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
-
Google slow to index pages
Hi We've recently had a product launch for one of our clients. Historically speaking Google has been quick to respond, i.e when the page for the product goes live it's indexed and performing for branded terms within 10 minutes (without 'Fetch and Render'). This time however, we found that it took Google over an hour to index the pages. we found initially that press coverage ranked until we were indexed. Nothing major had changed in terms of the page structure, content, internal linking etc; these were brand new pages, with new product content. Has anyone ever experienced Google having an 'off' day or being uncharacteristically slow with indexing? We do have a few ideas what could have caused this, but we were interested to see if anyone else had experienced this sort of change in Google's behaviour, either recently or previously? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | punchseo0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Shouldn't Lower Bounce Rate Correlate into Greater Click Thru Rate for a Web Site?
Greetings: I run a real estate web site in New York City with about 650 pages out of which 330 are property listing pages. About 250 of those listing pages contain less than 150 words of content. In late August I set about 250 of the listing pages that generated the least traffic (generally corresponding to those with the least content) to "no-index, follow". Now Google has removed those pages from their index. The overall bounce rate for the site has been reduced from about 69% to about 64% since the removal of these low quality listing pages. However the click thru rate has not improved and is stuck at about 2.2 pages per visitor. Shouldn't the click thru rate improve if the bounce rate goes own? Am I missing something? Also, is a lower bounce rate something that Google will take into account when calculating rank? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hi all, my site www.uniggardin.dk has lost major rankings on the searchengine google.dk. Went from rank #2-3 on important keywords to my site, and after the latest update most of my rankings have jumped to #12 - #20. This is so annoying, and I really have no idea what to do. Can it cause bad links to my site? In that case what will I have to do? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xpeztumdk
Christoffer0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
My New(ish) Site Isn't Ranking Well And Recently Fell
I launched my site (jesfamilylaw.com) at the beginning of January. Since then, I've been trying to build high quality back links. I have a few back links with keyword targeted anchor text from some guest posts I've published (maybe 3 or so) and I have otherwise signed up for business directories and industry-specific directories. I have a few social media profiles and some likes on Facebook, both for the company page and some posts. Despite this, I've had a lot of trouble cracking Google's top ten for any term, long or tall tail. I was starting to climb for Evanston Family Law, which is the key term I believe I am best optimized for, but took a dive yesterday. I fell from maybe the 14th result to somewhere on the 4th page. For all my other target terms, I don't know if I've gotten into the 20s yet. To further complicate matters, my Google Places listing isn't showing and is on the second page of results for Places searches, after businesses that aren't located in the same city. The night before I fell, I resubmitted my site to Google because Webmaster tools was showing duplicate title tags when I had none. I had also made a couple changes to some internal links and title tags, but only for a small fraction of the site. Long story short, I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I fell in the rankings and why my site isn't competitive for some of my target key phrases. I've read so many horror stories about Penguin that I fear my onsite optimization may be hurting my rankings or my back links are insufficient. I've done plenty of competitor research and the sites that are beating me have very aggressive onsite optimization and few back links. In short, I am very confused. Any help would be immensely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JESFamilyLaw0 -
Google Algo update for over SEO'd sites: Is this a game changer?
This must be on the forum somewhere already but I cant find it. Google are updating there algo to penalise over SEO'd sites, is this a game changer? http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/373630/google-to-demote-seo-heavy-sites Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0