Why isn't google indexing our site?
-
Hi,
We have majorly redesigned our site. Is is not a big site it is a SaaS site so has the typical structure, Landing, Features, Pricing, Sign Up, Contact Us etc...
The main part of the site is after login so out of google's reach.
Since the new release a month ago, google has indexed some pages, mainly the blog, which is brand new, it has reindexed a few of the original pages I am guessing this as if I click cached on a site: search it shows the new site.
All new pages (of which there are 2) are totally missed. One is HTTP and one HTTPS, does HTTPS make a difference.
I have submitted the site via webmaster tools and it says "URL and linked pages submitted to index" but a site: search doesn't bring all the pages?
What is going on here please? What are we missing? We just want google to recognise the old site has gone and ALL the new site is here ready and waiting for it.
Thanks
Andrew
-
Well, links/shares are good. But of course I'm just begging the question of how you can get those.
Rand gave a great talk called "Inbound Marketing for Startups" at a Hackers & Founders meetup that was focused more on Inbound as a whole than SEO in particular, but it's full of valuable insights: http://vimeo.com/39473593 [video]
Ultimately it'll come down to some kind of a publishing/promotional strategy for your startup. Sometimes your startup is so unique/interesting that it has its own marketing baked right in - in which case you can get a lot of traction by simply doing old-school PR to get your startup in front of the right people.
Other times, you've got to build up links/authority on the back of remarkable marketing.
BufferApp is a great example of a startup that built traction off their blog. Of course, they weren't necessarily blogging as an SEO play - it was more in the aim of getting directly in front of the right audience for direct signups for their product. But they definitely built up some domain authority as a result.
I'd also take a look at the guides Mailchimp has created - they created the dual benefit of getting in front of the right audience in a positive/helpful way (which benefits the brand and drives sign-ups directly) as well as building a considerable number of inbound links, boosting their domain authority overall.
Unfortunately no quick/easy ways to build your domain authority, but things you do to build your authority can also get you immediately in front of the audience you're looking for - and SEO just becomes a lateral benefit to that.
-
Thank you all for your responses. It is strange. we are going to add a link to our g+ page and then add a post.
As a new site what is the best way to get our domain authority up so we get crailed quicker?
Thanks again
Andrew
-
I disagree. Unless the old pages have inbound links from external sites, there's not much reason to 301 them (and not much benefit). If they're serving up 404 errors, they will fall out of the index.
Google absolutely does have a way to know these new pages exist - by crawling the home page and following the links discovered there. Both of the pages in question are linked to prominently, particularly the Features page which is part of the main navigation. A sitemap is just an aid for this process - it can help move things along and help Google find otherwise obscure/deep pages, but it by no means is a necessity for getting prominent pages indexed, particularly pages that are 1-2 levels down from the home page.
-
If you didn't redirect the old URLs to the new ones when the new site went live, this will absolutely be the cause of your problem, Studio33. That, combined with having no (or misdirected) sitemap means there was essentially no way for Google to even know your site's pages existed.
Good catch Billy.
-
Hi Andrew,
-
Google has been indexing HTTPS URLs for years now without a problem, so is unlikely to be part of the issue.
-
Your domain authority on the whole may be slowing Google down in indexing new pages. Bottom line is crawl rate and depth are both functions of how authoritative/important you appear based on links/shares/etc.
-
That said, I don't see any indication as to why these two particular pages are not being indexed by Google. I'm a bit stumped here.
I see some duplication between your Features page and your Facebook timeline, but not with the invoice page.
As above, your domain authority (17) is a bit on the low side. So this could simply be a matter of Google not dedicating enough resources to crawl/index all of your pages yet. But why these two pages would be the only ones is perplexing, particularly after a full month. There are no problems with your Robots.txt, no canonical tag issues, the pages are linked to properly.
Wish I had an easy answer here. One idea, a bit of a long shot: we've seen Google index pages faster when they're linked to from Google+ posts. I see you have a Google+ business page for this website - you might try simply writing a (public) post there that includes a link over to the Features page.
As weak as that is, that's all I've got.
Best of Luck,
Mike -
-
OK - I would get a list of all of your old pages and start 301 redirecting them to your new pages asap. This could be part of your issue.
-
Hi checked XML, its there if you view source it just doesn't have a stylesheet
-
Hi thanks about 1 month. The blog page you are getting maybe the old ones,as they are working this end http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog . What you have mentioned re the blog is part of the problem. Google has the old site and not the new.
-
Getting this on your Blog pages:
The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.
where you aware?
Anyway - may I ask how old these pages are?
-
Thanks. I will look into the sitemap. That only went live about an hour ago whilst this thread has been going on.
-
Yeah - with no path specified the directive is ignored. (you don't have a '/' so the directive (disallow) is ignored)
however, you do direct to your xml sitemap which appears to be empty. You might want to fix that....
