Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Homepage not indexed - seems to defy explanation

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Homepage not indexed - seems to defy explanation

    Technical SEO
    7
    19
    4903
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Marcus_Miller
      Marcus_Miller last edited by

      Hey folks

      Hoping to get some more eyes on a specific problem I am seeing with a clients site.

      Site: http:www.ukjuicers.com 

      We have checked everything we can think of and the usual suspects here are not present:

      • Canonical URL is in place
      • Site is shown as indexed in search console
      • No Crawl, DNS, Connectivity or server errors
      • No robots.txt blocking - verified in search console
      • No robots meta tags or directives
      • Fetch as Google works
      • Fetch & render works
      • site command returns all other pages
      • info command does not return the homepage
      • homepage is cached and cache has been updated since this issue started: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ukjuicers.com
      • homepage is indexed in yahoo and Bing
      • all variations redirect to the www.ukjuicers.com domain (.co.uk, .com, www, sans www etc)

      The only issue I found after some extensive digging was some issues with the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site both being available and both specifying the canonical version as themselves. So, http site used canonicals with http and https site used canonicals with https. So, a conflict there with the canonical exacerbating the problem it is there to solve.

      The HTTPS site is not indexed though and we have set this up in webmaster tools and now the web developer has set redirects to ensure all versions even the https now 301 redirect to the http://www.ukjuicers.com page so these canonical issues have been ironed out.

      But... it's still not indexing the homepage.

      The practical implications of this are quite scary - the site used to be somewhere between 1st and 4th for keywords like 'juicers', 'juicer' etc. Now they are bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 with an internal page. They were jostling with the big boys (amazon, argos, john lewis etc) but now they are right at the bottom of the second page.

      It's a strange one - i have seen all manor of technical problems over the years but this one seems to defy sensible explanation. The next step is to do a full technical SEO audit of the site but I am always of the opinion that with many eyes all bugs are shallow so if anyone has any input or experience with odd indexation problems like this would love to get your input.

      Cheers
      Marcus

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • MikeRoberts
        MikeRoberts @Marcus_Miller last edited by

        Glad you figured it out. I honestly didn't think it would have been the canonicals. I'm a little surprised that the bots didn't just choose not to respect the suggestion as opposed to blanking your site from the index. Didn't think that was even a possibility from incorrect canonicals. Good to know for the future though in case anything like this comes up with anyone else's site.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Marcus_Miller
          Marcus_Miller @AGMContainerControls last edited by

          Yep - it's back. Looks like resolving the canonical issue fixed it. Seems it was a usual suspect after all. 🙂

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Marcus_Miller
            Marcus_Miller @MikeRoberts last edited by

            Yep - bit of a weird one but in the end looks like the canonicals were the issue. Thanks for taking a look though man - super appreciated. 🙂

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Marcus_Miller
              Marcus_Miller @becole last edited by

              Hey Bernadette - thanks for the feedback. Site is back in the index now, looks like the canonicals were the culprit but the owners are keen for no future issues so I will dig in and take a look at these points. Cheers!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Marcus_Miller
                Marcus_Miller last edited by

                Hey folks

                24 hours after we identified and fixed the canonical issue the site is now indexed again so it does look like it was indeed a canonical conundrum. Both the HTTP and HTTPS sites were claiming to be the canonical version so in some respects creating a conflict. We removed this conflict and it is now indexed.

                Thanks for the extra eyes folks - appreciated and if anyone ever needs another pair of eyes to look a problem give me a shout. 🙂

                Cheers
                Marcus

                MikeRoberts 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • PenaltyHammer
                  PenaltyHammer last edited by

                  Hey Marcus. You just need some links from high authority website like moz:) People say you're indexed so case closed, job done:)

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • LoganRay
                    LoganRay last edited by

                    I just noticed that clicking on the entire slider, even out to the sides where it appears to be just white space, takes you to another page. At first I didn't realize what I was clicking that got me to the next page. When I do Crtl+A on the page, the full width of the slider images shows highlighted in blue, but to the side of those images outside of those bounds is linked. I'm wondering if Google sees this as cloaking and kicked out the homepage as a result.

                    *I did see that AGM pointed out it's indexed now, but that's not to say this wasn't the cause of original de-index.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • AGMContainerControls
                      AGMContainerControls Subscriber last edited by

                      As of this writing it looks like the page is indexed. By searching site:ukjuicers.com it comes up in the search results with about 861 other results. Not sure if there is anything you changed to get things working again but it seems to be in their index now.

