Weird indexing problem - Can it be solved?
-
Hi
Been building and optimising sites for 15 years and this is one of the hardest problems I ever came across. So any help would be very much appreciated. Here we go:
For some mysterious reason this URL http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ has been indexed as http://weekend.visitsweden.com even if we tried all we can to correct it. The problem is that since the latter points to the first URL with a 301 it refuses to get any page rank. Also it does not get visible in Google at all.
Just a recap of what we have tried so far:
- Add site to webmaster tools
- Add proper sitemap.xml
- Add 301 redirect to the correct URL
An easy way to locate the problem is to search for the main content of the site. As you can see it returns the wrong URL and the correct URL does not even get listed.
Again, any help is very much appreciated.
Kind regards
Fredrik
-
Hi there,
This is definitely a crazy problem! It looks like you've done what you should, but Google's ignoring you.
Here's a theory, though: I don't think that Google loves the idea of there being no "home" page; it probably only expects domain.com/home or domain.com/default.asp or domain.com/index.html as alternatives to domain.com, so seeing http://weekend.visitsweden.com/ redirect to http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ could be confusing it.
Is there a reason why you don't want http://weekend.visitsweden.com/ to be the homepage?
Kristina
-
That's very strange. Do you have anything conflicting in your htaccess file and redirect plugin (if you're using one)? Does weekend.visitsweden.com (without the /no/) reside on the same servers and is it using conflicting canonical or redirect tags?
weekend.visitsweden.com/ IS getting indexed. I did a search for "Slottet er et av Skånes eldsteog mest bemerkelsesverdige slottmed anertilbake til 1200-tallet" and weekend.visitsweden.com/ was the #2 result. My tools tell me the page has 0 links though. Thought that was odd too.
Have you tried asking Google to specifically deindex weekend.visitsweden.com?
That's all I can think of.
-
And does it do the same thing if you remove the 301 from .com/ to .com/no/ and leave it without a redirect for a while?
-
Forget to mention, this has been discussed before in this thread:
http://moz.com/community/q/visitsweden-indexing-errorUnfortunately those suggestions did not seem to solve the issue.
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
-
Mass Removal Request from Google Index
Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website. When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts. This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012. So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove. Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404? I believe this is very wrong. As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?0 -
Keyword rich internal linking - problem?
Had an interesting situation today.. We write daily news articles on our site. In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links. For example.. 'Today McDonald's have announced that they are purchasing more blue widgets in order to increase their opportunity to appeal to a larger market.' So in that sentence you can see one outbound link and one inbound to blue widgets on our site. I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site.. I actually asked them why and this was their response. 'We're concerned because of the number of keyword-rich internal links in the article, and are worried that being included alongside them might be misinterpreted by Google as an artificial link.' Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?.. but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Can cookies harm your webiste?
Hi mozzers, I am doing an seo audit and one of the components of crawlability in the audit template I have is: "Disable Cookies/Make Googlebot user agent", I am not quite sure why cookies could harm your SEO? Can someone explain me what problems can arise because of cookies? Does it prevent bots to crawl your website like .js on your nav? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Links from non-indexed pages
Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed. These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxweb0 -
Does anyone have a clue about my search problem?
After three years of destruction, my site still has a problem - or maybe more than one. OK, I understand I had - and probably still have - a Panda problem. The question is - does anyone know how to fix it, without destroying eveything? If I had money, I'd gladly give it up to fix this, but all I have is me, a small dedicated promotions team, 120,000+ visitors per month and the ability to write, edit and proofread. This is not an easy problem to fix. After completing more than 100 projects, I still haven't got it right, in fact, what I've done over the past 2 months has only made things worse - and I never thought I could do that. Everything has been measured, so as not to destroy our remaining ability to generate income, because without that, its the end of the line. If you can help me fix this, I will do anything for you in return - as long as it is legal, ethical and won't destroy my reputation or hurt others. Unless you are a master jedi guru, and I hope you are, this will NOT be easy, but it will prove that you really are a master, jedi, guru and time lord, and I will tell the world and generate leads for you. I've been doing website and SEO stuff since 1996 and I've always been able to solve problems and fix anything I needed to work on. This has me beaten. So my question is: is there anyone here willing to take a shot at helping me fix this, without the usual response of "change domains" "Delete everything and start over" or "you're screwed" Of course, it is possible that there is a different problem, nothing to do with algorithms, a hard-coded bias or some penalizing setting, that I don't know about, a single needle in a haystack. This problem results in a few visible things. 1. Some pages are buried in supplemental results 2. Search bots pick up new stories within minutes, but they show up in search results many hours later Here is the site: http://shar.es/EGaAC On request, I can provide a list of all the things we've done or tried. (actually I have to finish writing it) Some Notes: There is no manual spam penalty. All outgoing links are nofollow, and have been for 2 years. We never paid for incoming links. We did sell text advertising links 3-4 years ago, using text-link-ads.com, but removed them all 2 1/2 years ago. We did receive payment for some stories, 3-4 years ago, but all have been removed. One more thing. I don't write much - I'm a better editor than a writer, but I wrote a story that had 1 million readers. the massive percentage of 0.0016% came from you-know-who. Yes, 16 visitors. And this was an exclusive, unique story. And there was a similar story, with half a million readers. same result. Seems like there might be a problem!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | loopyal0 -
Keyword Phrases - Can You Break Them Up?
Can you break up a search query across a sentence and have Google still recognize which query you are targeting? Let's say I'm trying to rank a page for the phrase "best haircuts calgary". Is Google's algorithm advanced enough to look at page title "Best Haircuts - Where To Get Them In Calgary" and know it's targeting the query "best haircuts calgary"? If it can't do this right now, I could see it advancing to this at some point in the future, which would then change the game quite a bit in terms of how creative you can get creating pages for queries.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Ajax Content Indexed
I used the following guide to implement the endless scroll https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started crawlers and correctly reads all URLs the command "site:" show me all indexed Url with #!key=value I want it to be indexed only the first URL, for the other Urls I would be scanned but not indexed like if there were the robots meta tag "noindex, follow" how I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wwmind1 -
My Job Site is having Indexing Issues
I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0