Site:www.domainname.com - does not find homepage in Google (only inner pages - why?)
-
When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do.
The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again.
When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search.
Any ideas?
[see images where you can see the problem]
-
Thanks. I'm going to try that and I'll let you know if this helps.
-
Yup, an "empty" robots.txt file should look like this:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: -
Thank you for your answer.
You're right. There is no robots.txt file. You're saying that I should get one in place, just for housekeeping.
But will it help if I just leave it empty? Because I do not need to disallow something, right now...
Thanks.
-
Thank you for your answer.
- I do not have any errors in Search console regarding the homepage.
- There is no robots.txt file.
-
Looks like the site is missing a robots.txt file; that could cause some issues (hit tip, Tim Holmes). I'd get one in place, just for housekeeping - search engines have been known behave oddly sometimes when they can't find a robots.txt file.
I'm struggling to see anything obvious that would cause this behaviour, but equally, I wouldn't be too concerned about it - the page is clearly indexed and discoverable, so this may just be a quirk.
-
To all intents and purposes it would appear the Homepage file has been indexed as it can be found via branded search etc. From viewing the sites source you are not blocking anything or have any funny canonical issues. Do you have any errors in your Google Search Console.crawl reports.
Also have you anything in your robots.txt file that could be causing an issue?
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 Indexing of Site Map
We recently launched a new site - on June 4th we submitted our site map to google and almost instantly had all 25,000 URL's crawled (yay!). On June 18th, we made some updates to the title & description tags for the majority of pages on our site and added new content to our home page so we submitted a new sitemap. So far the results have been underwhelming and google has indexed a very low number of the updated pages. As a result, only a handful of the new titles and descriptions are showing up on the SERP pages. Any ideas as to why this might be? What are the tricks to having google re-index all of the URLs in a sitemap?
Technical SEO | | Emily_A0 -
Wrong page ranked in Google, specific example
Hi All, I've searched for previous questions and many talk about the same problem but do not post an actual example. I am also thinking to do a blog post and a series of experiments once there is a theory. My target keyword is "Exhibition Stand Hire" and this is the target page on our site http://goo.gl/qt54lb Site appears on page 6 of SERPS (google.co.uk), but instead of this page a homepage is listed. But if I'm searching for the term using quotes, ie "Exhibition Stand Hire" the right page appears on page 4 of the SERPs. Our home page only uses the keyword in the body text, while target page is very optimised. Could it be over-optimised? I've tried mixing up words in the title tag to not offer an exact match, also i've varied the anchor text of all incoming links but that didn't fix the problem. (Hence why at the moment they all use different terms to point to this page) None of this helped alter what page is chosen to appear. Is it simply the matter of page not being strong enough compared to other less relevant pages on the site? How come many other sites rank better with much less effort? (i'm using OSE to determine competition) Thank you.
Technical SEO | | georgexx0 -
Cant find internal links on one of my pages.
When I run open site explorer for www.kingremodeling.com/ss.php?pid=5 it says there are 40 links to it on my site. However, I cannot find these links on any of the pages that open site explorer lists such as my homepage www.KingRemodeling.com. Totally confused!
Technical SEO | | allb830 -
Cached pages still showing on Google
We noticed our QA site showing up on Google so we blocked them in our robot.txt file. We still had an issue with them crawling it so we blocked the site from the public. Now Google is still showing a cached version from the first week in March. Do we just have to wait until they try to re-crawl the site to clear this out or is there a better way to try and get these pages removed from results?
Technical SEO | | aspenchicago0 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Considering redirecting my site from .com/us to just .com. What could the possible SERP consequences?
Today we use country-specific .tlds but have the US site on .com/us; .com is now a 'flag-site.' Ikea uses that structure too (.com/.com/us). Looking potential risk to redirecting current US site to .com.
Technical SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0 -
Google caching meta tags from another site?
We have several sites on the same server. On the weekend we relocated some servers, changing IP address. A client has since noticed something freaky with the meta tags. 1. They search for their companyname, and another site from the same server appears in position 1. It is completely unrelated, has never happened before, and the company name is not used in any incoming text links. Eg search for company1 on Google. Company1.com.au appears at position 2, but at position1 is school1.com.au. The words company1 don't appear anywhere on the site. I've analysed all incoming links with a gazillion tools, and can't find any link text of company1, linking to school1. 2. Even more freaky, searching for company1.com.au at Google. The results at Google in position 1 for the last three days has been: Meta Title for school1 (but hovering/clicking actual goes to URL for company1)
Technical SEO | | ozgeekmum
Meta Description for school1
URL for company1.com.au Clicking on the cached copy of result1, it shows a cached version of school1 taken on March 18. Today is 29 March. Logically we are trying to get Google to spider both sites again quickly. We've asked the clients to update their home pages. Resubmitted xml sitemaps. Checked the HTTP status codes - both are happily returning 200s. Different cookies. I found another instance on a forum: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10578/incorrect-meta-information-in-google Any ideas?0