Lost search engine visibility after unveiled
ouki
Registered Users Posts: 69 Big grins
My site has lost search engine visibility since the day I unveiled to the new SM. Google webmaster tool is throwing errors when trying to index and crawl my site. See attached screenshot.
I have my site SEO set as Homepage Only from 2010. I only want the search engines to find my Homepage, nothing else. It worked as expected in old SM.
I checked the source of my site www.oukiphoto.com today, it shows the following.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet" />
I have worked with SM support for over a month. They did not have a clue. Seeking for help here.
I have my site SEO set as Homepage Only from 2010. I only want the search engines to find my Homepage, nothing else. It worked as expected in old SM.
I checked the source of my site www.oukiphoto.com today, it shows the following.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet" />
I have worked with SM support for over a month. They did not have a clue. Seeking for help here.
0
Comments
that appears to have happened before you unveiled as I thought the new smugmug wan't available in July? I had a huge number of erros (1200) in June but they just disappeared in July
If you go to your account, then the search tab, then web search you will get the code you show if you set 'Google Visibility' to No or Homepage only. If you set it to Yes then you won't get the noindex thing. It seems like the Homepage only thing isn't doing anything that I can see but you would need a smugexpert to answer that.
I thought with 'Not Found' errors there was a list of the pages not found. Can you find them to give a clue? I think you have to click on the words 'Not Found' to get the list
good luck
Rich
edit: Also, when you click on the Not Found link you will get the date that it wasn't found. I found there was a bunch of problems back at the start of Sept that threw up those errors but they have since disappeared. However the error won't clear until then next time that URL is scanned which may take a while if you have lots of pages and possibly never if Google has been told never to visit those pages again.
edit2: I can't see why you would also want to block google from indexing pages like this http://www.oukiphoto.com/Website/Wedding-Engagement that seems ideal for letting people find you on the web. The only reason for asking is to find out what the overall objective is in case you are going about it in a funny way.
edit3: I'm guess the reason for you only wanting google to index your home page is that you are only wanting people to see your Website and Portfolio pages and not the Photos pages, but... if you search for oukiphoto.com you get straight to your /photos page Google. My guess is that Google picks it up from your blog that possibly has an incorrect robots.txt. You are set to disallow /search but afaik that blocks the pages called search rather than blocking all search engines. As the pages at the top of your blog are from your /photos folder Google can find it even if it can't index the pages.
Not fun this stuff really is it
You are absolutely right. I am hosting my personal galleries on the same SM account. I only want to expose my professional business related pages to the public and hide the rest (but remain accessible if you know the URL). I absolutely don't want Google to pick up /photos folder.
Anything shown on my website, having a link, I want Google to index it. Nothing else. What is your best suggestion to accomplish this?
I can't be 100% sure but what I would do is
1. Using the organiser set all of your galleries and folders other than your Website and Portfolio folders to Websearchable=no. You need to do this for both folders and galleries as the setting doesn't flow down through folders
2. Change your account search setting to 'Google Visibility'=Yes
3. Change the robots.txt for your blog page (which I think is hosted elsewhere) to block everything or add a the <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet" /> to your blog page
4. In webmaster tools ask Google to remove the URL yoursitename/Photos/. This will only last for 90 days but hopefully by then you will have fixed the robots thing on your blog
Finally, keep a close eye on your Google results in case it pops up again. You can do this with a google search for 'site:oukiphoto.com/photos'
Remember there are other search engines as well....
There may be a better way so hopefully a smuggie might pop up with a suggestion
good luck
Rich