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.
Page disappears from Google search results
-
Hi, I recently encountered a very strange problem.
One of the pages I published in my website ranked very well for a couple of days on top 5, then after a couple of days, the page completely vanished, no matter how direct I search for it, does not appear on the results, I check GSC, everything seems to be normal, but when checking Google analytics, I find it strange that there is no data on the page since it disappeared and it also does not show up on the 'active pages' section no matter how many different computers i keep it open.I have checked to page 9, and used a couple of keyword tools and it appears nowhere!
It didn't have any back links, but it was unique and high quality. I have checked on the page does still exist and it is still readable. Has this ´happened to anyone before?
Any thoughts would be gratefully received.
-
@joelssonmedia said in Page disappears from Google search results:
I've had quite a lot of similar cases like this. The reason it happens is that Google crawls and indexes the pages in many phases. First phase is URL discovery, where it just discovers a new URL via links on your site or sitemap.
Second phase is indexing and first-pass deduplication. If your page has a good quality (in google's eyes) and is not a duplicate to another page on your site, it usually gets indexed. If your page does not pass this phase - it usually appears in "Crawled but not indexed" section.
Third and further phases are connected to further deduplication algorithms, and very few people know exactly what's "under the hood". One of the discoveries that I've had is that if a page does not have sufficient number of incoming links from your site, and Googlebot is not able to discover it from your homepage, it usually won't get indexed. So, my recommendation is:-
check if your page has incoming links from your site and can be discovered from homepage. If not, put a link to your page from your homepage or from one of the first-level pages, and see if it resolves your issue.
-
check if your page is accessible with JavaScript turned off (you can do it in browser settings or with one of the Chrome plugins). In many cases, you may see that the content of the page appears only partially, or may be even completely blank. If yes, speak to you developers to make sure that the page is fully rendered with JS turned off.
-
if nothing works, try to change the top paragraphs of your content and titles/headers and change the URL slightly, while making sure that there are no issues with points (1) and (2). It may happen, that during the crawl, search bot received a server error, in this case you can either wait for the next crawl (I don't know how often Googlebot crawls your website, it usually depends on how high is the Domain Authority of your site), or resubmit the page, as I suggested.
Wishing you luck! These indexing issues are always the trickiest to figure out. If nothing works, feel free to post some more details and we'll try to figure out.
-
-
@joelssonmedia Hi Joe, I will be happy to take a look at it but I would need to see what you're doing, to be honest with you without that I can only guess it could be something like /robots.txt
Robots.txt file URL: www.example.com/robots.txt
User-agent: * Disallow: /
=Blocking all web crawlers from all content
https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxtHope this helps,
Tom
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 Search Console Not Sending Messages
One of our sites received a Manual Penalty for unnatural links by Google. However, we never received a message in Google Search Console or an email about the manual action. The only reason we knew about the penalty is by the obvious drop in rankings, then signing into search console to look for any manual actions, which we found. Since then, we have submitted a disavow file and a reconsideration request. However, once again we did not receive an email or message in search console that shows confirmation of the disavow or that they received the reconsideration request. The disavow file does show up after I upload it, and it says it was successfully uploaded... but no messages or emails. After many hours of investigating the various canonical versions of our website on Search Console, we found out that there were several “owners” of the various canonical versions of our site that had “could not find the email address” as a site owner. We found out that these were previous employees who no longer worked with the company and their email address was deleted. After unverifying these site owners, (all the ones that had “could not find the email address” as the site owner), the notifications, emails and messages in Search Console started to appear. However, the only place they did not appear, is the main canonical version of our site. Of course, the main canonical version of our site (https://www) is the version that we uploaded the disavow and reconsideration request. This is the canonical version of the site that we need to receive these messages to know if our reconsideration request was granted! We’ve just reuploaded the disavow file and reconsideration request to all of the other canonical versions (2 of the 3 received the message about the penalty)…. and we are currently awaiting a response. Has anybody else had problems with not receiving notifications in search console due to deleted email addresses?
Technical SEO | Jul 9, 2018, 10:53 PM | Fiyyazp0 -
Google Search console says 'sitemap is blocked by robots?
Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt." I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this: User-Agent: *
Technical SEO | Jan 31, 2018, 5:25 PM | Extima-Christian
Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?1 -
How to: Sub headings appears in google results
I notice that many sites have sub headings appearing below their google results. http://i.imgur.com/A5JxMKD.png
Technical SEO | Dec 31, 2014, 5:28 AM | kevinbp
See image for example. Q: what are these called? and how do we get them? A5JxMKD.png1 -
Should I nofollow search results pages
I have a customer site where you can search for products they sell url format is: domainname/search/keywords/ keywords being what the user has searched for. This means the number of pages can be limitless as the client has over 7500 products. or should I simply rel canonical the search page or simply no follow it?
Technical SEO | Nov 25, 2012, 7:09 AM | spiralsites0 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | Oct 16, 2012, 1:43 PM | sparts1 -
How to handle (internal) search result pages?
Hi Mozers, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE. I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked. How would you handle this?
Technical SEO | Jul 14, 2014, 8:20 AM | Qon0 -
Dynamically-generated .PDF files, instead of normal pages, indexed by and ranking in Google
Hi, I come across a tough problem. I am working on an online-store website which contains the functionlaity of viewing products details in .PDF format (by the way, the website is built on Joomla CMS), now when I search my site's name in Google, the SERP simply displays my .PDF files in the first couple positions (shown in normal .PDF files format: [PDF]...)and I cannot find the normal pages there on SERP #1 unless I search the full site domain in Google. I really don't want this! Would you please tell me how to figure the problem out and solve it. I can actually remove the corresponding component (Virtuemart) that are in charge of generating the .PDF files. Now I am trying to redirect all the .PDF pages ranking in Google to a 404 page and remove the functionality, I plan to regenerate a sitemap of my site and submit it to Google, will it be working for me? I really appreciate that if you could help solve this problem. Thanks very much. Sincerely SEOmoz Pro Member
Technical SEO | Apr 1, 2013, 7:15 PM | fugu0 -
How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?
I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result. See attached for an example. How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png
Technical SEO | Mar 6, 2011, 6:07 AM | Carlito-2569610