Page not being indexed or crawled and no idea why!

[CSawatzky]

Hi everyone,

There are a few pages on our website that aren't being indexed right now on Google and I'm not quite sure why. A little background:

We are an IT training and management training company and we have locations/classrooms around the US. To better our search rankings and overall visibility, we made some changes to the on page content, URL structure, etc. Let's take our Washington DC location for example. The old address was:

http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/location.aspx?id=uswd44

And the new one is:

http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training

All of the SEO changes aren't live yet, so just bear with me. My question really regards why the first URL is still being indexed and crawled and showing fine in the search results and the second one (which we want to show) is not. Changes have been live for around a month now - plenty of time to at least be indexed.

In fact, we don't want the first URL to be showing anymore, we'd like the second URL type to be showing across the board. Also, when I type into Google site:http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training I'm getting a message that Google can't read the page because of the robots.txt file. But, we have no robots.txt file. I've been told by our web guys that the two pages are exactly the same. I was also told that we've put in an order to have all those old links 301 redirected to the new ones. But still, I'm perplexed as to why these pages are not being indexed or crawled - even manually submitted it into Webmaster tools.

So, why is Google still recognizing the old URLs and why are they still showing in the index/search results?

And, why is Google saying "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"

Thanks in advance!

• Pedram

[MikeRoberts]

Your Robots.txt (which can be found at http://www2.learningtree.com/robots.txt) does in fact have Disallow: /htfu/ which would be blocking http://www2.learningtree.com**/htfu/**uswd44/reston/it-and-management-training from being crawled. While your old page is also technically blocked, it has been around longer and would already have been cached so will still appear in the SERPs.... the bots just won't be able to see changes made to it because they can't crawl it.

You need to fix the disallow so the bots can crawl your site correctly and you should 301 your old page to the new one.

[CSawatzky]

Thanks, Mike. That was incredibly helpful. See, I did click the link on the SERP when I did the "site" search on Google, but I was thinking it was a mistake. Are you able to see the disallow robot on the source code?

[MikeRoberts]

The pages in question don't have any Meta Robots Tags on them. So once the Disallow in Robots.txt is gone and you do a fetch request in Webmaster Tools, the page should get crawled and indexed fine. If you don't have a Meta Robots Tag, the spiders consider it Index,Follow. Personally I prefer to include the index, follow tag anyway even if it isn't 100% necessary.

[CSawatzky]

Hi Mike,

As a follow up, I forwarded your suggestions to our Webmasters. The adjusted the robots.txt and now reads this, which I think still might cause issues and am not 100% sure why this is:

User-agent: *
Allow: /htfu/
Disallow: /htfu/app_data/
Disallow: /htfu/bin/
Disallow: /htfu/PrecompiledApp.config
Disallow: /htfu/web.config
Disallow: /

Now, this page is being indexed: http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd74/alexandria/it-and-management-training

But, a more niched page still isn't being indexed:  http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/usny27/new-york/sharepoint-training

Suggestions?

[MikeRoberts]

It possibly just hasn't been long enough for the spiders to re-crawl everything yet. Have you done a fetch request in Webmaster Tools for the page and/or site to see if you can jumpstart things a little? Its also possible that the spiders haven't found a path to it yet. Do you have enough (or any) pages linking into that second page that isn't being indexed yet?

[CSawatzky]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the reply. I'm out of the country right now, so reply might be somewhat slow.

Yes, we have links to the pages on our sitemaps and I have done fetch requests. I did a check now and it seems that the niched "New York" page is being crawled now. Might have been a time issue as you suggested. But, our DC page still isn't being crawled. I'll check up on it periodically and see the progress. I really appreciate your suggestions - it's already helping. Thank you!