Google not indexing /showing my site in search results...
-
Hi there,
I know there are answers all over the web to this type of question (and in Webmaster tools) however, I think I have a specific problem that I can't really find an answer to online.
site is: www.lizlinkleter.com
Firstly, the site has been live for over 2 weeks... I have done everything from adding analytics, to submitting a sitemap, to adding to webmaster tools, to fetching each individual page as googlebot and then submitting to index via webmaster tools. I've checked my robot files and code elsewhere on the site and the site is not blocking search engines (as far as I can see)
There are no security issues in webmaster tools or MOZ. Google says it has indexed 31 pages in the 'Index Status' section, but on the site dashboard it says only 2 URLS are indexed.
When I do a site:www.lizlinketer.com search the only results I get are pages that are excluded in the robots file: /xmlrpc.php & /admin-ajax.php.
Now, here's where I think the issue stems from - I developed the site myself for my wife and I am new to doing this, so I developed it on the live URL (I now know this was silly) - I did block the content from search engines and have the site passworded, but I think Google must have crawled the site before I did this - the issue with this was that I had pulled in the Wordpress theme's dummy content to make the site easier to build - so lots of nasty dupe content.
The site took me a couple of months to construct (working on it on and off) and I eventually pushed it live and submitted to Analytics and webmaster tools (obviously it was all original content at this stage)... But this is where I made another mistake - I submitted an old site map that had quite a few old dummy content URLs in there... I corrected this almost immediately, but it probably did not look good to Google...
My guess is that Google is punishing me for having the dummy content on the site when it first went live - fair enough - I was stupid - but how can I get it to index the real site?!
My question is, with no tech issues to clear up (I can't resubmit site through webmaster tools) how can I get Google to take notice of the site and have it show up in search results?
Your help would be massively appreciated!
Regards,
Fraser
-
Glad to see you got things worked out. Best practice is to always have a "Disallow: /" rule in place in the root location when building a site, or to build it on an IP address via cpanel. A long long time ago we had an issue like this when we hired a rookie web designer, and had to go through everything making sure it was set correctly. Htaccess, robots, sitemap, sitemap crawl frequency, ODP (open directory project) settings, EVERYTHING.
Hope everything works out for your new site! Also, since you are having large load times due to a heavy template style, you may want to check this out: http://designshack.net/articles/css/18-css-compression-tools-and-techniques/. Compression is your friend
-
Hi Dirk & Donna,
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond - I appreciate it....
Dirk - you are right - the x robots tag in the .htaccess file must have been the issue - I'm an idiot! I assumed because there was nothing on idividual pages or the robots file it must be okay.
I will also look to clean up those images and take a look at the java script.
Donna - I will clean up the robots file.
Thanks guys - you've really helped me out.
Regards,
Fraser
-
Here's the content of your robots.txt file.
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /trackback/ Disallow: /xmlrpc.php Disallow: ?wptheme= Sitemap: http://www.lizlinkleter.com/sitemap_index.xml
Robots files are very very touchy. The duplicate inclusion of "Disallow: /wp-admin/" could be throwing you off. I'd clean that up first.
-
Hi Fraser,
I doubt that it is the dummy content which is causing the troubles. You use the x-robots-tag to put noindex/nofollow on all your pages. Probably this a setting in the config of your Wordpress site. More info on the tag can be found here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?hl=en
Apart from that :
- Your homepage is only visible when javascript is enabled - the same applies to your portfolio page.
- The images are extremely heavy to load - you should seriously consider to make them a lot lighter (more than 50% of your images > 100K (a lot of them are bigger than 500K)
rgds,
DIrk
-
Hi Michael,
Thanks so much for getting in touch.
http://i.imgur.com/zTbnxcl.png?1 - this is what I see in webmaster tools after a fetch request - seems to be indexing (although only partially when I ask to render also).
http://i.imgur.com/rXwhVmy.png - this is the result of the 'partial' when I look at it more closely in Webmaster Tools.
Thanks very much!
Fraser
-
In Google Webmaster Tools what happens when you use the Fetch function? Is Google able to crawl and render the page/s?
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
-
How ask Google to de index scrapper sites?
While doing text Google searches for various keywords I have found two sites that have scrapped pages from my site which goes by an old URL of www.tpxcnex.com and a new URL of www.tpxonline.com www.folder.com is one of the sites and if you try to visit that site or any of the scrapped Google index listing, Chrome warns you not to. How can I ask Chrome to deindex www.folder.com or another scrapper site, or atleast deindex the URLs which have clearly scrapped my content?
Technical SEO | | DougHartline0 -
Carousel of cards at the top of a Google search results page?
When I searched for "mapping software", a carousel of images which displayed a variety of different companies appeared above the results list. Does anyone know what this is and how you go about getting your company into this carousel? The attached image displays the carousel. gRjF1
Technical SEO | | eSpatial0 -
How to remove my cdn sub domins on Google search result?
A few months ago I moved all my Wordpress images into a sub domain. After I purchased CDN service, I again moved that images to my root domain. I added User-agent: * Disallow: / to my CDN domain. But now, when I perform site search on the Google, I found that my CDN sub domains are indexed by the Google. I think this will make duplicate content issue. I already hit by the Panguin. How do I remove these search results on Google? Should I add my cdn domain to webmaster tools to request URL removal request? Problem is, If I use cdn.mydomain.com it shows my www.mydomain.com. My blog:- http://goo.gl/58Utt site search result:- http://goo.gl/ElNwc
Technical SEO | | Godad1 -
How to know which pages are indexed by Google?
So apparently we have some sites that are just duplicates of our original main site but aiming at different markets/cities. They have completely different urls but are the same content as our main site with different market/city changed. How do I know for sure which ones are indexed. I enter the url into Google and its not there. Even if I put in " around " it. Is there another way to query google for my site? Is there a website that will tell you which ones are indexed? This is probably a dumb question.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
/index.php/ page
I was wondering if my system creates this page www my domain com/index.php/ is it better to block with robot.txt or just canonize?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Will Google index a 301 redirect for a new site?
So here is the problem... We have setup a 301redirect for our clients website. When you search the clients name it comes up with the old .co.uk website. We have made this redirect to the new .com website. However on the SERPs when it shows the .co.uk it shows the old title pages which currently say 'Holding Page'. When you click on that link it takes you to the fully functioning .com website. My question is, will the title tags in the SERPs which show the .co.uk update to the new ones from the .com? I'm thinking it will be just a case of Google catching up on things and it will sort itself out eventually. If anyone could help I would REALLY appreciate it. Thanks Chris
Technical SEO | | Weerdboil0 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0