Why isn't google indexing our site?
-
Hi,
We have majorly redesigned our site. Is is not a big site it is a SaaS site so has the typical structure, Landing, Features, Pricing, Sign Up, Contact Us etc...
The main part of the site is after login so out of google's reach.
Since the new release a month ago, google has indexed some pages, mainly the blog, which is brand new, it has reindexed a few of the original pages I am guessing this as if I click cached on a site: search it shows the new site.
All new pages (of which there are 2) are totally missed. One is HTTP and one HTTPS, does HTTPS make a difference.
I have submitted the site via webmaster tools and it says "URL and linked pages submitted to index" but a site: search doesn't bring all the pages?
What is going on here please? What are we missing? We just want google to recognise the old site has gone and ALL the new site is here ready and waiting for it.
Thanks
Andrew
-
Well, links/shares are good. But of course I'm just begging the question of how you can get those.
Rand gave a great talk called "Inbound Marketing for Startups" at a Hackers & Founders meetup that was focused more on Inbound as a whole than SEO in particular, but it's full of valuable insights: http://vimeo.com/39473593 [video]
Ultimately it'll come down to some kind of a publishing/promotional strategy for your startup. Sometimes your startup is so unique/interesting that it has its own marketing baked right in - in which case you can get a lot of traction by simply doing old-school PR to get your startup in front of the right people.
Other times, you've got to build up links/authority on the back of remarkable marketing.
BufferApp is a great example of a startup that built traction off their blog. Of course, they weren't necessarily blogging as an SEO play - it was more in the aim of getting directly in front of the right audience for direct signups for their product. But they definitely built up some domain authority as a result.
I'd also take a look at the guides Mailchimp has created - they created the dual benefit of getting in front of the right audience in a positive/helpful way (which benefits the brand and drives sign-ups directly) as well as building a considerable number of inbound links, boosting their domain authority overall.
Unfortunately no quick/easy ways to build your domain authority, but things you do to build your authority can also get you immediately in front of the audience you're looking for - and SEO just becomes a lateral benefit to that.
-
Thank you all for your responses. It is strange. we are going to add a link to our g+ page and then add a post.
As a new site what is the best way to get our domain authority up so we get crailed quicker?
Thanks again
Andrew
-
I disagree. Unless the old pages have inbound links from external sites, there's not much reason to 301 them (and not much benefit). If they're serving up 404 errors, they will fall out of the index.
Google absolutely does have a way to know these new pages exist - by crawling the home page and following the links discovered there. Both of the pages in question are linked to prominently, particularly the Features page which is part of the main navigation. A sitemap is just an aid for this process - it can help move things along and help Google find otherwise obscure/deep pages, but it by no means is a necessity for getting prominent pages indexed, particularly pages that are 1-2 levels down from the home page.
-
If you didn't redirect the old URLs to the new ones when the new site went live, this will absolutely be the cause of your problem, Studio33. That, combined with having no (or misdirected) sitemap means there was essentially no way for Google to even know your site's pages existed.
Good catch Billy.
-
Hi Andrew,
-
Google has been indexing HTTPS URLs for years now without a problem, so is unlikely to be part of the issue.
-
Your domain authority on the whole may be slowing Google down in indexing new pages. Bottom line is crawl rate and depth are both functions of how authoritative/important you appear based on links/shares/etc.
-
That said, I don't see any indication as to why these two particular pages are not being indexed by Google. I'm a bit stumped here.
I see some duplication between your Features page and your Facebook timeline, but not with the invoice page.
As above, your domain authority (17) is a bit on the low side. So this could simply be a matter of Google not dedicating enough resources to crawl/index all of your pages yet. But why these two pages would be the only ones is perplexing, particularly after a full month. There are no problems with your Robots.txt, no canonical tag issues, the pages are linked to properly.
Wish I had an easy answer here. One idea, a bit of a long shot: we've seen Google index pages faster when they're linked to from Google+ posts. I see you have a Google+ business page for this website - you might try simply writing a (public) post there that includes a link over to the Features page.
As weak as that is, that's all I've got.
Best of Luck,
Mike -
-
OK - I would get a list of all of your old pages and start 301 redirecting them to your new pages asap. This could be part of your issue.
-
Hi checked XML, its there if you view source it just doesn't have a stylesheet
-
Hi thanks about 1 month. The blog page you are getting maybe the old ones,as they are working this end http://www.invoicestudio.com/Blog . What you have mentioned re the blog is part of the problem. Google has the old site and not the new.
-
Getting this on your Blog pages:
The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.
where you aware?
Anyway - may I ask how old these pages are?
-
Thanks. I will look into the sitemap. That only went live about an hour ago whilst this thread has been going on.
-
Yeah - with no path specified the directive is ignored. (you don't have a '/' so the directive (disallow) is ignored)
however, you do direct to your xml sitemap which appears to be empty. You might want to fix that....
-
Hi no I think its fine as we do not have the forward slash after the disallow. See
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
I wish it was as simple as that. Thanks for your help though its appreciated.
-
Hmmm. That link shows that the way you have it will block all robots.
