Google won't index my site?

[EdwardoUK]

Hi, I've just signed up and am new to SEO. I placed my site live around mid December 2013. Initially I got 2 pages indexed but now not even they show up for site:www.traditional-cleaning.co.uk. According the Moz analytics I have 3 pages with duplicate content which are:

http://traditional-cleaning.co.uk/http://traditional-cleaning.co.uk/index.htmhttp://traditional-cleaning.co.ukProblem is I have no idea how to fix this, don't know whether Google isn't indexing my site because of this and generally am a bit stuck! Can anyone have a quick look at my site and give me a push in the right direction?

[StreamlineMetrics]

Hi there!

I just searched Google for site:http://traditional-cleaning.co.uk and I see 26 pages indexed, so it is good news that your site is being indexed! Google considers the www version and the non-www version of the URLs to be different sites, so it's best to pick one and stick with it. You can do this by 301 redirecting all of your URLs that start with "www" to the root. I usually recommend using an .htaccess file for this as long as your server is compatible. Here is some more information - http://301redirects.net/non-www-to-www-301-redirect-urls.php

You will also want to redirect the index.htm file to the root URL. Here is how you can do this (with .htaccess) -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

redirect html pages to the root domain

RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [NC,R,L]

These two steps should resolve your issues with both Google and Moz. I also highly recommend using Google Webmaster Tools and designating your preferred URL just to be safe. Let me know if you need any other help!

[NBGnetworks]

Hi Edward,

The first thing I would do is sign up for google webmaster tools if you haven't already.  The next step is to submit a site-map to google tools to help get your content indexed.

Also it appears that your content is indexed, try searching for "www.traditional-cleaning.co.uk" or "traditional-cleaning.co.uk", you'll see your content is being displayed by google.  The site looks fantastic by the way!

The next step on your SEO adventure is going to be picking www.traditional-cleaning.co.uk OR traditional-cleaning.co.uk.  Depending on your hosting setup you can have www redirected via .htaccess or change www to a cname record in your dns to point to the non-www version.  The opposite is also an option if you'd like to keep the www but you don't want to use both interchangeably because it will created duplicate content.

That should give you some good things to get started on.  Let me know if you have any trouble.

Thanks,

-Nick

[EdwardoUK]

Thanks Nick, yes I have submitted an XML map through webmaster tools. I assume I'll be able to youtube some examples on how you do the htaccess thing?

[EdwardoUK]

Hi thanks, that's really helpful. I'll give those suggestions a bash and let you know if I run into any issues. due to the fact that I only submitted this about a month ago and have zero links, I guess it's optimistic to assume I'll get any traction any time soon?

[NBGnetworks]

You can definitely youtube some advice.  Is your hosting provided by a big name provider or do you manage your own server?

-Nick

[EdwardoUK]

Hi Nick, yes its Godaddy

[EdwardoUK]

Hi, would simply attaching this to my htaccess file inside Godaddydo sort things out (I have specified non-www in webmaster tools also):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^traditional-cleaning.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://traditional-cleaning.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks

[EdwardoUK]

Err, right this is turning into a bit of a disaster. I told Google that non-www was preferred since that was what seemed to be indexed. I then went to the htaccess file and copied in the code exactly as specified, but now it won't load? I went back and deleted it but there's still a problem, made worse by the fact I've told google to specifically look for a page that doesn;t work. Any help much appreciated!

[StreamlineMetrics]

Are you still having issues with this? The .htaccess file is quite powerful and can easily bring down a site with even the smallest mistake. Let me know if you are still having problems and I will try my best to help you out today.

[EdwardoUK]

Hi thanks for getting back. Yes got it sorted though you're right about even the smallest error causing major issues - left a [ character in the file which brought everything to its knees...one other small issue is that the Moz analytics tool is saying that I have duplicate content on 3 pages, but they're all the same page? See attached. any ideas how to solver this?

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