Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Homepage was removed from google and got deranked
-
Hello experts
I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back.
It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist.
4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk".
Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk".
At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better. Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page.
After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image.
Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all?
For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results
-
Hi Everett
First of all I am sorry for the late reply, I was vacationing the last 7 days.
Thank you for your reply. I think you might be right about the "sandbox" thing. The page had a good position in the google search results, but then we made a mistake and canonicalized it to a non-existent page for 4 months. It could be that google considers it a "new page", even though they had it indexed for a year.
I appreciate your efforts, and I will wait some time, to see if it improves by itself, otherwise I will have to work some more on improving the contents of the site.
-
Hi Christian,
I don't see any evidence of the site being deindexed now. Here are some things I checked for you, along with a few observations:
-
Nothing in the Robots.txt file, or robots meta tag, or X-robots HTTP header response that would keep these pages from being indexed by Google
-
The rel= canonical tags appear to be functioning properly
-
The home page is indexed and not duplicated by other indexed pages
-
Google has about 86 pages indexd from your domain
-
Hrefl Lang tags appear to be implemented properly
-
There are only about 50 links going into the domain from other sites, and the ones from Moz are the best of what few aren't just random scraper sites (harmless, but annoying).
Sometimes Google ranks a brand higher when it first comes out because it's a chicken or egg situation. How else can they collect data for their machine to chew on unless some traffic is sent to a new site? We used to call this phenomenon "the Google sandbox" a long time ago, but it is essentially (in its effect) the same thing. We do it ourselves with A:B testing and paid advertising. You have to spend some budget to gain enough data to know what's working and what isn't.
I don't think you have a technical SEO problem here. I think you need to continue building a brand and producing useful, rich content. Good luck!
-
-
Hi Ross
Thank you a lot for all the recommendations, I will get those things done and get back on here with the result.
Though currently I have the Yoast SEO plugin, and have generated a sitemap with only the pages we want ranking, which I did already upload to GSC, but I will make sure there is a link in the footer as well.
And also I did a 301 redirect on all these "attachment" pages, but I will change that to a 410.
-
Hi Christian,
Try to update your home page by adding additional content to it or rewriting the existing content on the home page. Do not forget to reindex the home page after your update. In addition, you should install the Rank Math SEO plugin and regenerate the sitemap. Once, you have a new sitemap then you should resubmit the sitemap to GSC. You should only keep the URLs in the sitemap, but no images. If you want to remove some of your pages from the index you should set those pages to 410 Gone instead of 404 status. Also, I do not see that you have a link to your sitemap on your home page. You should add a link to the sitemap into your footer.
Ross
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
-
Google News and Discover down by a lot
Hi,
Technical SEO | | SolenneGINX
Could you help me understand why my website's Google News and Discover Performance dropped suddenly and drastically all of a sudden in November? numbers seem to pick up a little bit again but nowhere close what we used to see before then0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Why does my Google Web Cache Redirects to My Homepage?
Why does my Google Webcache appears in a short period of time and then automatically redirects to my homepage? Is there something wrong with my robots.txt? The only files that I have blocked is below: User-agent: * Disallow: /bin/ Disallow: /common/ Disallow: /css/ Disallow: /download/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /medias/ Disallow: /ClientInfo.aspx Disallow: /*affiliateId* Disallow: /*referral*
Technical SEO | | Francis.Magos0 -
Why google indexed pages are decreasing?
Hi, my website had around 400 pages indexed but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that? will it effect my web page ranking ?
Technical SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below,
Technical SEO | | CommercePunditCan you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
0 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
H1 Tag as Logo on the Homepage.
So I was working on a Genesis theme website where they have the H1 Tag as the Logo on the homepage. I wanted this changed because I always use my H1 tag to include a keyword I want to rank for. I was told by the Genesis Forum Manager that Yoast said the Logo should be the H1 tag on the homepage. (Yoast has a WP SEO Plugin that is very popular) That makes no sense to me, so I was looking for Opinions. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Does Google Bot accept Cookies
I am working with a per page results refinement that stores a cookie on the users computer and then keeps that same per page as the user goes around the site. I was just wondering if that was true for Google bot or Bing bot as well. Will they keep the cookie or would they not be able to accept it. I just want to know as I dont want different urls created if they can keep the cookie. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Gordian0