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.
-
Ok great then, maybe I got concerned too soon.
Thanks for your input!
-
At a month old, that's not unusual.
-
The traffic is actually climbing on the new website but I have a hard time having Google crawl some of the pages.
Out of 63 pages submitted (and I mean pages, not posts), only 5 pages have been indexed.
It also seems like Google doesn't get the latest sitemap often. To this day, I always had to resubmit it manually.
-
Live or not, I don't think there's a difference in the impact thewebhostinghero.com has on webhostinghero.com at this point. So long as they're not linked, whatever is done is done.
-
Yes I did notice the PR thing too and I don't get it either.
At some point, webhostinghero.com was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com (at the domain registrar level).
Could it be that the PR for webhostinghero.com is the one from thewebhostinghero.com?
I think the best thing would be to completely shut down thewebhostinghero.com but webhostinghero.com isn't profitable yet. Thewebhostinghero.com still brings me a little income.
Jeez I'm stuck on this one...
-
It's just that the very first search I did with a piece of your content showed results for duplicate content. I'd did a few other checks after that did, in fact, come up clean. By the way, something seems a little off regarding your pagerank--it's kind of strange to have that kind of PR with the back links I see in OSE.
-
What do you mean by "questionably original content"? Apart from 2 of these 3 tools (http://www.webhostinghero.com/tools/). The rest is 100% original content. No spun content at all. Of course it's going to be similar in a way because both website are about the same topic but other than that, I didn't rewrite anything, it's all new.
-
One month old is very young to be expecting search traffic. On the other hand, being so closely connected to a triple-penalized site, being a month old, and having questionably original content, isn't going to give google the warm fuzzies about the quality of your site. I'd be making sure my content was spotlessly authentic and more than that, I'd be figuring out how to create some engagement with it--that's what would really speed things up for you. Your content may be providing relevance but authority is going to come from engagement.
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
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Google index
Hello, I removed my site from google index From GWT Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results, Status Removed. site not ranking well in google from last 2 month, Now i have question that what will happen if i reinclude site url after 1 or 2 weeks. Is there any chance to rank well when google re index the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Requesting New Custom URL for Google+ Local Business Page
This question is about the new custom URLs for Google+ Local Business pages: Has anyone heard any success stories with requesting a custom URL different than the two reserved ones offered by Google via contacting a Google Rep by phone? And what advantages might there be for a local business to go with a very long custom URL such asgoogle.com/+rosenbergAndDalgrenLLPFortLauderdale as opposed to just google.com/+RdLawyers? Does having the city name in the URL offer any <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> benefit? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gbkevin0 -
New website from scratch and redirects or maintaining domain?
Hi friends, I have to face a big challenge. My client has an online store with about 250 products. The store is based on a web service provider whose CMS gives critical duplicate content issues. My client is considering to rethink the store from scratch and choose a CMS that offers more guarantees. I have two options: Starting the store from scratch with new domain and make redirects (whole domain or page to page?) Maintaining the domain, careful to keep the current structure of the URL, which is currently pretty bad I hope you could help me. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sergio_redondo0 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website. After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword. Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JingShack0