-
Thanks but I think Robots.txt is correct. Excert from http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
To exclude all robots from the entire server
User-agent: * Disallow: /
To allow all robots complete access
User-agent: * Disallow:
(or just create an empty "/robots.txt" file, or don't use one at all)
-
It looks like your robots.txt file is the problem. http://www.invoicestudio.com/robots.txt has:
User-agent: * Disallow: When it should be:
User-agent: *
Allow: / -
Hi,
The specific pages are
https://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/InvoiceTemplate
http://www.invoicestudio.com/Features
I'm not sure what other pages are not indexed.
New site has been live 1 month.
Thanks for your help
Andrew
-
Without seeing the specific pages i cant check for things such as noindex tags or robot text blocking access, i would suggest you double check these aspects. The pages will need to be accesible to Search engines when they crawl your site, so if there are no links to those pages Google will be unable to access them.
How long have they been live since the site re-launch as it may just be that they have not been crawled yet, particuarly if they are deeper pages within your site hierarchy.
Heres a link to Googles resources on crawling and indexing sites incase you have not been able to check through them yet.
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
-
Sitemap Indexed Pages, Google Glitch or Problem With Site?
Hello, I have a quick question about our Sitemap Web Pages Indexed status in Google Search Console. Because of the drastic drop I can't tell if this is a glitch or a serious issue. When you look at the attached image you can see that under Sitemaps Web Pages Indexed has dropped suddenly on 3/12/17 from 6029 to 540. Our Index status shows 7K+ indexed. Other than product updates/additions and homepage layout updates there have been no significant changes to this website. If it helps we are operating on the Volusion platform. Thanks for your help! -Ryan rou1zMs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rrhansen0 -
HTML5: Changing 'section' content to be 'main' for better SEO relevance?
We received an HTML5 recommendation that we should change onpage text copy contained in 'section" to be listed in 'main' instead, because this is supposedly better for SEO. We're questioning the need to ask developers spend time on this purely for a perceived SEO benefit. Sure, maybe content in 'footer' may be seen as less relevant, but calling out 'section' as having less relevance than 'main'? Yes, it's true that engines evaluate where onpage content is located, but this level of granular focus seems unnecessary. That being said, more than happy to be corrected if there is actually a benefit. On a side note, 'main' isn't supported by older versions of IE and could cause browser incompatibilities (http://caniuse.com/#feat=html5semantic). Would love to hear others' feedback about this - thanks! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Why google index some meta titles I dont have?
Hi there, I have a problem with a website and I am desperate to find a solution because I have tried many things and nothing works! My website its: adtriboo.com Google does not find my main URL (main countro spain) www.adtriboo.com/es and I dont see this page its indexed in google. See link https://www.google.es/search?num=100&hl=es&site=&source=hp&q=site%3Aadtriboo.com&oq=site%3Aadtriboo.com&gs_l=hp.3...1189.4419.0.4586.17.17.0.0.0.0.223.1457.9j6j1.16.0...0.0...1c.1.8.hp.brTKX-zPwVI Also, google its showing some meta titles that are not in my page! For example my subfolder for the country Chile shows this title: Chile - Adtriboo but this its my real title Diseño logo, logotipos, video corporativo - adtriboo In webmaster tools everything looks good, and if I explore the webpage like google in webmaster tools the code its ok and everything lookd okay. If you see for example the URL from Chile (www.adtriboo.com/es_CL) the meta title is not the right one! Also i have a problem indexatión because i am not visible for any of my keywords even in the page 10! Please, somebody knows what happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Comunicare0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Refocusing a site's conent
Here's a question I was asked recently, and I can really see going either way, but want to double check my preference. The site has been around for years and over that time expanded it's content to a variety of areas that are not really core to it's mission, income or themed content. These jettisonable other areas have a fair amount of built up authority but don't really contribute anything to the site's bottom line. The site is considering what to do with these off-theme pages and the two options seem to be: Leave them in place, but make them hard to find for users, thus preserving their authority as an inlink to other core pages. or... Just move on and 301 the pages to whatever is half-way relevant. The 301 the pages camp seems to believe that making the site's existing/remaining content focused on three or four narrower areas will have benefits for what Google sees the site as being about. So, instead of being about 12 different things that aren't too related to each other, the site will be about 3 or 4 things that are kinda related to eachother. Personally, I'm not eager to let go of old pages because they do produce some traffic and have some authority value to help the core pages via in-context and navigation links. On the other hand, maybe focusing more would have benefits search benefits. What do think? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How are pages ranked when using Google's "site:" operator?
Hi, If you perform a Google search like site:seomoz.org, how are the pages displayed sorted/ranked? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
I'm facinated by SEO but the truth is, I don't have the time to do it. Who can I hire?
I'm facinated by SEO but the truth is, I don't have the time to do it. I trust the moz community more than some of those other SEO forums out there so I'm asking you all, where can I go to find a good SEO firm who's affordable enough for a small startup? The next part of the question is, what should I expect to pay for services that will really make a difference? Please don't spam this thread....I seriously just want an honest opinion as to where I can find some credible help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chaz880 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0