Hi guys
My site has been No2 on Google for several search terms for two years, ‘West Bridgford’ plus that term with – news – events- information etc
Since the theme change its totally vanished from results. I use Yoast SEO and I added code to Theme Amalytics field. Could this be the cause?
Now removed code from theme field and submitted indexes through Search Console – can you help it took lots of hard work and time to reach those positions
Thanks
Pat
Google has been making changes to their algorithm and rolled out latest changes recently; this is an ongoing process. Sometimes changing your page structure, layout, placement of links, etc. can cause a change in indexing. Obviously good to check your Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) for any crawl errors, drop in inbound links, rise in 404 errors if you changed permalinks, etc.
Also if your mobile friendly status changed, or PageSpeed dropped considerably, that can also have an impact.
We’ve been going through the same issue with our California news portal (10+ years old).
This seems to really be impacting sites in Google News due to how they “feature” news items for 7 days, but then seem to “whack” the organic results for awhile, then they come back.
We’ve not been able to sort out WHY this happens — one of our sites took huge traffic hit (using Canvas theme); while another took a huge jump switching from Canvas to Newsmag.
Thanks for such a quick reply Chris
Yes I’ve taken a speed hit but not optimised site yet, will probably go CFlare – used before on GoDaddy Managed WP and kept getting 522 errors annoying users and they could never solve. Also used MaxCdn which is also not on yet on the new site. Plus you’re right it could just be the blip of change that sometimes happens – will give it all a few days and let you know of still an issue
Pat
No crawl errors or significant 404s all is well in Console.
No permalinks and is mobile friendly I’m sure. Pingdom 5s down from 3
Should the code be put in the theme field of using Yoast too?
Pat
I’ve noticed that Google aren’t indexing some of my posts. I’m on the current version of Newspaper 🙂
Apologies- I’m sorry it was my own fault!!
But it may help others…
I used a staging site and therefore ‘Discouraged Search Engines’ whilst implementing the theme – because it was a temp random URL on staging
Guess what I forgot to do when transferring the ‘new’ Newspaper 6 site back to ‘production’?
Yes untick that box instead transferring the issue to live site
Sorry for that
Pat
Ah! This is where the Google Search Console really helps as it will show “last time indexed,” or ‘unable to index due to robots.txt” and the like.
Changing servers, and DNS, can also temporarily impact this too.
But glad you figured that “hide from search engines” thing (!!) — that would surely impact anything! 🙂
@Gee95
check your search console on Google to see what errors if any your post might be causing them to not index, like “error on page,” or “content too short,” or whatever. They will not index some things like might skip a post with a link to YouTube video and nothing else, or a page with 8 adverts and one paragraph of text, etc.
Check your sitemaps from time to time to MAKE SURE THEY WORK. We’ve had issues with stupid YOAST SEO bugs from time to time breaking the sitemap function (seriously).
Hello Chris!
Thanks for the tips, i’ve previously fixed all the issues with Yoast sitemaps, but unfortunately i can’t check why my news content isn’t being indexed as my applications have been rejected from Google News.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93994?hl=en
Is there any other way to find out why some aren’t being indexed? Currently webmaster tools are showing:
6,228 URLs submitted
3,831 URLs indexed
Thanks,
That’s a bit high… but yes, you found the article I was thinking of, more related to Google News.
Note that if you have stuff in your sitemap with redundant title and description tags, they will skip those. That is a big one to look out for.
What you can do is randomly check some of your posts to see if indexed in Google and if you find something missing carefully look at it to see why.
Thanks for the tips Chris.
I’ve added each Yoast Sitemap separately in webmaster tools (12 sitemaps altogether), i’ll see if that helps more with indexing, as i originally only added the sitemap_index.xml.
