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.
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
-
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 -
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
Technical SEO | | SS.Digital0 -
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 -
How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?
We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website. My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain. Currently our URL structure is... domain.com/products/product-name.html domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
How does Google find /feed/ at the end of all pages on my site?
Hi! In Google Webmaster Tools I find *.../feed/ as a 404 page in crawl errors. The problem is that none of these pages exist and they have no inbound links (except the start page). FYI, it´s a wordpress site. Example: www.mysite.com/subpage1/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage2/feed/ www.mysite.com/subpage3/feed/ etc Does Google search for /feed/ by default or why do I keep getting these 404´s every day?
Technical SEO | | Vivamedia0 -
How long will Google take to stop crawling an old URL once it has been 301 redirected
I need to do a clean-up old urls that have been redirected in sitemap and was wondering about this.
Technical SEO | | Ant-8080 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0