-
Hi no I think its fine as we do not have the forward slash after the disallow. See
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
I wish it was as simple as that. Thanks for your help though its appreciated.
-
Hmmm. That link shows that the way you have it will block all robots.
-
Thanks but I think Robots.txt is correct. Excert from http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
To exclude all robots from the entire server
User-agent: * Disallow: /
To allow all robots complete access
User-agent: * Disallow:
(or just create an empty "/robots.txt" file, or don't use one at all)
-
It looks like your robots.txt file is the problem. http://www.invoicestudio.com/robots.txt has:
User-agent: * Disallow: When it should be:
User-agent: *
Allow: / -
Hi,
The specific pages are
https://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate
http://www.invoicestudio.com/Features
I'm not sure what other pages are not indexed.
New site has been live 1 month.
Thanks for your help
Andrew
-
Without seeing the specific pages i cant check for things such as noindex tags or robot text blocking access, i would suggest you double check these aspects. The pages will need to be accesible to Search engines when they crawl your site, so if there are no links to those pages Google will be unable to access them.
How long have they been live since the site re-launch as it may just be that they have not been crawled yet, particuarly if they are deeper pages within your site hierarchy.
Heres a link to Googles resources on crawling and indexing sites incase you have not been able to check through them yet.
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
-
SEO Adjustments Where Content Isn't Front And Centre...
So I am wondering what people think for a SEO strategy for sites where (1) the interaction is a one-off event and (2) content is not often shared or something that people want. Specificially regarding two sites this applies to: Site 1 is basically a mortgage site. So customers interact with the site once and then most likely never again once their mortgage is sorted. Mortgages aren't great content pieces and customers don't really read a lot of the content - it's part of the reason loan officers/mortgage professionals exist... Site 2 is also for a one off purchase but it's an embarrassing problem that nobody would share content for because they don't want people to know that they sought help for this. This also makes getting backlinks hard. Also it is a one off purchase, never to be made again... Am interested in how people would adapt their SEO strategies to these circumstances - where content development and promotion is limited...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTAMP0 -
Only 285 of 2,266 Images Indexed by Google
Only 285 of 2,266 Images Indexed by Google. Images for our site are hosted on Amazons CDN cloud based hosting service. Our Wordpress site is on a virtual private server and has its' own IP address. The number of indexed images has dropped substantially in the last year. Our site is for a real estate brokerage firm. There are about 250 listing pages set to "no-index". Perhaps these contain 400 photos, so they do not account for why so few photos have been indexed. The concern is that the low number of indexed images could be affecting overall ranking. The site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Is this issue something that we should be concerned about? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Blocking Certain Site Parameters from Google's Index - Please Help
Hello, So we recently used Google Webmaster Tools in an attempt to block certain parameters on our site from showing up in Google's index. One of our site parameters is essentially for user location and accounts for over 500,000 URLs. This parameter does not change page content in any way, and there is no need for Google to index it. We edited the parameter in GWT to tell Google that it does not change site content and to not index it. However, after two weeks, all of these URLs are still definitely getting indexed. Why? Maybe there's something we're missing here. Perhaps there is another way to do this more effectively. Has anyone else ran into this problem? The path we used to implement this action:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbake
Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters Thank you in advance for your help!0 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
(Sorry for my english!) A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year. I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore. So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search. It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old. In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old. So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website? The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Google suddenly indexing and displaying URLs that haven't existed for years?
We recently noticed google is showing approx 23,000 indexed .jsp urls for our site. These are ancient pages that haven't existed in years and have long been 301 redirected to valid urls. I'm talking 6 years. Checking the serps the other day (and our current SEOMoz pro campaign), I see that a few of these urls are now replacing our correct ones in the serps for important, competitive phrases. What the heck is going on here? Is Google suddenly ignoring rewrite rules and redirects? Here's an example of the rewrite rules that we've used for 6+ years: RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] Now, this 'bottom paint' url has been incredibly stable in the serps for over a half decade. All of a sudden, a google search for 'bottom paint' (no quotes) brings up the jsp page at position 2-3. This is just one example of something very bizarre happening. Has anyone else had something similar happen lately? Thank You <colgroup><col width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamestown
| RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] |0 -
Why is google ranking me higher for pages that aren't optimised for keywords those that are?
I am finding that our homepage and other pages are being ranked higher against keywords that we have optimised other pages for. e.g Keyword: Luxury Towels Google Ranks our homepage http://www.towelsrus.co.uk at 20 for this and the page I am trying to rank for it is nowhere to be seen http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/sport-spa/luxury-towels/catlist_fnct498.htm Why is this and is this why our position for certain keywords fluctuates? How do I remedy this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0