[wtf] Mysterious Homepage De-Indexing
-
Our homepage, as well as several similar landing pages, have vanished from the index. Could you guys review the below pages to make sure I'm not missing something really obvious?!
URLs: http://www.grammarly.com http://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker
- It's been four days, so it's not just a temporary fluctuation
- The pages don't have a "noindex" tag on them and aren't being excluded in our robots.txt
- There's no notification about a penalty in WMT
Clues:
-
WMT is returning an "HTTP 200 OK" for Fetch, is showing a redirect to grammarly.com/1 (alternate version of homepage, contains rel=canonical back to homepage) for Fetch+Render. Could this be causing a circular redirect?
-
Some pages on our domain are ranking fine, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=grammarly+answers
-
A month ago, we redesigned the pages in question. The new versions are pretty script-heavy, as you can see.
-
We don't have a sitemap set up yet.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance, friends!
-
Did this get resolved? I'm seeing your home-page indexed and ranking now.
I'm not seeing any kind of redirect to an alternate URL at this point (either as a browser or as GoogleBot). If you 301'ed to an alternate URL and then rel=canonical'ed back to the source of the 301, that could definitely cause problems. It's sending a pretty strong mixed-signal. In that case you'd probably want to 302 or use some alternate method. Redirects for the home-page are best avoided, in most cases.
-
Are you sure it was missing for a time? Ultimately I wouldn't use a third-party (Google) as a tool to diagnose problems (faulty on-site code) that I know are problems and need to be fixed.I'd fix the problems I know are issues and then go from there. Or hire someone capable of fixing the problems.
-
Thanks, Ryan. I'll get to work on the issues you mentioned.
I do have one question for you - grammarly.com/proofreading (significantly fewer links, identical codebase) is now back on the index. If the issue was too many scripts or HTML errors, wouldn't both pages still be de-indexed?
-
Here are some issues just going down the first few lines of code...
- There's a height attribute in your tag.
- Your cookie on the home page is set to expire in the past, not the future
- Your tag conflicts with your script and other code issues (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21363090/doctype-html-ruins-my-script)
- Your Google Site Verification meta tag is different than other pages.
- Your link to the Optimizely CDN is incorrect... (missing 'http:' so it's looking for the script on your site)
- You have many other Markup Issues.
And that's prior to getting into the hundreds of lines of code preceding the start of your page at the tag... 300 lines or so on your other indexed pages 1100+ on your home page. So not only are you not following best practices as outlined by Google, but you have broken stuff too.
-
The saga continues...
According to WMT, there are no issues with grammarly.com The page is fetched and rendered correctly.
Google! Y u no index? Any ideas?
-
Like Lynn mentioned below, if you're having redirection take place across several portions of the site, that could cause the spikes, and a big increase in total download time is worrying if you're crossing the average bounce rate threshold for most people's patience.
Here's the Google Page speed take on it: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgrammarly.com&tab=desktop. They go over both desktop and mobile.
-
Hmm, was something done to fix the googlebot redirect issue or did it just fix itself? Here it states that googlebot will often identify itself as mozilla and your fetch/render originally seemed to indicate that at least some of the time that was the page google was getting. It is a bit murky technically what exactly is going on there but if google is getting redirected some of the time then as you said you are getting into a circular situation between the redirect and the canonical where it is a bit difficult to predict what will happen. If that is 100% fixed now and google sees the main page all the time then I would wait a day or two to see if the page comes back into the index (but be 100% sure that you know it is fixed!). I still think that is the most likely source of your troubles...
-
Excellent question, Lynn. Thank you for chiming in here. There's a user agent based javascript redirect that keeps Chrome visitors on grammarly.com (Chrome browser extension) and sends other browsers to grammarly.com/1 (Web app that works on all browsers).
UPDATE: According to WMT Fetch+Render, the Googlebot redirection issue has been fixed. It is no longer being redirected anywhere and returning a 200 OK for grammarly.com.
Kelly, if that was causing the problem, how long should I hold my breath for re-indexing after re-submitting the homepage?
-
Yup definitely. Whether you're completely removed or simply dropped doesn't matter. If you're not there anymore, for some reason Google determined you're no longer an authority for that keyword. So you need to find out why. Since you just redesigned, the way way is to back track, double check all the old tags and compare them to the new site, check the text and keyword usage on the website, look for anything that's changed that could contribute to the drop. If you don't find anything, tools like majesticSEO are handy to checking if your backlinks are still healthy.
-
Hi Alex, Thank you for your response. The pages didn't suffer in ranking, they were completely removed from the index. Based on that, do you still think it could be a keyword issue?
-
That's actually a great point. I suppose Google could have been holding on to a pre-redesign cached version of the pages.
There has been a 50-100% increase in page download times as well as some weird 5x spikes for crawled pages. I know there could probably be a million different reasons, but do any of them stick out at you as being potential sources of the problem?
-
How does that second version of the homepage work and how long has it been around for? I get one version of the homepage in one browser and the second in another, what decides which version is served and what kind of redirect is it? I think that is the most likely source of your troubles.
-
Yes, but the pages were indexed prior to the redesign, no? Can you look up your crawl stats in GWT to see if there's been a dramatic up tick in page download times, and a down trend in pages crawled. That will at least give you a starting point as to differences between now and then: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-stats
-
Logo definitely needs to be made clickable to Home.