                      Marcus_Miller 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • MikeRoberts
                        MikeRoberts last edited by

                        I took a look at all of the usual suspects as well... which amounts to pretty much everything that everyone else mentioned but I was intrigued by this issue and thought maybe another set of eyes might notice something that was off. Nothing was wrong in the page source from what I saw, no issues crawling it myself and I didn't see any penalties. Normally I'd think that if your homepage wasn't appearing for branded organic searches then a penalty was levied against you but when that is the case the homepage is still normally find-able in a Site operator search. M__aybe it is related to all the backlinks that were lost/deleted in the past month but I'm not sure why that would be the case unless removing the homepage from the index was a Penguin response to link issues... but I was under the impression that peguin was devaluing the link source not the link recipient and deleting/removing links seems to be a preferred method of handling penguin-related issues. So if there is a relationship between penguin and your homepage being deindexed then I am not sure at all why nor am I certain how to fix it as I'm not seeing anything in particular that screams "linking issue" at me. (though I only did a fairly cursory inspection of things)

                        So I am stumped. Whenever the issue is figure out I would love to know how/why this came to be.

                        Marcus_Miller 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • becole
                          becole last edited by

                          Marcus, I know this is frustrating. I've checked several things, and looked at many of the possibilities that you've already brought up. I don't have access to the Google Search Console, so I cannot comment about any of that data. I'm assuming that you don't have a manual action on the site or any other messages from Google.

                          What I've seen in the past is issues with schema markup, especially when it comes to reviews and how they're handled on sites. I'm not saying that this is the issue--but I've seen issues that Google has had with these (especially because there is the word "hidden" there in the code). So, you might look into that some more.

                          The issue could also be related to links--look at the links to the site's home page to see if there is an issue with low quality links pointing to that page or other unnatural links.

                          If someone has copied the page, added a canonical tag, and then added a "meta noindex tag" to their page, it's possible that they could have taken your page out of the index. This has happened before.

                          Marcus_Miller 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • PenaltyHammer
                            PenaltyHammer @Marcus_Miller last edited by

                            Unfortunately you're not amazon so maybe you must try harder;)

                            or force to index mainpage with some software or indexer website then wait a while.

                            I'm thinking about some negative seo made for your mainpage but so far can't see any symptoms.

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • TimHolmes
                              TimHolmes @Marcus_Miller last edited by

                              This is a strange one then.... very strange.

                              Just performed a site: search and like you said it is not showing up as indexed. There is normally something technical to explain an issue like this, but I cannot see anything after looking at your site robots and source code.

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • Marcus_Miller
                                Marcus_Miller @PenaltyHammer last edited by

                                Hey Krzysztof

                                Yeah, the page has little textual content but... neither does the amazon homepage. Ultimately the page is a jump in point for all the products and the content suits that. Certainly, I could understand Google not liking the page but would that not result in a reduced rank rather than a complete removal like this?

                                On the dodgy links front they have never done anything on that front - so anything there would be surprising (or just incidental cruft that is out there on scraper sites and the like).

                                Super odd. 😞

                                PenaltyHammer 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • Marcus_Miller
                                  Marcus_Miller @LoganRay last edited by

                                  Yep - super odd. 15 years or so in this game and never seen anything quite like this. Transient drops but usually it boiled down to some simple technical error or more often user error cough no index / robots.txt cough

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • Marcus_Miller
                                    Marcus_Miller @TimHolmes last edited by

                                    Hey - the real issue here is the page is just not indexed. It's not there. Not that another page is a more suitable or preferential result. Ultimately that was the best page for a user to jump in at... The page is not even returned in a brand search so... can't see how any other page could be more suitable for that kind of search.

                                    TimHolmes 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • PenaltyHammer
                                      PenaltyHammer last edited by

                                      Hi Marcus

                                      The only thing I think it can be the issue is the number of words on mainpage. Mostly I see images and words from menus, links and not main content. Digging deeper can help (seo audit).

                                      This can be a penguin too but to know the answer, full link analysis is needed. After quick glance I see some unnatural links but not in larger number. Maybe they got footprints not visible at once (same ip, c class, content with link etc).

                                      Marcus_Miller 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • LoganRay
                                        LoganRay last edited by

                                        You're not kidding, this does defy explanation. When did it drop out of the index?

                                        In all honesty, I don't have a solution, you've already checked everything I would have. I'm mostly commenting so I can keep up with this issue and see how it unfolds. Very curious to see if anyone can identify what's happening here.

                                        Marcus_Miller 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • TimHolmes
                                          TimHolmes last edited by

                                          Hmmm, is it a case of Google simply feels the homepage is not as engaging and relevant in terms of search to your users and they put more emphasis on product pages which it choose to feature instead.

                                          I often find that for key terms our product pages almost always rank higher then the homepage unless a brand only search.

                                          Secondly, is this a recent change? Could the most recent Penguin update have simply resulted in your competitors getting a boost where as before the previous algo was holding them back which has resulted in your position slide.

                                          Marcus_Miller 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • 1 / 1
                                          • First post
                                            Last post

                                          Got a burning SEO question?

                                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                          Start my free trial


                                          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.

                                          • See all categories

                                          Related Questions

                                          • CustomMadeCasino

                                            GA4 showing 2 versions of my homepage

                                            ga4 indexing

                                            When my website Custom Made Casino switched from universal analytics to GA, i have noticed that now in the behavior section it is showing 2 versions of my homepage which I feel may be impacting seo. It is showing the main url which we use for everything, https://custommadecasino.com/ , and it is showing https://custommadecasino.com/index.php?route-common/home. This was never the case with universal. Does anyone know if this is a problem and if so, how do i fix it so that our proper homepage is what is indexed?

