Our root domain is no longer appearing in search results

[brandonRT]

Hi all

The root domain for our site, roadtrippers.com, has been disappearing from Google's search results. Subfolders and subdomains still appear, but our root domain isn't found at all. I believe I've verified this by searching "-inurl:trips -inurl:byways -inurl:support -inurl:blog -inurl:places -inurl:guides -inurl:destinations site:https://roadtrippers.com/" in Google and our root domain is nowhere to be found.

This may or may not be related to another issue we've had, where the root domain is appearing with a seemingly rotating set of parameters. Sometimes it'll be ?mod=, sometimes it'll be ?tag=translation. Originally they appeared to simply displace our ranking root domain, but now they and our root domain are completely disappearing. Our dev team believes they fixed the problem with recent 301 tags to any unapproved parameter being added to the root domain, but this hasn't fixed the original problem.

Any insight into this is greatly appreciated!

Brandon

[jesse-landry]

Yeah I see what you mean. Just googling "roadtrippers" shows me what you're describing. Your blog seems to populate first, which sort of makes sense as it has the most content.

Beyond the redirect issues, there may be a thin-content issue going on since there really doesn't appear to be a ton on that home page. Have you tried fetching as Google to see what they're seeing? What does it look like?

This is interesting I'd like to see what other people say. Cause your site looks awesome.. now how do you get it indexed beyond the blog...

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Brandon,

Its probably that robots meta noindex tag you have in there!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Your homepage has this meta-tag on it

name="Robots" content="noindex,follow">

Remove it and you're good to go

[DougRoberts]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but I notice that the page at https://roadtrippers.com/ has the following meta tag in the header:

[jesse-landry]

ha! Silly me. That's what I get for not taking time and jumping to conclusions.

I'll blame the head cold I'm currently battling on a dreary Monday

in other words - yeah definitely that no index tag.

[brandonRT]

Wow. Definitely a hard lesson in checking the obvious, eh?

Thanks everybody. Total oversight not to even bother checking what I never considered to be an issue. Now to go talk to our dev team to figure out how this even got in...

Thanks again everybody!