No descripton on Google/Yahoo/Bing, updated robots.txt - what is the turnaround time or next step for visible results?
-
Hello,
New to the MOZ community and thrilled to be learning alongside all of you! One of our clients' sites is currently showing a 'blocked' meta description due to an old robots.txt file (eg: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt)
We have updated the site's robots.txt to allow all bots. The meta tag has also been updated in WordPress (via the SEO Yoast plugin)
See image here of Google listing and site URL: http://imgur.com/46wajJw
I have also ensured that the most recent robots.txt has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools.
When can we expect these results to update? Is there a step I may have overlooked?
Thank you,
Adam -
Great, the good news is following submission of a sitemap via Webmaster Tools, things appear to be remedied on Google! It does seem, however, that the issue still persists on Bing/Yahoo.
Some of the 404's are links from an old site that weren't carried over following my redesign; so that will be handled shortly as well.
I've submitted the sitemap via Bing Webmaster Tools, as such I presume it's a similar matter of simply 'waiting on Bing'?
Many thanks for your valuable insight!
-
Hi There
It seems like there are some other issues tangled up in this.
- First off it looks like some non-www URLs indexed in Google are 301 redirecting to www but then 404'ing. It's good they redirect to www, but they should end up on active pages.
- The NON-www homepage is the one showing the robots.txt message. This should hopefully resolve in a week or two when Google re-crawled the NON-www URL, sees the 301 - the actual solution is getting the non-www URL out of the index, and having them rank the www homepage instead. The www homepage description shows up just fine.
- You may want to register the non-www version of the domain in webmaster tools, and make sure to clean up any errors that pop up there as well.
-
I just got this figured out, let's try dropping this into Google!
-
The 404 error could be around a common error experienced with Yoast sitemaps: http://kb.yoast.com/article/77-my-sitemap-index-is-giving-a-404-error-what-should-i-do
1st step is to try and reset the permalink structure, it could resolve the 404 error you're seeing. You definitely want to resolve your sitemap 404 error to submit a crawlable sitemap to Google.
-
Thanks! It would seem that the Sitemap URL http://www.altaspartners.com/sitemap_index.xml brings up a 404 page, so I'm a bit confused with that step - but otherwise it appears to be very clear!
-
In WordPress, go to the Yoast plugin and locate the sitemap URL / settings. Plug the sitemap URL into your browser and make sure that it renders properly.
Once you have that exact URL, drop it into Google Webmaster Tools and let it process. Google will let you know if they found any errors that need correcting. Once submitted, you just need to wait for Google to update its index and reflect your site's meta description.
Yoast has a great blog that goes in depth about its sitemap features: https://yoast.com/xml-sitemap-in-the-wordpress-seo-plugin/
-
Sounds great Ray, how would I go about checking these URLs for the Yoast siteap?
-
Yoast sets up a pretty efficient sitemap. Make sure the sitemap URL settings are correct, load it up in the browser to confirm, and submit your sitemap through GWT - that will help get a new crawl of the site and hopefully an update to their index so your meta descriptions begins to show in the SERPs.
-
Hi Ray,
With fetch as Googlebot, I see a redirection for the non-www, and a correct fetch for the www.Using SEO Yoast, it would seem the sitemap link leads to a 404?
-
Ha, that's exactly what I did.
I'm not showing any restrictions in your robots.txt file and the meta tag is assigned appropriately.
Have you tried to fetch the site with the Webmaster Tools 'fetch as googlebot' tool? If there is an issue, it should be apparent there. Doing this may also help get your page re-crawled more quickly and the index updated.
If everything is as it should be and you're only waiting on a re-index, that usually takes no longer than two weeks (for very infrequently indexed websites). Fetching with the Google bot may speed things up and getting an external link on a higher trafficked page could help as well.
Have you tried resubmitting a sitemap through GWT as well? That could be another trick to getting the page re-crawled more quickly.
-
Hello Ray,
Specifically, the firm name, which is spelled a-l-t-a-s p-a-r-t-n-e-r-s (it is easy to confuse with "Atlas Partners" which is another company altogether
-
What was the exact search term you used to bring up those SERPs?
When i search 'atlastpartners' and 'atlastpartners.com' it brings up your site with a meta description.
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
-
Should I "no-index" two exact pages on Google results?
Hello everyone, I recently started a new wordpress website and created a static homepage. I noticed that on Google search results, there are two different URLs landing on same content page. I've attached an image to explain what I saw. Should I "no-index" the page url? Google url.JPG In this picture, the first result is the homepage and I try to rank for that page. The last result is landing on same content with different URL. So, should I no-index last result as shown in image?
Technical SEO | | amanda59640 -
How to do A/B testing without creating two separate url like google analytic experiment?
Hello Experts, I want to do A/B testing for my page. In google analytic experiment we have to create two pages 1) Original Page 2) Variant 1 but I don't want to go in this method that is I donot want to create two pages is it possible only via one page but two different events or something else ? If yes then which is the best tool? Thanks! Wrigths!
Technical SEO | | wright3350 -
Do I have a robots.txt problem?
I have the little yellow exclamation point under my robots.txt fetch as you can see here- http://imgur.com/wuWdtvO This version shows no errors or warnings- http://imgur.com/uqbmbug Under the tester I can currently see the latest version. This site hasn't changed URLs recently, and we haven't made any changes to the robots.txt file for two years. This problem just started in the last month. Should I worry?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Any one worked on a sites.google.com/ website ?
Hi I have a client that has a sites.google.com/ website, Has anyone ever used one ? or had to do SEO on one ? Any help would be very much appreciated Thanks
Technical SEO | | tempowebdesign0 -
Google Has Indexed Most of My Site, why won't Bing?
We've got 600K+ pages indexed by Google and have submitted our same sitemap.xml's to Bing, but have only seen 100-200 pages get indexed by Bing. Is this fairly typical? Is there anything further we can do to increase indexation on Bing?
Technical SEO | | jamesti0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
Google / Bing Product Feeds - Optimization - Taxonomies
Can anyone provide insightful optimization tips for GOOGLE and BING product feeds? How important is it to use the respective SE' taxonomies? Any other effective tactics apart from data stufffing?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610 -
New website branding, differences between http://www and http://
Hey Mozers! We will be creating another brand pretty soon with some pretty cool interactive features and before we start development of the site I was wondering if there are any pros/cons to branding the site sans the www. For example http://example123.com and http://www.example123.com. I would much prefer to brand it has http://example123.com but I just wanted to check first to see if that would have any negative SEO ramifications. It seems that it might just be a preference as I looked at Facebook and Twitter and they both do it differently, same with Groupon and LivingSocial. Looking forward to hearing from you guys!
Technical SEO | | Riggz1