Googlebot cannot access your site
-
"At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site"
We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then.
When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google.
The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com
I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else.
The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out.
The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach
and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google.
Does anyone have some input?
-
Have you tried going to Google WMT and performing a Fetch as Googlebot? Do you have the old GA tracking code from before the asynchronous code was used?
If the answer to both questions is yes, try updating your GA code.
http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/08/fixing-googlebot-cant-access-your-site.html
-
Hi Anderson,
Just took a very quick look at your source code and my first reaction would be that there is something "unique" happening with the naming within your site structure
To be more precise ... you have multiple instances like this in the code:
http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com/sites/tile-pompanobeach.com/files/logo.png
since the keyword you are targeting for that page is tile pompano beach, it is not much of a stretch to think perhaps the repetition could be an attempt to manipulate rankings.
Given that you are saying rankings have plummeted to as low as page 10, I would guess that the repetition of your keyword term (exact match domain) in the source code is being seen as keyword stuffing.
It would be interesting to know exactly when the rankings went into freefall, but my guess would be perhaps around the end of April.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I don't think the issue is from your domain or the notifications. I received a similar notification but I looked into it and realized my site had gone offline for a little bit of time.
The site looks pretty new. I suspect a lack of links and the fact that Google actually lives in several different data centers (that update their index at different times) is the factor... just my guess though.
-
Oh and I have been reading a few things on using hyphens in URL's. Before I had read something saying it was good because google reads the keywords separately. But I read that a while ago. Now when I looked into it I am seeing that some people think (and have tested) that using a hyphen in the websites main URL can hurt SEO.
Do you think my domain could be the problem
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
-
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Partner Sites
Hi All, Within our company we have a media group that publishes magazines and videos, the sites have footers that link to our shopping site, one of them has 118,459 links to one URL, domain authority 23, and the other 17,726 to seven URLs, domain authority 52, (there are some articles which link organically). My question is are these links because they're from identifiable companies with the same ownership worth keeping or are they detrimental? The site being linked to has a DA of 39 Cheers Stew
Technical SEO | | StewMcG0 -
How can i do SEO For Ecommerce site
I am doing SEO for my WP blog but now I am starting my recently launch an eCommerce site where I am selling electronics products. I want to know how can I do the SEO so at least I can top 10 position for my google India. Second how can i avoid duplicate content about copying manufacture contents. Please help
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
Squidoo vs Personal Site
Hey guys I'm Nikolas a newb, just signed up to the pro membership trial after alot of digging on the seomoz blog for months . First off let me tell you alittle about my story and seo knowledge. I started off online on the well known squidoo site with revenue sharing, because of my day job I had alot of time to work on my articles and build up to a nice monthly salary of just over 1k in less than 5 months which doubled and trippled in the last few months. Seo is like a 6th sense to me , onpage offpage and the lots. Most of what I read here is not new to me or something I didn't already know about, but its good to freshen up and remember things, as theres alot to search engine optimization. I have built up to over 500k unique visitors in less than a year and have decided to move on to my own site 4 months ago. The niche is the exact same one I have targeted on squidoo. My site had alot of issues at the start the classic 301 redirection ht_access fix I had to do,content management system building low quality content pages via tags that i have fixed(noindex) and removed with 404s, build up original unique valuable posts, interlink ,onpage and offpage seo the basics I did for squidoo. The problem here is that I can't seem to get any traction from google where as my squidoo search engine traffic is 80% , my sites google traffic is 5-10%. I have the same number of articles on both sites, similar topics , similar onpage offpage optimisation basically identical but have alot better content on my new site. My bing, yahoo and referral traffic is rising everyday but as I know google is 85% of the market share I am leaving alot of money on the table. I hope that most of you more dedicated seo's can give me a tip or two and explain exactly what is going on with my situation and if possible take a look at my site hardwarepal .
Technical SEO | | NikolasNikolaou0 -
Moving an eCommerce Site to Wordpress
I'm evaluating moving an established eCommerce I own over to a WordPress based site with a woocommerce plugin. My question is, does the added /category/ slug hurt SEO rankings at all?
Technical SEO | | CobraJones950 -
Www. version of my site shows nothing in Open Site Explorer
When I first setup my site the domain was learnbonds.com. I moved hosts a couple of months ago and as part of the process I asked them to make the site show as www.learnbonds.com which they did. Now however when I goto www.learnbonds.com in open site explorer it says there is no data. When I enter learnbonds.com into open site explorer it gives me data but says that the site has been redirected to the www. version which shows no data. Also in google webmaster when I try to set the preferred domain as the www. version it gives me the following message: Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://www.learnbonds.com/. Please verify http://www.learnbonds.com/. I am concerned that this is hurting my SEO and would appreciate any advice you can give. Thanks Dave
Technical SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
Site maintenance and crawling
Hey all, Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime. We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops. My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index). I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?
Technical SEO | | Daylan1 -
Robots.txt blocking site or not?
Here is the robots.txt from a client site. Am I reading this right --
Technical SEO | | 540SEO
that the robots.txt is saying to ignore the entire site, but the
#'s are saying to ignore the robots.txt command? See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file To ban all spiders from the entire site uncomment the next two lines: User-Agent: * Disallow: /0