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.
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
-
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum.
We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index."
No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file.
Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping.
We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter.
It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas?
I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
-
I'm sure you've gone over this and if so feel free to ignore me but did you make sure your sitemap is up to scratch - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/184732?hl=en
You can also look to see if your data is up to par - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
You can always work back from the date it stopped working see if you've done anything that may have caused this (some one changing a tag etc.) lastly there is always the giant list of things to check for Google news - http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/
Best of luck and let us know how you get on.
-
Of course, I should have included that: Fabiusmaximus.com
-
Are you able to share the website that we're talking about?
-
Thanks for the ingenious advice, out of the box thinking. However, we're still in Google News. When we force Google to index a post via Fetch, it shows up in News. Plus the New Publisher page tells you that you're in News.
It's some sort of technical problem. A weird one.
-
My guess is that it's less of a technical constraint and more of a non-match for Google News guidelines. There are several things in there that could trigger the boot, (https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787) such as:
Stick to the news--we mean it! Google News is not a marketing service. We don't want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism. If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content. Otherwise, if we find non-news content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.
Journalistic standards. Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.
News content. Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. We generally do not include how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.
And so on... If you think you're in the clear try going to the Google News specific help center (on the previously linked page) and submit your site for inclusion.
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
-
Removing a site from Google index with no index met tags
Hi there! I wanted to remove a duplicated site from the google index. I've read that you can do this by removing the URL from Google Search console and, although I can't find it in Google Search console, Google keeps on showing the site on SERPs. So I wanted to add a "no index" meta tag to the code of the site however I've only found out how to do this for individual pages, can you do the same for a entire site? How can I do it? Thank you for your help in advance! L
Technical SEO | | Chris_Wright1 -
Site Audit Tools Not Picking Up Content Nor Does Google Cache
Hi Guys, Got a site I am working with on the Wix platform. However site audit tools such as Screaming Frog, Ryte and even Moz's onpage crawler show the pages having no content, despite them having 200 words+. Fetching the site as Google clearly shows the rendered page with content, however when I look at the Google cached pages, they also show just blank pages. I have had issues with nofollow, noindex on here, but it shows the meta tags correct, just 0 content. What would you look to diagnose? I am guessing some rogue JS but why wasn't this picked up on the "fetch as Google".
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Does Google pass link juice a page receives if the URL parameter specifies content and has the Crawl setting in Webmaster Tools set to NO?
The page in question receives a lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | surveygizmo0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0
