Hi everyone,
I have a website for my offline business, that used to get indexed by Google almost immediately after publishing new content. However, recently, I've noticed that my new pages are either taking a long time to be indexed or not appearing at all in Google search results. I also had many posts at the top of page one on Google. I must admit I haven't been publishing as much over the last few months. However, I have another website in the same niche, with much less content and yet that is always indexed quickly.
I haven’t made any major changes to my website structure or content strategy, and I’m not seeing any obvious issues in Google Search Console. I’ve tried manually requesting indexing, but even that doesn’t seem to be working either.
Has anyone else experienced this? Could it be related to a recent Google update, crawl issues, or something else I might be overlooking? Any insights or suggestions would be much appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
Hi Roy
Nice to hear from you, as usual, and I'm sorry you're having Google indexing and ranking problems. I believe it's all part of the ongoing search engine changes as they continually try to adjust to AI evolution and other issues.
I hope you're otherwise doing well and getting some guitar-playing time in whenever you can. 😎
Rock on! 🤘
Frank 🎸
@frank Good morning Frank,
I hope that you are doing well and enjoying your retirement. I do appreciate you taking the time to comment.
When I went to Google Search Console I found lots of 404 URLs that were not mine, in fact there were about 87,000+. There were not actually on the website, but attached to the server, it appears. This has now been dealt with by my Webmaster. Allegedly, many websites or servers were attacked fairly recently. Hopefully, the website will soon be back to normal, whether it’s done any damage to my rankings long-term, I don’t know. Time will tell.
All the best to you.
Roy
@RoyBretton Hi Roy
Great to hear that the problem with your website has been rectified! 👍
I had a similar issue with my guitar site. A bot hacked it through a security flaw in the Sassy Social Share plugin (the most updated version) and installed a plugin that added thousands of GSC indexing requests for non-existent online gambling site posts. You can read about it in a WA post I wrote at the time. As frustrating as it was, I learned lots of great things about the inner workings of GSC, so some good came out of it, too.
I'm enjoying my retirement immensely, playing music, watching movies, hanging out with family and friends, and eating all my favorite foods! I hope you're making time for the things you like to do, too. 😎
Keep On Rockin' It! 🤘
Frank 🎸
I haven’t made any major changes to my website structure or content strategy, and I’m not seeing any obvious issues in Google Search Console. I’ve tried manually requesting indexing, but even that doesn’t seem to be working either.
I want to say this happened to me around the time I stopped focusing on Google. Like Frank said, I blamed it on an Algo update, but, again, it's when I stopped primarily focusing on Google - have your overall rankings dropped or is it just the issue of nothing getting indexed quickly anymore?
@andy Good morning Andy,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my question, I do appreciate it.
I trust that you are doing well.
I have just replied to, Frank and it appears that when I went to Google Search Console, I found lots of URLs that were not part of my website, in fact they were not even on the website. Somehow these URLs were attached to the server, 87,000+ of them, I don’t know enough to comment too much. I believe it was blocking or clogging up the website. Hopefully things will get back to normal soon as my Webmaster has dealt with it.
Have a great day.
Roy