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 crawl drop
the crawl request of my company site: https://www.dhgate.com/ has dropped nearly over 95%, from daily 6463599 requests to 476493 requests at 12:00am on 9th, Oct (GMT+8). This dramatic dropping trend not only showed in our GSC crawl stats report but also our company's own log report. We have no idea what’s going on. We want to know whether there is an update of google about crawlling, or is this the issue of our own site? If something is wrong with our site, in what aspects would you recommend us to check, analyze and accordingly optimize?
Technical SEO | | DHgate_20140 -
How to remove 302 redirects in Magento?
We're seeing a couple of temporary redirects. One for the http pointing to https. Another for /checkout pointing to/checkout/cart. We don't have an internal dev so not sure how to remove these. Would anyone know? I've set up the 301s but they're not overriding and I'm still seeing the issues in the crawl. Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | LASClients0 -
Website homepage temporarily getting removed from google index
hi, website: www.snackmagic.com The home page goes out of google index for some hours and then comes back. We are not sure why our home page is getting de-indexed temporarily. This doesn't happen with other pages on our website. This has been happening intermittently in the gap of 2-3 days. Any inputs will be very useful for us to debug this issue Thanks
Technical SEO | | manikbystadium0 -
Homepage no longer showing in Google.co.uk
Hi guys, Has anyone ever had this before? My clients website was appearing 4 & 5 in Google.co.uk for the keyword 'voltage optimisation'. Since moving up in the rankings after furiously optimising the website we have now gotten to position 3 in Google.co.uk but the homepage ranking has disappeared and now is just displaying our 'what is voltage optimisation' page. I'm guessing Google feels that this page is more useful to someone searching 'voltage optimisation' but my client wants answers?! It's almost like Google have said, "if you want to take position 3 were only going to list one of your pages" because everytime we drop back down to position 4 our homepage appears position 5.
Technical SEO | | TWSI0 -
No google traffic for this site? Help?
Hi We have not done this web site http://climateacs.co.uk but have now picked it up and its getting no traffic what so ever from google do you think its been blacklisted? I have added it to my webmaster tools and there are no manual actions on it and most of the backlinks on google webmaster tools are from yell.com. However when I run it on opensiteexplorer I am seeing some chinese type links?? It is not really showing many search queries at all when you view them in webmaster tools under United Kingdom. I was going to start citation building for the address to help support the google places entry but just wanted to see what other peoples opinion was really on this site? Thanks Tracy
Technical SEO | | dashesndots0 -
Google Schema Code for Organisation
I've created the Google Schema code for an organisation. Should this go in the template HTML so it would be shown on all pages or just on the home page?
Technical SEO | | CharlBritton0 -
Google Not Indexed WWW name
Here is my domain - http://www.plugnbuy.com . When i see through "site" google not showing with WWW index but the same when i do without WWW.. it is showing in search. So yesturday i changed the setting from GWM to preferred domain as a WWW appear but today still not showing anything... Please help..
Technical SEO | | mamuti0 -
Does Google Read Javascript?
I would like to include a list of links in a select type box which I would like google to follow. In order to do this, I will be styling it with the help of javascript, and in turn change the select box into a ul and the options into li's. The li's would each contain a link, but if javascript is disabled it will fallback to a normal css styled select box. My question is would google follow the links made by the javascript? Or would the bot just recognize the select box as a select box and not links. Thanks for any help!
Technical SEO | | BrianJenkins0