Site Not Indexing After 2 Weeks - PA at 1

[camarin_w]

Hi Moz Community!

I'm working as a digital marketing consultant for an organization that uses us for their online registration - we do not manage their web page. The issue that I am hoping you might have some ideas on is that their SERPS still aren’t making much of a recovery since they revamped their site in mid August.  I ran a MOZ campaign for them and despite that they (eventually) got all their 301s in place, they submitted an updated sitemap to Google, aren’t hitting any crawl errors, and have a working robots.txt over two-thirds of their site pages don’t seem to be indexing.  MOZ is giving most of them a Page Authority of 1, and when I login to their GWT, it’s showing me that only 3 pages have been indexed of the 315 URLs submitted.

I know Google doesn’t make any guarantees in index update timelines, but 2+ weeks seems like a long time

Their website is https://www.northshoreymca.org/.  The site has a DA of 43 but most of the pages on the main nav are still at 1. They gave me permission to share in this forum because we're really trying to figure out a recovery strategy.

Any thoughts or ideas as to what might be causing this? Is there anything else that you think I should check or that might be causing an issue? Is it possible that Google is just taking this long to index their page? Note: this page is built with Drupal.

THANK YOU!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I see a good amount of pages indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.northshoreymca.org%2F

Make sure the profile you are using in GSC (formerly GWT) is the https://www. version of the website (any other profile will show fewer/no indexed pages).

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

There are some points to mark here:

1- The site was redisigned, as you say there has been restructured the site completely.
2- As some of the URLs seem to be new, still none of them were crawled by roger (moz's bot) and/or they are likely to be considered to no have any leverage. That's some explanation for the PA1.
3- It's known that google takes its time to index the whole site. And also takes its time to inform it in WMT. My advise is to do a search with: 'site;yoursite.com' and check whether there has been an improval in the indexation. Just now im getting 620 results in that search. 
4- Being built in Dupal is no metric to google (at least as fas as my knoledge) in order to harm or benefit you. It's transparent for Google.

Hope I've helped.
GR.

[mememax]

hey camarin, so far I see 271 URLS indexed for the search "site:https://www.northshoreymca.org". There are of course a couple of changes I would do like try to have a friendlier look to the tag URLs instead of having the tag parameter, but anyway it seems that it's working. Also PA for this page https://www.northshoreymca.org/locations/haverhill/ is 33. I think as you said it was just a matter of time. I hope your problem got fixed.

[camarin_w]

Thanks so much! Any thoughts on why their GSC is saying 3 pages indexed? I checked as Oleg suggested above that it was referencing https:www. and verified that it is. I'm very new to the technical side of things so thanks for the help!

[camarin_w]

Thanks Gaston! In your experience, are there some generalities you can speak to for the length of time it takes to index a site? I understand that the response to that question is probably relative given a site's size, age, update frequency etc. but would you care to ballpark it?

I'm really new to SEO (and entirely self-taught) so appreciate all the info! Thanks again!

[camarin_w]

Thanks for the input Oleg. I did verify that in GSC that they are pointing to https://www. so I'm not sure what gives in terms of the discrepancy between the index of 3 pages showing in GSC vs. the several hundred pages showing when you hit site:https://www.northshoreymca.org.

Very new to MOZ and SEO so I really appreciate your time and input!

[GastonRiera]

You're welcome. We are here to help.

I cannot specify an exact amount of time. I've had sites that were fully indexed and informed in WMT in 3 weeks, and other sites that took over 2 months and only got informed roughly 90% of pages.

Sorry, Google is that way. Sometimes gives is a buch of information and sometimes nothing.
Again, i'd trust what you get in the search results, not what appears in WMT.

[camarin_w]

So here's an example of a page from the main nav on their site that is a problem page:

site:https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts

I guess we're just stuck in a waiting game for pages like this?

Thanks again!

[GastonRiera]

Yeap. Just wait.

I've checked if there was a problem with robots.txt or the meta robots tag, and there isnt any problem with that particularly page.
You can speed up the indexing of some pages with google.com/addurl

[camarin_w]

You are too kind! I thought we checked into all that stuff too. I'm glad to at least know that we're probably just up against a waiting game and there isn't something fundamentally wrong with the page that's preventing the index. I'll start manually adding main nav links from addurl and cross my fingers.

Thank you again!

[GastonRiera]

Dont get spammy and add all your 300 pages. You cant never know when google pisses off. Be discrete and and dont try to rush all the indexed.
(this is just a myth, but lets not try to probe it).

[camarin_w]

Yes! Better safe than sorry!

[mememax]

I would not focus too much on GSC if the site has been recently built, the place where you want your pages to be is google index

The place I would check is GA to see how many of your pages are getting at least 1 visits and which ones don't. You can then look for the pages which are not getting traffic and understand if they are not being indexed or not ranking high.

This page for example https://www.northshoreymca.org/programs/creative-arts I've noticed that you're using the rel="<a class="attribute-value">shortlink</a>", which I don't think it's adding too much value, probably is making things messier, as you two different version of your page, in fact if you check for /node/ folder you're finding pages you don't want (ex.https://www.northshoreymca.org/node/145 instead of this <a class="attribute-value">https://www.northshoreymca.org/content/ymca-north-shore-annual-gala</a>) I would set up a 301 at least so you ensure that google is not deciding which is the best page to index and serve to users, I know you hav a canonical but it could be something you could test, and help google not making too many decisions, especially because canonical is just a recommendation done to bots, and which google normally doesn't follow boldly for new sites.

hoep this helps, let me know how it goes!

[camarin_w]

Thanks again! I noticed all of this too before I submitted to Q&A but doing a little bit of research (and with my admittedly limited knowledge of the topic) I thought that this was pretty standard for how clean Drupal URLs are setup? Is that incorrect?

[mememax]

being a standard drupal setting doesn't mean it makes SE friendly anyway I have no backup for that theory, I'm just assuming that new sites should be as simple as possible in order to google to get a better grasp of them and start trusting before complicating thing in an unnecessary way, unless the node url is adding any value to you, I would get rid of it and 301 it to its canonical.