd leave it alone since Webmaster Tools was telling me "all is well" with the robots.txt file. I'll add the code like you suggest and we'll see what happens.
Thanks again.
-
Ryan, you have been giving some really valuable answers. Nice. Keep up the great work!
-
Fix your robots.txt. It is not set up as you suggested.
http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/robots.txt
User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/SiteMap.aspx I am unsure of what action a search engine would take upon encountering your code, but based on your post it seems that it blocks all agents. The correct code would be:
User-agent: *
Disallow:Sitemap: http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/SiteMap.aspx For more information about robots.txt you can take a look at: [http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html](http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html)
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
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Removing Personal content from Google Index
Hi everyone, A user is complaining that her name is appearing in google search through our job ads site, so I removed such ads through Search Console, but the problem is not the ads anymore but our internal search results. The ads are no longer live but our searches has been indexed by google back then, We have been manually taking over 500 pages that included such name but more and more keep coming through pagination, we haven't found a pattern yet so pretty much any search result might have contained such name. We might get some legal issues here, did you guys got into anything similar before? We have just set some rules so that this doesn't happen again, but still can't find a way to deal with this one. Thanks in advance. PD: Not sure if this is the right category to fit it.
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
Google still listing pages from old domain after 2 change requests
Good Morning I put forward the following question in December 2014 https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/google-still-listing-old-domain as pages from our old domain www.fhr-net.co.uk were still indexed in Google. We have submitted two change request in WMT, the most recent was over 6 months ago yet the old pages are still being indexed and we can't see why that would be Any advice would be appreciated
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Getting Google to index a large PDF file
Hello! We have a 100+ MB PDF with multiple pages that we want Google to fully index on our server/website. First of all, is it even possible for Google to index a PDF file of this size? It's been up on our server for a few days, and my colleague did a Googlebot fetch via Webmaster Tools, but it still hasn't happened yet. My theories as to why this may not work: A) We have no actual link(s) to the pdf anywhere on our website. B) This PDF is approx 130 MB and very slow to load. I added some compression to it, but that only got it down to 105 MB. Any tips or suggestions on getting this thing indexed in Google would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BBEXNinja0 -
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 -
UK website ranking higher in Google.com than Google.co.uk
Hi, I have a UK website which was formerly ranked 1<sup>st</sup> in Google.co.uk and .com for my keyword phrase and has recently slipped to 6<sup>th</sup> in .co.uk but is higher in position 4 in Google.com. I have conducted a little research and can’t say for certain but I wonder if it is possible that too many of my backlinks are US based and therefore Google thinks my website is also US based. Checked Google WmT and we the geo-targeted to the UK. Our server is also UK based. Does anyone have an opinion on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tdsnet0 -
Relocating to a C-level domain: Google Newsmaps & pagejuice
A client wants to relocate the majority of his niche news site, www.example.com, into a c-level domain on the same domain (news.example.com). Right now, almost all the articles are populating in Google News and generating traffic, thanks to the site's age, content and its newsmap. With the relocation, 80% of the files pulled into Google News, will now be news.example.com/tech/article-sample, as opposed to how they have been historically, www.example.com/tech/article-sample. Will that break Google News auto submission process, hurt their google news positioning, and require them to reapply for consideration? Secondly, a good chunk of landing pages (30+) and articles (3-4k) will be relocated to the new news.example.com domain. Everything after the .com/ will of course remain the same, but the c-level will be new so essentially, a new URL. I know that redirecting will lose some pagejuice, but since its a c-level, its going to be basically like moving the urls to a brand new domain?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0 -
Keyword domains
Hi everyone. Two questions regarding keyword domains (e.g. "widgets.com") If we have to choose a domain with an extra word, does it make a difference to have the added word before or after? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "widgets-now.com" Does it make a difference if the extra word is a generic vs a 'real' word? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "japanese-widgets.com" Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Technical SEO | | hectorpn0