Certain Product Pages Not Indexing

[GManSEO]

Hey All,

We discovered an issue where new product pages on our site were not getting indexed because a "noindex" tag was inadvertently being added to section when those pages were created.

We removed the noindex tag in late April and some of the pages that had not been previously indexed are now showing up, but others are still not getting indexed and I'd appreciate some help on why this could be.

Here is an example of a page that was not in the index but is now showing after removal of noindex:

http://www.cloud9living.com/san-diego/gaslamp-quarter-food-tour

And here is an example of a page that is still not showing in the index:

http://www.cloud9living.com/atlanta/race-a-ferrari

UPDATE: The above page is now showing after I manually submitted it in WMT.  I had previously submitted another page like a month ago and it was still not indexing so I thought the manual submission was a dead end.  However, it just so happens that the above URL just had its Page Title and H1 updated to something more specific and less duplicative so I am currently running a test to see if that's the problem with these pages not indexing.  Will update this soon.

Any suggestions?  Thanks!

[GManSEO]

Significantly changing the Page Title and H1 is working.  Second page now indexing after not indexing for some time.  Probably shoulda thought of that a long time ago but that noindex tag sidetracked me!

[brad.s.knutson]

It's hard to say, and I admit that I would have also expected them to reindex the pages by now.

A while back I was working for a client who accidentally turned on noindex, nofollow in their WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin site-wide.  I didn't catch it for a week, and after I turned it off it took an additional 3 weeks before a single page of the site was reindexed.  Granted, this was a low ranked site, and it probably wasn't high on Google's priority, but it did take much longer than I hoped to recover from.

Unfortunately I think you just have to wait it out.  Just keep doing what your doing, creating new content, etc.  Maybe if you build a new link to the page, Google will recrawl it then?

[GManSEO]

Good point.  But why then would they continue to not index a month after manual submission?

[brad.s.knutson]

If the page was set to "noindex" for a long time, Google may have flagged the page as such and chosen to skip over it when it was crawling your site.

[GManSEO]

Also, historically indexation happened very quickly on this site (less than 24 hours) so that's why I think something else is afoot here.  And it has been like 6 weeks... which I don't think makes sense for a site with this level of domain authority.

[GManSEO]

Hey Bradley,

Thanks for the response.  Yes, I had manually fetched a few of these pages about a month back and that didn't change indexation so I thought it was a dead end.  However, one I tried again this morning suddenly indexed and it just so happened to also have had its Page Title and H1 tag changed to be significantly more unique than they were previously so I am wondering if that is problem.  I am currently running a test with another page that I manually submitted a month ago but without updating Page Title/H1 and now I have resubmitted with changed info.

We'll see if that does the trick.

Will let you know.

[brad.s.knutson]

You can ask Google to crawl your page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276

Ask Google to crawl a page or site:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Health, click Fetch as Google.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
4. In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)
5. Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.
6. Once you see a Fetch status of "Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:
   • To submit the individual URL to Google's index, select URL and click Submit. You can submit up to 500 URLs a week in this way.
   • To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month.

It's probably just Google slowly making their way around to re-crawling these pages.  I would fetch the page, and just wait a little while longer.