Did you compare the old design and the new design's text to make sure you're still covering the same keywords. In many cases a redesign is more "streamlined" which also means less text or a re-write which is going to impact the keywords your site is relevant for.
-
Thanks, Ryan. Improving our code-to-text ratio is on our roadmap, but could that really be the issue here? The pages were all fully indexed without problems for a full month after our redesign, and we haven't added any scripts. Was there an algorithm update on Monday that could explain the sudden de-indexing?
-
VERY script heavy. Google has recently released updates on a lot of this (Q4 2014) here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.mx/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html. With further guidance given here: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-encoding-and-transfer. Without doing a deep dive that's the most glaring issue and obvious difference between pages that are still being indexed and those that are not.
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
-
Blog page and homepage ranking next to each other for same keyword
Hello, I have my homepage that has been existing for 10 years that is ranked in 18 th position on google for the keyword luxury bike tours. This homepage doesn't have any external link or internal links saying luxury bike tours and nowhere in the title or on the page do I have the word luxury. I only have the words bike and tours. I created a blog page 24 hours ago that has the word luxury, bike and tours in the title and it is ranked in 19 th position just behind my homepage. I am wondering how it can be there and my homepage just be one spot above with all the history and linking it has ? Is it due to the fact that I have the word luxury in the title ? Is it just because my internal linking structure is correct and this blog page is brand new and will my homepage rank higher in the near future but see that I just redid the structure I need to wait a few months ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
In the google index but search redirects to homepage
Hi everyone, thanks for reading i have a website "www.gardeners.scot" and have the following pages listed in google site: command http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-landscaping-Edinburgh.htm & http://www.gardeners.scot/garden-maintenance-Edinburgh.htm however when a user searches for "garden landscaping Edinburgh" or "garden maintenance Edinburgh" we are in the rankings but google search links these phrases to the home page not to their targeted pages. the site is about a year old have checked the robots.txt, sitemap.xml & .htaccess files but can see anything wrong there. any ideas out there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | livingphilosophy0 -
Why Google isn't indexing my images?
Hello, on my fairly new website Worthminer.com I am noticing that Google is not indexing images from my sitemap. Already 560 images submitted and Google indexed only 3 of them. Altough there is more images indexed they are not indexing any new images, and I have no idea why. Posts, categories and other urls are indexing just fine, but images not. I am using Wordpress and for sitemaps Wordpress SEO by yoast. Am I missing something here? Why Google won't index my images? Thanks, I appreciate any help, David xv1GtwK.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Worthminer1 -
Canonical or No-index
Just a quick question really. Say I have a Promotions page where I list all current promotions for a product, and update it regularly to reflect the latest offer codes etc. On top of that I have Offer announcement posts for specific promotions for that product, highlighting very briefly the promotion, but also linking back to the main product promotion page which has a the promotion duplicated. So main page is 1000+ words with half a dozen promotions, the small post might be 200 words, and quickly become irrelevant as it is a limited time news article. Now, I don't want the promotion page indexed (unless it has a larger news story attached to the promotion, but for this purpose presume it is doesn't). Initially the core essence of the post will be duplicated in the main Promotion page, but later as the offer expires it wouldn't be. Therefore would you Rel Canonical or just simply No-index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Indexing a several millions pages new website
Hello everyone, I am currently working for a huge classified website who will be released in France in September 2013. The website will have up to 10 millions pages. I know the indexing of a website of such size should be done step by step and not in only one time to avoid a long sandbox risk and to have more control about it. Do you guys have any recommandations or good practices for such a task ? Maybe some personal experience you might have had ? The website will cover about 300 jobs : In all region (= 300 * 22 pages) In all departments (= 300 * 101 pages) In all cities (= 300 * 37 000 pages) Do you think it would be wiser to index couple of jobs by couple of jobs (for instance 10 jobs every week) or to index with levels of pages (for exemple, 1st step with jobs in region, 2nd step with jobs in departements, etc.) ? More generally speaking, how would you do in order to avoid penalties from Google and to index the whole site as fast as possible ? One more specification : we'll rely on a (big ?) press followup and on a linking job that still has to be determined yet. Thanks for your help ! Best Regards, Raphael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pureshore0 -
De-indexed Link Directory
Howdy Guys, I'm currently working through our 4th reconsideration request and just have a couple of questions. Using Link Detox (www.linkresearchtools.com) new tool they have flagged up a 64 links that are Toxic and should be removed. After analysing them further alot / most of them are link directories that have now been de-indexed by Google. Do you think we should still ask for them to be removed or is this a pointless exercise as the links has already been removed because its been de-indexed. Would like your views on this guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Sudden Change In Indexed Pages
Every week I check the number of pages indexed by google using the "site:" function. I have set up a permanent redirect from all the non-www pages to www pages. When I used to run the function for the: non-www pages (i.e site:mysite.com), would have 12K results www pages (i.e site:www.mysite.com) would have about 36K The past few days, this has reversed! I get 12K for www pages, and 36K for non-www pages. Things I have changed: I have added canonical URL links in the header, all have www in the URL. My questions: Is this cause for concern? Can anyone explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Best Product URL For Indexing
My proposed URL: mydomain.com/products/category/subcategory/product detail Puts my products 4 levels deep. Is this too deep to get my products indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waynekolenchuk0