Warning for everyone about webmaster tools, bing and google.

byImagineer17

151 followers

Updated 5 years ago

I started having a serious issue with sitemaps and what not. Here's what happened, my site was doing great with getting indexed, impressions and clicks were going up and I was loving it.

All of a sudden I start seeing a drop, and no new pages getting indexed in webmaster, eventhough WA says they're getting indexed. According to webmaster, my site came to a crawl, about one or two clicks a day versus the near hundred a day I was getting prior, and I noticed that it only talked about 3-7 pages getting those views, pages I published in August !

As im fishing around I see that google excluded 357 pages from being indexed, of course I was pissed, but I had to figure out why, because I never hit the no index tag on anything I publish.

After 30 minutes or so of fishing around, I go to my website and look at the website that is set in webmaster and I figure out the problem.

Turns out that HTTP://example.com and HTTPS://example.com are two different things, webmaster had my site as http and all the old posts that had the same, the 350 pages being excluded are all under https.

Now that I have that figured out, theres a new problem need solving of google excluding some of my pages due to a no index x.robot tag, and I have yet to find out how to fix that. But if anyone knows do let me know.

UPDATE for paragraph above, turns out google isn't stupid, the pages that are marked no index are supposed to be that way, any of your URLS that end in /feed and has your article's name is NOT your actual article. If you index a /feed (example: https://example.com/how-to-lose-weight-now/feed) people that visit your site will see nothing but code and google does not like that. Just trust google I guess lmao.

All of this happened out of nowhere honestly, wtf. back to work.