Google is crawling my website, but won’t index it. I am invisible.

  • My site is 11 years old. I get 1 or 2 visitors a day. I am so totally discouraged and upset.

    In the beginning I did ok, and it was fun, but some years ago I got attacked by a porn hate group and it’s been hard coming back. However 2 years ago I buckled down and tried to fix everything. Got great plugins like Yoast, caching, image minification, learned about speed, updated every single post for SEO, etc.

    And now it’s doing worse than ever. I’ve tried Yoast and XML Sitemaps, Site Kit, Better Health, Lighthouse, etc. Today I decided to try submitting my latest post to Google Console directly to index. I discovered that Google Console has excluded over 2000 pages.

    Some of them make sense, but 600 pages are excluded for a reason that doesn’t make sense: Excluded because of Page with Redirect.

    URL is not on Google
    This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed. It also says it’s not in the Sitemap.

    None of these are being redirected. But there are more posts being excluded every week! Here is one: https://donnabarstow.com/girl-talk-cartoons/throw-out-husband/

    Does anyone know what Page with Redirect means? Is it mobile? What is happening?

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by fallback2.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by fallback2.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • This url https://donnabarstow.com/girl-talk-cartoons/throw-out-husband/ is being redirected to https://donnabarstow.com/throw-out-husband/

    Note that the /girl-talk-cartoons/ category is being stripped out. The response code of the page is: 301 Moved Permanently.

    What are the permalinks settings in the WordPress dashboard >> Settings >> Permalinks? It looks like these may have changed at some point from yoursite.com/%category%/%postname%/ to yoursite.com/%postname%/

    Or is the SEO plugin you are using stripping out the category from the url? (disable to check). Somehow, the site is telling the browser that yoursite.com/girl-talk-cartoons/throw-out-husband/ can now be found at yoursite.com/throw-out-husband/, and that this is a permanent move. Therefore, Google is not indexing yoursite.com/girl-talk-cartoons/throw-out-husband/, but it is indexing yoursite.com/throw-out-husband/ (see for yourself, by entering site:donnabarstow.com/throw-out-husband/ into a Google search). Essentially, if there are 2 or more urls for the same page, then Google decides on which one to index, and labels this the canonical url.

    I’m no SEO guru, but I think the issue is the pages previously having the category in the url, and now not, so Google is deindexing all the old urls that contain the category. If that is the case, and there is at a url indexed for each page using the yoursite.com/%postname%/ permalink, then maybe no attention is required. You can check this to confirm.

    Thread Starter fallback2

    (@fallback2)

    This is SO helpful, thanks! Yes, I did decide to add categories – but will check in settings & Yoast. I want it with category. You’re right, my permalinks didn’t have the category. I just changed it and got a huge warning (AFTERWARDS) from WP that it shouldn’t be done on a live site and all my traffic will be lost.So I changed it back.

    I have 0 traffic now, so I guess it will continue to be 0.

    It looks like ~240 pages are indexed by Google. While your pages are organsied and can be searched by category on this site (e.g. popular cartoons, business cartoons), none appear to use /%category%/ in the url. Each page has meta data added in the page source by the Yoast SEO plugin. I would be cautious about making any url changes without researching first how to ensure that the existing page rank/SEO can be retained (hence the warning from WP), and to justify making that change. Have you tried posting in an SEO forum: https://wpbuffs.com/seo-forums/

    Or try posting in the Yoast SEO support forum: https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/wordpress-seo/#new-post

    Your site is rich with content, so it does seem odd that you are getting no traffic. I think you need an audit of the site to see how it is currently structured (the sitmamp, permalinks setting and Yoast SEO settings will be helpful here), if that has recently changed (e.g. by adding an SEO plugin), what Google is indexing, not-indexing and de-indexing, and the best path forward.

    Thread Starter fallback2

    (@fallback2)

    Thanks for hanging in there, @pidengmor! I did ask on Yoast, thanks. I asked on a couple of Fbk forums, too. Yoast usually replies, so fingers crossed.

    Thanks, too, for saying I have good content. ?? Something to carry me through today.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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