Homepage De-Indexed - No Errors, No Warnings

[gpapatheodorou]

Hi,

I am currently working on this project. Sometime between March 7th & 8th homepage was de-indexed. The rest of the pages are there. Found it out through decreased traffic on GA. No notifications of any kind of penalty/errors recieved. Tried to manually re-index through "Fetch as Google" in WMT to no avail. Site is redirected to https.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[metafser]

I checked,Your home page is not index. Do it manually index. Only 60 product page indexed in google. Increase your social signal & update some content. I think, it will recover. Beside, You can submit in some review sites. Which site will help you for quick indexing.

[C-Tech]

Your homepage is set to "noindex", which means that Google will not crawl it. You need to allow search engines to index it. As you're using Wordpress you should first check Settings > Reading, then see if the box next to search engine visibility is ticked. It should NOT be ticked. If that's OK, check your home page in the admin panel. Look for the Wordpress SEO by Yoast section, and click the Advanced panel. Make sure the Meta Robots Index is set to "Index". Hopefully that should sort your problem.

[gpapatheodorou]

Hi Tafser. Thank you for your prompt response. I know that my homepage is currently not indexed. It was de-indexed a few days ago. This is what I am trying to figure out. Why that happened and how to get it re-indexed. I really can't get it.

Why do I have to increase my social signal & update some content or submit reviews? My homepage was prpoperly indexed and for some reason was de-indexed without any obvious reason. No on or off-page actions has taken place the last few weeks.

[gpapatheodorou]

Hi there. Thank you for your reply. I have checked all these before asking the question. Everything is in place as it should be. How did you find out that the homepage is set to "noindex"?

[C-Tech]

By looking at the source code of your homepage:

<title>Star Lighters: Personalised Refillable Cigarette Petrol Lighter</title>

In the robots line it says "noindex". That's your problem. My guess is that someone has clicked the wrong thing in the Yoast options for that page, because other pages on your site are not set to noindex.

[gpapatheodorou]

You're right about the source code. But everything seems fine in Yoast. The robots file does not block anything as well. I think that there might be some incompatibility issue between the old WP v.2.8.5 and Yoast v.1.7.1.

I will try to update both to the latest releases and see what will happen.

[taryn_s]

Hi there,

I strongly suspect this is an issue with the way your theme is configured. Yoast is a fantastic plugin but it's not very forgiving with poorly configured themes. This is what I think is happening - within SEO > Titles and Metas, you probably have the 'Noindex subpages of archives' option ticked. Try unticking this option, save the changes, refresh your homepage, look at your source code and my guess is that the 'noindex' attribute will be gone.

Could you let us know how you get on?

[gpapatheodorou]

Hi Brendan,

That was really close I tried that one but did not work. I spotted the problem in "Custom Post Type Archives" in "Post Types" tab in SEO by Yoast plugin. I unticked that option and everything seems fine now. Thank you so much for your help.

Cheers