Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
-
(Sorry for my english!)
A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year.
I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com.
When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore.
So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed
Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search.
It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old.
In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old.
So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website?
The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.
-
Ok great then, maybe I got concerned too soon.
Thanks for your input!
-
At a month old, that's not unusual.
-
The traffic is actually climbing on the new website but I have a hard time having Google crawl some of the pages.
Out of 63 pages submitted (and I mean pages, not posts), only 5 pages have been indexed.
It also seems like Google doesn't get the latest sitemap often. To this day, I always had to resubmit it manually.
-
Live or not, I don't think there's a difference in the impact thewebhostinghero.com has on webhostinghero.com at this point. So long as they're not linked, whatever is done is done.
-
Yes I did notice the PR thing too and I don't get it either.
At some point, webhostinghero.com was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com (at the domain registrar level).
Could it be that the PR for webhostinghero.com is the one from thewebhostinghero.com?
I think the best thing would be to completely shut down thewebhostinghero.com but webhostinghero.com isn't profitable yet. Thewebhostinghero.com still brings me a little income.
Jeez I'm stuck on this one...
-
It's just that the very first search I did with a piece of your content showed results for duplicate content. I'd did a few other checks after that did, in fact, come up clean. By the way, something seems a little off regarding your pagerank--it's kind of strange to have that kind of PR with the back links I see in OSE.
-
What do you mean by "questionably original content"? Apart from 2 of these 3 tools (http://www.webhostinghero.com/tools/). The rest is 100% original content. No spun content at all. Of course it's going to be similar in a way because both website are about the same topic but other than that, I didn't rewrite anything, it's all new.
-
One month old is very young to be expecting search traffic. On the other hand, being so closely connected to a triple-penalized site, being a month old, and having questionably original content, isn't going to give google the warm fuzzies about the quality of your site. I'd be making sure my content was spotlessly authentic and more than that, I'd be figuring out how to create some engagement with it--that's what would really speed things up for you. Your content may be providing relevance but authority is going to come from engagement.
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
-
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Need to update Google Search Console profile for http to https change. Will a "change of address" option suffice or do we need to create a new GSC profile?
In the past I have seen most clients create new Google Search Profile when they update to a https URL. However a colleague of mine asked if just updating the change of address option will suffice https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106. Would it be best to just update the change of address for the Google Search Console profile to keep the data seamless? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
When does Google index a fetched page?
I have seen where it will index on of my pages within 5 minutes of fetching, but have also read that it can take a day. I'm on day #2 and it appears that it has still not re-indexed 15 pages that I fetched. I changed the meta-description in all of them, and added content to nearly all of them, but none of those changes are showing when I do a site:www.site/page I'm trying to test changes in this manner, so it is important for me to know WHEN a fetched page has been indexed, or at least IF it has. How can I tell what is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Running Google Ads on the website will impact the Rankings?
Hi, Will Google AdSense those are running above the fold of the website, impact the keywords rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuchiPardal0 -
How to make Google include our recipe pages in its main index?
We have developed a recipe search engine www.edamam.com and serve the content of over 500+ food bloggers and major recipe websites. Our legal obligations do not allow us to show the actual recipe preparation info (e.g. the most valuable from the content), we can only show a few images, the ingredients and nutrition information. Most of the unique content goes to the source/blog. By submitting XML sitemaps on GWT we now have around 500K pages indexed, however only a few hundred appear in Google's main index and we are looking for a solution to include all of them in the index. Also good to know is that it appears that all our top competitors are in the exactly same situation, so it is a challenging question. Any ideas will be highly appreciated! Thanks, Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edamam0 -
Is it possible to get a list of pages indexed in Google?
Is there a tool that will give me a list of pages on my site that are indexed in Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rise10 -
How can I block unwanted urls being indexed on google?
Hi, I have to block unwanted urls (not that page) from being indexed on google. I have to block urls like example.com/entertainment not the exact page example.com/entertainment.aspx . Is there any other ways other than robot.txt? If i add this to robot.txt will that block my other url too? Or should I make a 301 redirection from example.com/entertainment to example.com/entertainment.aspx. Because some of the unwanted urls are linked from other sites. thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VipinLouka780