Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google

[Gavo]

We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings.

When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now.

The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored.

If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were  in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.

[KevnJr]

Have you submitted your pages for "Fetching" through Webmaster Tools? Check when you were last crawled by Google, make some content upgrades and re-submit. That always gets us indexed within 48 hrs.

I use the Moz Page Optimization tool as a guide to edit our product pages, that helps immensely.

KJr

[MikeGracia]

Hi Gavo.

I think I've spotted your issue!

Looking at https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/robots.txt I can see that you're all good now, HOWEVER...

view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/ Check your source code and you'll notice an inline noindex tag!:

Also, checking another page: view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/services/ I get the same meta tag.

This makes me think it's sitewide... So, as you;re running WordPress:

• In wp-admin, go to Settings > Reading, then untick the box that discourages search engines.

Once you've done that, the following optional steps won't hurt and may speed things up

• Submit a new sitemap
• Use the fetch & render, as Kevin recommends
• Personally, and this is entirely conjecture on my part, I'd use Google's page speed & mobile friendly testing tools, as I find that 'seems' to help (I've not bothered verifying by running tests & checking the access log files to bot activity etc - as it only takes a few seconds to do so not worth the time. Maybe I'll check out of curiosity at some point though!)

** As there's been a couple of errors with indexing, once you've done this change, I'd recommend running a full site crawl (Moz's tools or Screaming Frog is cool too) and check for any other noindex pages!**

EDIT: In case you don't have Screaming Frog, let me know when you've updated the WordPress setting and I'll run a crawl for you and ping you a list of any pages that are still showing noindex tags, if any exist

[Gavo]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your help!!

Could you check now to ensure it is OK? A change was made and I believe the source code no longer contains the line:

However, when I look to create a sitemap through a sitemap generator to add to Webmaster Tools, I am still unable to do so, which makes me think that perhaps the problem has not been resolved.

Your further assistance here would be most appreciated.

[MikeGracia]

Sorry for the late reply, checking now for you

[MikeGracia]

Yup, all looks good now - the page has index, follow

I'm going to send you a private message here on Moz with a Screaming Frog crawl export, which I carried out just to check there were no instances of 'noindex' left on any pages... All looks fine from the noindex standpoint.

[Gavo]

Thanks so much Mike! Got that export and appreciate you helping us here!

[MikeGracia]

Not a problem, happy to help