Possible problem with new site (GWT no queries/very low index vs. submitted)
-
Hi everyone,
I recently launched a new website for a small business loan company in the Dallas area. The site has been live for roughly a month and a half. I submitted everything to GWT as usual, including my sitemap. I am not sure what's going on with the site, as there is no activity from GWT in the impressions or queries. The submit vs. index is 24/3 (and hasn't moved). Also the queries graph on the overview stops at 3/18/2015... On another note, when I go to Crawl > Sitemaps, it shows that there were pages indexed during the month of march and then on April 3 it drops from 17 to 2 and never increases.
Google says there are no errors or issues found, but I feel like there's something wrong. When I do site:, my URLs do pop up which makes me believe there's just a problem with my GWT. With that being said, I'm not happy THINKING there's something wrong. I need to actually know what the problem is.
The only thing I can think of that I have done is purchase SSL for the site, but when I search what pages are indexed using www. it shows all the HTTPS URLS, so that would tell me that the site is getting indexed without a problem?
Does anyone have a clue as to what might be happening? I will attach some screen shots so that you can get a better idea...
-
Thanks Rick, you just answered my question on how long it will take to update!
-
Hi James, great question!
Ryan you hit that on the nail lol
I'm having this same issue currently! I have ssl on all 3 domains and realise I was adding the http version and not the https version. I have since updated it now, how long did you take for you to receive the updated information after you made the adjustments?
-
Just like you said: add https version (with and without www) to gwt, change the wp main url, use the ssl redirect plugin or manage the redirect via htaccess and finally wait a few days to see the changes.
-
Good work James! And nice outline of your steps involved. This will be an asset for people experiencing similar issues I'm sure. Cheers!
-
Sorry to keep responding to my own problem but I think I just fixed the issue... I believe the entire problem was stemming from the fact that my HTTPS was setup incorrectly.
1. I added the HTTPS version of my site to GWT.
2. I changed my urls in WordPress to reflect HTTPS not http.
3. This created a problem with my redirection. Typing in a naked URL was no longer redirecting to https:// or www.
4. I changed my .htaccess file to force HTTPS.
Now I believe the entire problem is fixed. I just have to wait and see how my tools reflect the changes and hopefully I did everything correctly.
-
UPDATE:
Ooohkay, got an update. So I mentioned that I purchased SSL for the site. I just added the https://www. version to GWT and now it's giving me more updated information. I didn't realize that the https version was different. Now my question though is how is this affecting the rest of my website? Does anyone have experience managing https vs http pages?
Also, does Moz automatically track all versions of the domain or do I need to create a new campaign with the HTTPS version?
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
-
What has a better chance of ranking alongside my main site for my company name, a subdomain or new domain?
Hi Moz, Do search engines really treat subdomains as separate domains in this regard? Or are we more likely to get more real estate on the first page with a new domain? Our goal is to have our main site and this new subdomain or domain ranking in positions 1 and 2 for our company name. This is going to be a careers site/portal. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
How can I see all the pages google has indexed for my site?
