Why is Google not indexing my site?
-
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
-
These two URL's
http://simplycrowngreenbowls.wordpress.com/
http://simplycrowngreenbowls.com/
Should 301 Redirect to
-
Got ya. Sorry for being slow, but what should I make sure is pointed there?
-
Your best bet would be to login to the WP account and have it redirect to your new site. This would be the quickest way to let Google know that the WP site is the old site, plus if you had any links to it the juice would flow to the new one instead of going away.
-
Preferred Landing Page.
-
Ah I see, thank you. I've deleted the wordpress.com site, I started it before the proper site and don't need it so hopefully simplycrowngreenbowls.co.uk will start to replace that?
-
Apparently Google thinks the http://simplycrowngreenbowls.wordpress.com/ site is more relevant. (I see that this is also your site.) Google cached the .wordpress site first, so it might just be holding on to that because there is no overwhelming reason not to.
You have a line in the content of that .wordpress page instructing people to go to simplycrowngreenbowls.co.uk, but you do not actually 301 redirect the page. As Shawn said, you should do that.
If you do a Bing or Yahoo search your site simplycrowngreenbowls.co.uk comes up first, and as I mentioned I can find your site with the site: operator in Google, so I do not think it is a case of your preferred site not being findable. (I also took a look with Screaming Frog and didn't see any glaring errors.)
-
How come I don't see my site if i type in "simply crown green bowls"?
-
I can see your site indexed in Google. When I do site:simplycrowngreenbowls.co.uk in a Google search bar, I see nine pages from your site come up.
-
Thanks Shawn. What do you mean by get everything to point to your PLP?
-
That shouldn't be an issue as long as you have the correct DNS in the settings.
Something I noticed, is this you as well? http://simplycrowngreenbowls.wordpress.com/
If it is, you might want to do a 301 redirect from that to your domain.
Are you parking the US version of the domain? I found http://simplycrowngreenbowls.com/ and it shows GoDaddy.com saying that the domain is parked for free courtesy of GoDaddy.
My guess, and I am by no imagination a server wizard, there is a disconnect with what you want to rank and what Google is finding. I would talk with 1and1 or GoDaddy to see if they can help you get everything to point to your PLP and go from there.
I am all over the place on this reply, but hopefully it helps get you in the right direction.
-
By the way, GoDaddy is the host and 1and1 is registrar. Could that be causing a problem? I spoke to them both today and both said they couldn't see any problems.
-
Hi Shawn,
I don't mind posting the URL, it's http://simplycrowngreenbowls.co.uk
It would be fantastic to know if you see any technical issues.
-
Without knowing the URL it's hard to troubleshoot if there are technical issues with the page/site.
If you don't want to post personal or business stuff here no worries.
Things to try:
-
Screaming Frog - have it crawl your URL to find any issues
-
Do a Google site search to see if they have any pages indexed
-
Use semRush for those URL's and see if any keywords rank
-
Is GoDaddy your host or just the registrar? If they are not your host, contact them. Make sure to provide the exact error from GWT to help troubleshoot
-
Check robots.txt to ensure that isn't blocking.
Those are the few things top of head I would try
-
-
OK, thanks.
Any idea where the problem lies then? The site is about two months old and competing for moderately low competition key words and is just not ranking, even if I type in the brand name!
-
That is correct, if there was an issue it would say partial or something else and then you could click into it to see what Google sees.
-
Hi Shawn,
Thanks for the response. It says completed with a green tick so I presume that's fine?
-
Try to fetch your site as Google in GWT to see what it says. If there are DNS errors, it should give you some indication of where the error is.
Google Support article to do some more research - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2598813
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
-
Why are only PDFs on my client's site being indexed, and not actual pages?