                                            Technical SEO | | CustomMadeCasino
                                            0
                                          • ZuricoDrexia

                                            Escort directory page indexing issues

                                            seo page treatment page rank google rankings

                                            Re; escortdirectory-uk.com, escortdirectory-usa.com, escortdirectory-oz.com.au,
                                            Hi, We are an escort directory with 10 years history. We have multiple locations within the following countries, UK, USA, AUS. Although many of our locations (towns and cities) index on page one of Google, just as many do not. Can anyone give us a clue as to why this may be?

                                            Technical SEO | | ZuricoDrexia
                                            0
                                          • CommercePundit

                                            Image Indexing Issue by Google

                                            Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below, Can you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!

                                            Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
                                            0
                                          • rhoadesjohn

                                            How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages

                                            We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th.  It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?

                                            Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn
                                            0
                                          • GManSEO

                                            Getting a video displaying a lightbox indexed

                                            We have created a video for a category page with the goal of building links to the page and improving the conversion rate of visitors to the page.  This category is Christmas oriented so we want to get the video dropped in ASAP. Unfortunately there was a mixup with our developer and he created a lightbox pop-up to display the video on the category page.  I'm concerned this will hurt our ability to get the video indexed in Google. Here was his response.  Is what he says here true? "With the video originally being in lightbox the iFrame Embed was enough since the video can't be on the page, it would have to be hidden on the page which is ignored by Google.  The SEO would be derived from modifying the video sitemap to define the category page as the HTML page for the Wistia video and Google will make the association. The sitemap did all the heavy lifting, the schema markup did not come till later so it had no additional affect on Google other then to re-enforce the sitemap." Thanks for your help!

                                            Technical SEO | | GManSEO
                                            0
                                          • TalkInThePark

                                            De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?

                                            Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
                                            www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
                                            www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
                                            And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
                                            TalkInThePark

                                            Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark
                                            0
                                          • zazo

                                            How to tell if PDF content is being indexed?

                                            I've searched extensively for this, but could not find a definitive answer. We recently updated our website and it contains links to about 30 PDF data sheets. I want to determine if the text from these PDFs is being archived by search engines. When I do this search http://bit.ly/rRYJPe  (google - site:www.gamma-sci.com and filetype:pdf) I can see that the PDF urls are getting indexed, but does that mean that their content is getting indexed? I have read in other posts/places that if you can copy text from a PDF and paste it that means Google can index the content.  When I try this with PDFs from our site I cannot copy text, but I was told that these PDFs were all created from Word docs, so they should be indexable, correct? Since WordPress has you upload PDFs like they are an image could this be causing the problem? Would it make sense to take the time and extract all of the PDF content to html? Thanks for any assistance, this has been driving me crazy.

                                            Technical SEO | | zazo
                                            0
                                          • prima-253509

                                            Homepage outranked by sub pages - reason for concern?

                                            Hey All, trying to figure out how concerned I should be about this. So here is the scoop, would appreciate your thoughts. We have several eCommerce websites that have been affected by Panda, do to  content from manufacturers and lack of original content. We have been working hard to write our own descriptions and are seeing an increase in traffic again. We have also been writing blogs since February and are getting a lot of visits to them. Here is the problem, our blog pages are now outranking our homepage when you type in site:domain-name Is this a problem? our home page does not show up until you are 3 pages in. However when you type in just our domain name in google as a search it does show up in position one with sitelinks under it. This is happening across both of our sites. Is this a cause for concern or just natural due to our blogs being more popular than our homepage. Thanks! Josh

                                            Technical SEO | | prima-253509
                                            0

                                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                          Start my free trial
                                          Products
                                          • Moz Pro
                                          • Moz Local
                                          • Moz API
                                          • Moz Data
                                          • STAT
                                          • Product Updates
                                          Moz Solutions
                                          • SMB Solutions
                                          • Agency Solutions
                                          • Enterprise Solutions
                                          Free SEO Tools
                                          • Domain Authority Checker
                                          • Link Explorer
                                          • Keyword Explorer
                                          • Competitive Research
                                          • Brand Authority Checker
                                          • MozBar Extension
                                          • MozCast
                                          Resources
                                          • Blog
                                          • SEO Learning Center
                                          • Help Hub
                                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                          • How-to Guides
                                          • Moz Academy
                                          • API Docs
                                          About Moz
                                          • About
                                          • Team
                                          • Careers
                                          • Contact
                                          Why Moz
                                          • Case Studies
                                          • Testimonials
                                          Get Involved
                                          • Become an Affiliate
                                          • MozCon
                                          • Webinars
                                          • Practical Marketer Series
                                          • MozPod
                                          Connect with us

                                          Contact the Help team

                                          Join our newsletter
                                          Moz logo
                                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                          • Accessibility
                                          • Terms of Use
                                          • Privacy

                                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.