Very well established blog, new posts now being indexed very late
-
I have an established blog.We update it on daily basis. In the past, when I would publish a new post, it would get indexed within a minute or so.
But since a month or so, its taking hours. Sometimes like 10-12 hours for new posts to get indexed. Only thing I have changed is robots.txt.
This is the current robots file.
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content/plugins Disallow: /wp-content/cache Disallow: /wp-content/themes Disallow: /wp-login.php Disallow: /*wp-login.php* Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /feed Disallow: /comments Disallow: /author Disallow: /category Disallow: */trackback Disallow: */feed Disallow: */comments Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /wget/ Disallow: /httpd/ Disallow: /*.php$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*.js$ Disallow: /*.inc$ Disallow: /*.css$ Disallow: /*.gz$ Disallow: /*.wmv$ Disallow: /*.cgi$ Disallow: /*.xhtml$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*? Allow: /wp-content/uploads User-agent: TechnoratiBot/8.1 Disallow: # ia_archiver User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / # disable duggmirror User-agent: duggmirror Disallow: / # allow google image bot to search all images User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /wp-includes/ Allow: /* # allow adsense bot on entire site User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: Allow: /* Sitemap: http://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.gz
Site has tons of backlinks. Just wondering if something is wrong with the robots file or if it could be something else.
-
The robots.txt file is designed to completely block content. Normally, if your robots.txt file was a factor then your content would not appear in SERPs at all.
It is possible for content to appear in SERPs even though it is blocked by robots.txt if it is linked from other sources. Since this is new content, it is less likely that is the case unless you are immediately sharing links and Google is seeing those links within the time frame you shared.
The first place I would look is your sitemap or whatever tool is used to inform Google that you have new content. When you publish a new blog article, your software should ping Google and inform them there is new content. That is where any investigation should begin. Next step is to check server logs to see how long it takes Google to respond to the alert. If it takes them 12 hours, then there is nothing further you can do about it.
I would be interested in a lot more detail. How many articles how you confirmed as being affected by this issue. Exactly how did you confirm the issue?
As a side note, your robots.txt file is bloated and doesn't adhere to any standards I have seen. How exactly was it created? Did someone go in and make manual modifications to the file?
-
Are you using Feedburner? Has the feed publishing service gotten out of sync? You can re-sync it under the Troubleshootize section.
-
Yes, its a wordpress site and I always had the all in one SEO plugin enabled.
-
Do you use a word press platform? If so do you use a SEO plug in. Different plug ins can effect the index time.
-
Do you use a word press platform? If so do you use a SEO plug in. Different plug ins can effect the index time.
-
Could you possibly reverse the changes of the robots.txt to a previous "working" version where your site was getting indexed quicker?
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
-
Discovered - currently not indexed issues
Hi there We're having an issue with our site recently where our new blog posts are not indexing properly from Google.
Technical SEO | | Syte
Inspecting it with Google Search Console gives up the errors "Discovered - currently not indexed" and "Excluded". I.e. it seems like Google sees our sitemap but chooses not to crawl and index for some reason. Does anybody have any ideas why this might be, and what we could do to fix it?
Thanks0 -
Canonicalization, does it still index
If I have 2 pages that are identical but on different domains that our team manages, if we place a rel=canonical tag on the page we prefer/should display, will the page that doesn't have the canonical tag still be indexed and show on SERPs?
Technical SEO | | kroe10 -
Paginated pages are being indexed?
I have lots of paginated pages which are being indexed. Should I add the noindex tag to page 2 onwards? The pages currently have previous and next tags in place. Page one also has a self-referencing canonical.
Technical SEO | | WTH0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
Index bloating issue
Hello, In the last month, I noticed a huge spike in the number of pages indexed on my site, which I think is impacting my SEO quality score. While I've only have about 90 pages on my site map, the number of pages indexed jumped to 446, with about 536 pages being blocked by robots. At first we thought this might be due to duplicate product pages showing up in different categories on my site, but we added something to our robot.txt file to not index those pages. But the number has not gone down. I've tried to consult with our hosting vendor, but no one seems to be concerned or have any idea why there was such a big jump in the last month. Any insights or pointers would be so greatly appreciated, so that I can fix/improve my SEO as quickly as possible! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Saison0 -
Google Indexing - what did I missed??
Hello, all SEOers~ I just renewed my web site about 3 weeks ago, and in order to preserve SEO values as much as possible, I did 301 redirect, XML Sitemap and so on for minimize the possible data losses. But the problem is that about week later from site renewal, my team some how made mistake and removed all 301 redirects. So now my old site URLs are all gone from Google Indexing and my new site is not getting any index from Google. My traffic and rankings are also gone....OMG I checked Google Webmaster Tool, but it didn't say any special message other than Google bot founds increase of 404 error which is obvious. Also I used "fetch as google bot" from webmaster tool to increase chance to index but it seems like not working much. I am re-doing 301 redirect within today, but I am not sure it means anything anymore. Any advise or opinion?? Thanks in advance~!
Technical SEO | | Yunhee.Choi0 -
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0