Hi mozers, In WMT google says total indexed pages = 5080. If I do a site:domain.com commard it says 6080 results. But I've only got 2000 pages in my site that should be indexed. So I would like to see all the pages they have indexed so I can consider noindexing them or 404ing them. Many thanks, Julian.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julianhearn0 -
Does Google Index an Alert Div w/Delayed Hide
We have a div at the top of a client's the page that displays an alert to the user. After 30 seconds it is rendered hidden. Does Google index this? Does Google take this into account when it ranks the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WEOMedia0 -
Sites with dynamic content - GWT redirects and deletions
We have a site that has extremely dynamic content. Every day they publish around 15 news flashes, each of which is setup as a distinct page with around 500 words. File structure is bluewidget.com/news/long-news-article-name. No timestamp in URL. After a year, that's a lot of news flashes. The database was getting inefficient (it's managed by a ColdFusion CMS) so we started automatically physically deleting news flashes from the database, which sped things up. The problem is that Google Webmaster Tools is detecting the freshly deleted pages and reporting large numbers of 404 pages. There are so many 404s that it's hard to see the non-news 404s, and I understand it would be a negative quality indicator to Google having that many missing pages. We were toying with setting up redirects, but the volume of redirects would be so large that it would slow the site down again to load a large htaccess file for each page. Because there isn't a datestamp in the URL we couldn't create a mask in the htaccess file automatically redirecting all bluewidget.com/news/yymm* to bluewidget.com/news These long tail pages do send traffic, but for speed we only want to keep the last month of news flashes at the most. What would you do to avoid Google thinking its a poorly maintained site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozgeekmum0 -
XML Sitemap Index Percentage (Large Sites)
Hi all I'm wanting to find out from those who have experience dealing with large sites (10s/100s of millions of pages). What's a typical (or highest) percentage of indexed pages vs. submitted pages you've seen? This information can be found in webmaster tools where Google shows you the pages submitted & indexed for each of your sitemap. I'm trying to figure out whether, The average index % out there There is a ceiling (i.e. will never reach 100%) It's possible to improve the indexing percentage further Just to give you some background, sitemap index files (according to schema.org) have been implemented to improve crawl efficiency and I'm wanting to find out other ways to improve this further. I've been thinking about looking at the URL parameters to exclude as there are hundreds (e-commerce site) to help Google improve crawl efficiency and utilise the daily crawl quote more effectively to discover pages that have not been discovered yet. However, I'm not sure yet whether this is the best path to take or I'm just flogging a dead horse if there is such a ceiling or if I'm already at the average ballpark for large sites. Any suggestions/insights would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danng0 -
Duplicate Content/ Indexing Question
I have a real estate Wordpress site that uses an IDX provider to add real estate listings to my site. A new page is created as a new property comes to market and then the page is deleted when the property is sold. I like the functionality of the service but it creates a significant amount of 404's and I'm also concerned about duplicate content because anyone else using the same service here in Las Vegas will have 1000's of the exact same property pages that I do. Any thoughts on this and is there a way that I can have the search engines only index the core 20 pages of my site and ignore future property pages? Your advice is greatly appreciated. See link for example http://www.mylvcondosales.com/mandarin-las-vegas/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyLasVegas0 -
Will an RSS feed help new product get indexed? How to create one for product?
Hi I've read that creating an RSS feed for one of our ecommerce sites will help the products get indexed faster. Currently it takes google 4-5 days to index our new products, we want to speed that up. Will an RSS feed of the new products we have help? How do you create an RSS feed for this? Our blog gets indexed within minutes, but our main website, 4 days. Help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
New Domain Name For Site That Ranks Highly on Key Terms
Here's my problem -- which is actually a pretty good problem to have. My client is a speciality service provider in an extremely competitive field. It charges 3 to 5 times what others do for providing a super-premium level of service. It doesn't have -- nor does it want -- many customers. I can't go into details, but let's just say the business model is a bit like the charity or premium newsletter publishing model. It is extremely hard to recruit new members -- but once recruited, members tend to stay for a long time at high price points. Personal referral is key. As result of my efforts over the last 90 days, the client's SEO results have skyrocketed. After a couple of false starts, we have focussed on key terms the target demographic is likely to search, rather than the generic terms others in the industry use. We have also had great success with a social media strategy -- since the few people likely to be interested in paying such high prices know like-minded folks. For the first time, my client is getting "walk in" prospects. They are delighted! But they are not really walk-ins. They have already found the site -- either through SERPs or Facebook or Twitter. Now we need to get to the next level. Here's the problem: the client's domain name sucks. It is short, but combines an acronym with one of the words in its long-version name. It uses the British spelling version of the long name fragment, even though most Canadians now use American spelling. And it is a .ca, rather than a dot.com So I think we have to bite the bullet and change to the long, dot com version of the name, which is available and has the additional benefit of having embedded within it a key search term. I am basically an editorial/content guy and not a tech guy. The IT guys at my firm are strongly encouraging me to make the change...in very "colorful" language. We can certainly do 301 redirects at the page level. But I would like some additional validation before proceeding. My questions are: how much link juice might we lose? I've seen the figure of 10% bandied around. Is it accurate? might we see a temporary dip in results? If so, how long would it last? what questions did I forget to ask? What additional info do you need to offer informed advice ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielFreedman0