I think that's a great answer from Chris - invest in some analysis. Figure out what you need rather than go with X, Y or Z. Base the spend on your requirements and defining those requirements if needs be. Hope that helps!

Yep - it's back. Looks like resolving the canonical issue fixed it. Seems it was a usual suspect after all.

Yep - bit of a weird one but in the end looks like the canonicals were the issue. Thanks for taking a look though man - super appreciated.

Hey Bernadette - thanks for the feedback. Site is back in the index now, looks like the canonicals were the culprit but the owners are keen for no future issues so I will dig in and take a look at these points. Cheers!

Hey folks

24 hours after we identified and fixed the canonical issue the site is now indexed again so it does look like it was indeed a canonical conundrum. Both the HTTP and HTTPS sites were claiming to be the canonical version so in some respects creating a conflict. We removed this conflict and it is now indexed.

Thanks for the extra eyes folks - appreciated and if anyone ever needs another pair of eyes to look a problem give me a shout.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Krzysztof

Yeah, the page has little textual content but... neither does the amazon homepage. Ultimately the page is a jump in point for all the products and the content suits that. Certainly, I could understand Google not liking the page but would that not result in a reduced rank rather than a complete removal like this?

On the dodgy links front they have never done anything on that front - so anything there would be surprising (or just incidental cruft that is out there on scraper sites and the like).

Super odd.

Yep - super odd. 15 years or so in this game and never seen anything quite like this. Transient drops but usually it boiled down to some simple technical error or more often user error cough no index / robots.txt cough

Hey - the real issue here is the page is just not indexed. It's not there. Not that another page is a more suitable or preferential result. Ultimately that was the best page for a user to jump in at... The page is not even returned in a brand search so... can't see how any other page could be more suitable for that kind of search.

Hey folks

Hoping to get some more eyes on a specific problem I am seeing with a clients site.

Site: http:www.ukjuicers.com 

We have checked everything we can think of and the usual suspects here are not present:

• Canonical URL is in place
• Site is shown as indexed in search console
• No Crawl, DNS, Connectivity or server errors
• No robots.txt blocking - verified in search console
• No robots meta tags or directives
• Fetch as Google works
• Fetch & render works
• site command returns all other pages
• info command does not return the homepage
• homepage is cached and cache has been updated since this issue started: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ukjuicers.com
• homepage is indexed in yahoo and Bing
• all variations redirect to the www.ukjuicers.com domain (.co.uk, .com, www, sans www etc)

The only issue I found after some extensive digging was some issues with the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site both being available and both specifying the canonical version as themselves. So, http site used canonicals with http and https site used canonicals with https. So, a conflict there with the canonical exacerbating the problem it is there to solve.

The HTTPS site is not indexed though and we have set this up in webmaster tools and now the web developer has set redirects to ensure all versions even the https now 301 redirect to the http://www.ukjuicers.com page so these canonical issues have been ironed out.

But... it's still not indexing the homepage.

The practical implications of this are quite scary - the site used to be somewhere between 1st and 4th for keywords like 'juicers', 'juicer' etc. Now they are bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 with an internal page. They were jostling with the big boys (amazon, argos, john lewis etc) but now they are right at the bottom of the second page.

It's a strange one - i have seen all manor of technical problems over the years but this one seems to defy sensible explanation. The next step is to do a full technical SEO audit of the site but I am always of the opinion that with many eyes all bugs are shallow so if anyone has any input or experience with odd indexation problems like this would love to get your input.

Cheers
Marcus

Nope. No need for images. They just know about the content and link to it. The cached HTML shows they store a copy (or cache) of the HTML though. I could be wrong about the images but that would exponentially increase their storage needs so it seems unlikely.

Hey Archie

Google indexes everything. Images. Alt text for images. Images and their alt text. If you take a look at the cached version of a page you can see all HTML content indexed. You can see the cached version of a page by prefixing the URL with info: in a google search (or in the address bar in Chrome).

info:www.example.co.uk

I suspect that is not what you are asking though and rather you want to know whether Google uses the alt text when indexing and ranking a page. Again, I would answer that Google uses (or at least tries to use) everything. They will review the context (the page), the name of the image, the alt text and anything else that may lend context (inbound links, anchors, linking pages etc).

Googles Image Publishing Guidelines page is a good read:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en

Key takeaways from that page being:

• image name
• alt text
• on page context
• linking page context

Which of course is not to say that all of these attributes are used in all cases. I would suspect they are examined but given the general lack of useful anchors and well named images they are used when possible.

Which of course opens up a great big opportunity for those where images are a useful source of inbound traffic and competitors are using lazy CMS image names like image_z343wd.jpg and default "product image" or blank anchors.

Always difficult to answer a question without context as so many moving parts but certainly hope that helps.

Take care

Marcus

Hey

I agree with Michael in that largely, directories are dead. However, the evolution of directories and sites that add value to the listings are alive and kicking. Yelp (not so much in the UK) is one but TripAdvisor is really a a directory of sorts and that provides boatloads of additional value.

In the UK we have several directory types that are alive and well:

• TripAdvisor
• Trade Directories - plumbers, electricians etc
• Care Homes

My father is actually working on a directory at the moment - it is a list of all pubs in the UK that are dog friendly. It will detail everything for dogs, walks in the area etc etc. It will allow for

So in some respects it is the wrong question - Google does not punish wholes categories of sites. Rather they demote sites that have no real value and don't add anything (or that are set up to help other sites rank and for no other reason).

To make this work you have to ideally have a USP and provide a level of value that makes it desirable for folks to look at your site rather than the sites of the businesses in this category and to build up enough traffic so the business owners want to pay to be listed and get a preferential listing etc.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Rosemary

This is against the guidelines for local businesses so could be problematic

Ref: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

"If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at an address that is different from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours."

If we take a look at the schema page for a local business we can see that this markup is ideally for a physical business

ref: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness

"A particular physical business or branch of an organization. Examples of LocalBusiness include a restaurant, a particular branch of a restaurant chain, a branch of a bank, a medical practice, a club, a bowling alley, etc."

So - to go back to your question I am not sure it is spam as such but it is incorrect in how you are using the mark up. This is not a 'physical business or branch of an organisation' and as such the schema markup is used incorrectly. I would remove the schema markup in this instance.

However - there is no reason why you would not have a location pages for a service area - none at all and you can do these pages well and they can provide real value to a customer in the targeted location. They won't rank in the local pack but they may well rank in the organic results below (or be used for paid traffic)

I wrote about location landing pages in some depth here:
http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Hope that helps clear things up for you.

Cheers
Marcus