My client has recently built a new site (we did not build this), which is a subdomain of their main site. The new site is: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/uk/en/. (Their main domain is: http://itelligencegroup.com/uk/) This new Addstore site has recently gone live (in the past week or so) and so far, Google appears to have indexed 56 pdf files that are on the site, but it hasn't indexed any of the actual web pages yet. I can't figure out why though. I've checked the robots.txt file for the site which appears to be fine: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/robots.txt. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti0 -
How can I tell Google not to index a portion of a webpage?
I'm working with an ecommerce site that has many product descriptions for various brands that are important to have but are all straight duplicates. I'm looking for some type of tag tht can be implemented to prevent Google from seeing these as duplicates while still allowing the page to rank in the index. I thought I had found it with Googleoff, googleon tag but it appears that this is only used with the google appliance hardware.
Technical SEO | | bradwayland0 -
Google has deindexed 40% of my site because it's having problems crawling it
Hi Last week i got my fifth email saying 'Google can't access your site'. The first one i got in early November. Since then my site has gone from almost 80k pages indexed to less than 45k pages and the number is lowering even though we post daily about 100 new articles (it's a online newspaper). The site i'm talking about is http://www.gazetaexpress.com/ We have to deal with DDoS attacks most of the time, so our server guy has implemented a firewall to protect the site from these attacks. We suspect that it's the firewall that is blocking google bots to crawl and index our site. But then things get more interesting, some parts of the site are being crawled regularly and some others not at all. If the firewall was to stop google bots from crawling the site, why some parts of the site are being crawled with no problems and others aren't? In the screenshot attached to this post you will see how Google Webmasters is reporting these errors. In this link, it says that if 'Error' status happens again you should contact Google Webmaster support because something is preventing Google to fetch the site. I used the Feedback form in Google Webmasters to report this error about two months ago but haven't heard from them. Did i use the wrong form to contact them, if yes how can i reach them and tell about my problem? If you need more details feel free to ask. I will appreciate any help. Thank you in advance C43svbv.png?1
Technical SEO | | Bajram.Kurtishaj1 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Will a drop in indexed pages significantly affect Google rankings?
I am doing some research into why we were bumped from Google's first page into the 3rd, fourth and fifth pages in June of 2010. I always suspected Caffeine, but I just came across some data that indicates a drop in indexed pages from 510 in January of that year to 133 by June. I'm not sure what happened but I believe our blog pages were de-indexed somehow. What I want to know is could that significant drop in indexed pages have had an effect on our rankings at that time? We are back up to over 500 indexed pages, but have not fully recovered our first page positions.
Technical SEO | | rdreich490 -
What pages of my site does Google rank as the most important?
If I type site:youtube.com into Google, are the results listed by what Google considers to be the most important pages of the site? If I change my sitemap should this order change? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0 -
Google caching meta tags from another site?
We have several sites on the same server. On the weekend we relocated some servers, changing IP address. A client has since noticed something freaky with the meta tags. 1. They search for their companyname, and another site from the same server appears in position 1. It is completely unrelated, has never happened before, and the company name is not used in any incoming text links. Eg search for company1 on Google. Company1.com.au appears at position 2, but at position1 is school1.com.au. The words company1 don't appear anywhere on the site. I've analysed all incoming links with a gazillion tools, and can't find any link text of company1, linking to school1. 2. Even more freaky, searching for company1.com.au at Google. The results at Google in position 1 for the last three days has been: Meta Title for school1 (but hovering/clicking actual goes to URL for company1)
Technical SEO | | ozgeekmum
Meta Description for school1
URL for company1.com.au Clicking on the cached copy of result1, it shows a cached version of school1 taken on March 18. Today is 29 March. Logically we are trying to get Google to spider both sites again quickly. We've asked the clients to update their home pages. Resubmitted xml sitemaps. Checked the HTTP status codes - both are happily returning 200s. Different cookies. I found another instance on a forum: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10578/incorrect-meta-information-in-google Any ideas?0 -
Are Google now indexing iFrames?
A client is pulling content through an iFrame, and when searching for a snippet of that exact content the page that is pulling the data is being indexed and not the iFrame page. Seen this before?
Technical SEO | | White.net0