Website not showing on Google

  • Hello, I really need some honest assistance if someone can assist me please…

    I have noticed for over a year now that I do not show up on Google and my stats have slowly dwindled. I used to show on page 1 (with my website url) and if not page 1 then no more than page 3 for every post I’d upload.

    I now notice that only my social media urls show up on google and my website urls are often nowhere to be found:(

    In August last year my GWT advised this: Server Connectivity: Request timed out or site is blocking Google. And I also noticed two URL sites were in GWT whereas I only ever used to have 1. Then when I contacted my host he said that it was nothing to do with his server (although he upgraded his server somewhere around that time I think) and that it was my posts and page speed that were of concern and that I needed to delete one of the site urls from GWT. So I took his feedback on board but absolutely nothing has changed since, in fact, it has gotten worse.

    I also had A LOT of 404 errors at the time which I think was due to his server upgrade/move.

    There have been loads of issues that I can think of – one being when my host upgraded either his server or my wordpress, he disabled my All in One SEO plugin… I personally loved that plugin and thought it ran really well so I asked why it was disabled and he stated that he didn’t know why but that he liked Yoast better and then he installed and set up Yoast in its place. I only noticed about 2-3 weeks ago that in the Taxonomies section that the Format meta robots was ticked to noindex, also that the Date Archives was ticked to noindex and my Sitewide meta settings was ticked to noindex subpages of my archives.

    Now I also see in my GWT URL parameters that the sample of recently crawled URLs are coming back with the default permalink structure…where as mine was changed to Month and Name ages ago (in the beginning of my website in 2009/2010) – could this be why my recent website urls aren’t crawled? It has been crawling the default urls instead?

    I also noticed that when I do site:domainname.com/ it registered on google but it also asks at the top if I own this domain and to get it indexed on google. When I put a space inbetween for instance site: domainname.com/ it comes up with all of my social media urls only – as like what google is only showing when I search specific topics I’ve posted about.

    Could I need the .htaccess file in the Yoast plugin updated/tweaked? I also noticed the other day that some of my coding references an old theme that I used to use before I upgraded themes – could this be the missing link? I really have no idea and it’s really disheartening:( Can anyone assist please?

    Thank you.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Curious. What’s the site name?

    I agree that the issue is quite interesting. Did you create a Sitemap (using a plugin/manually) for Google and submit it via GWT? That should help Google Index your site properly.

    Also have a look at robots.txt to see if there are explicit instructions for Bots to keep away.

    Thread Starter VickyTFC

    (@vickytfc)

    Hello,

    There is no robots.txt file in GWT and it says:

    robots.txt not found (404)
    It seems like you don’t have a robots.txt file. In such cases we assume that there are no restrictions and crawl all content on your site.

    And then this when I click into ‘See live robots.txt’:

    The requested URL /index.php was not found on this server.

    As for the Sitemap – I thought it was this back last year and so I uploaded the one that Yoast generated to GWT then. I also did this on the 26th of March which was processed on the 8th of April. I just downloaded another one from the Yoast plugin and it has the following:

    This XML Sitemap Index file contains 7 sitemaps.

    Sitemap Last Modified
    https://domainname.com/site/post-sitemap1.xml 2013-11-19 02:00
    https://domainname.com/site/post-sitemap2.xml 2015-04-07 09:56
    https://domainname.com/site/page-sitemap.xml 2015-03-09 10:12
    https://domainname.com/site/category-sitemap.xml 2015-04-07 09:56
    https://domainname.com/site/post_tag-sitemap.xml 2015-04-07 09:56
    https://domainname.com/site/slide-page-sitemap.xml 2015-04-09 13:16
    https://domainname.com/site/portfolio-gallery-sitemap.xml 2015-04-09 13:16

    The last two sitemaps (slide-page-sitemap and portfolio-gallery-sitemap) open to Error 404 Page Not Found.
    The post_tag-sitemap has 6 tags in it.
    The category-sitemap has all of my categories (pages) except my About page and 2 are in a dull grey and not black like the others.
    The page-sitemap has all of my pages (categories) and my main page url is in a dull grey and not black like the others.
    The post-sitemap2 has 693 URLs.
    The post-sitemap1 has 1000 URLs (which both of these make up the 1693 posts that I have).

    Now when I go into GWT it is saying there are 2 errors and 1 warning on this sitemap. The errors are with the portfolio-gallery-sitemap and page-sitemap (which is what the sitemap told me initially anyway) stating the description as:

    We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit. Example: General HTTP error: 404 not found. HTTP Error: 404.

    And the warning is in the post-sitemap1 stating the description as:

    Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page.

    Could this be the reason why the site urls have dropped off google? I also noticed that the sitemap has 1,719 web pages submitted and 1,589 indexed but the previous sitemap submitted back on 6th of August 2014 and processed on 1st of September had 6,036 web pages submitted with 4,332 indexed.

    Thank you.

    Thread Starter VickyTFC

    (@vickytfc)

    Can anyone assist please?

    Thread Starter VickyTFC

    (@vickytfc)

    Oh and I notice that people who click through from Google to my site are clicking through via images ??

    Thread Starter VickyTFC

    (@vickytfc)

    Also when I go into my GWT in my Structured Data area it says there is 85 items out of 87 items with errors and the data type is Hentry…would this be a major reason perhaps?

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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