Difficulty with Indexing Pages - Desperate for Help!

[jacleaves]

I have a website with product pages that use the same URL, but load different data based on what's passed to them with GET. I am using a Wordpress website, but all of the page information is retrieved from a database using PHP and displayed with PHP.

Somehow these pages are not being indexed by Google.

I have done the following:

1. Created a site map pointing to each page.

2. Defined URL parameters in Search Console for these type of pages.

3. Created a product schema using schema.org, and tested it without errors.

I have requested re-indexing repeatedly and these pages and images on the pages are still not being indexed! Does anybody have any suggestions?

[matthew_jkay]

Hi jacleaves!

Without your website URL it will be difficult to diagnose the problem as there are a few potential technical issues here. My main worries would be whether you're blocking indexation somehow and the fact you're displaying your content using JavaScript.

I'd start here:

1. Check you're not blocking crawlers in your robots.txt file
2. Check you're not using the noindex tag

I'd also try using fetch and render in Google Search Console (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en) for your site pages to see how Google sees them. If googlebot isn't seeing your content, that's a strong hint there's a JavaScript crawling problem.

Also, strap yourself in and read this - https://www.elephate.com/blog/ultimate-guide-javascript-seo/ - it's THE guide for JavaScript SEO.

Let us know how you get on and we'll go from there!

[jacleaves]

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[jacleaves]

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[jacleaves]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for your quick response!

Here's one page:

http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4

My issue is none of the individual product pages are being indexed.

In response to your starting suggestions:

1. I am not blocking any resources.

2. I am not using noindex.

3. Page is being rendered successfully.

One more thing . . . I mis-spoke about how the content is generated. The content on this page is generated by PHP and NOT Javascript. So that is a non-issue.  (I corrected this in my initial question.)

I appreciate your feedback. Please let me know if you are able to determine what else I could be missing!

[davebuts]

Hi jacleaves,

The problem here is with your canonical tags (more info on canonical tags here).

This page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4

Has a canonical tag pointing to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/

The same thing is happening on all of your product pages.

I would change all of your product pages to use "SEO-friendly" URLs and have a self-referring canonical tag.

Eg. your example page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4
Would become: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset
And the canonical tag would point to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset

Cheers,

David

[jacleaves]

Hey, David Butler,

I am at a loss when it comes to canonical tags -- I am trying to understand how to use them. However, in this case I thought it was set up correctly.

To better explain the website . . . all of the product pages use the same URL, which is http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/.

I programmed the pages to retrieve info from a database and display specific product information based on the parameters passed to them (?mfgID=A-1&catID=4). I cannot change the URL's to be anything different, as they are not actually different pages.

What I had read is that the canonical url should not include the URL parameters, so that is why they were just going to the same page. I created URL parameters in Google Search Console because I thought that would take care of this issue. However it is not.

So . . . what I have done (after reading your post) is gone ahead  and changed the canonical URL to include the URL parameters.

Is that how I'm supposed to handle it in this type of a situation?

I am updating this response . . . after further investigation I can take care of changing the URL to something more search-engine friendly by using mod rewrite. I'll test it out.

[davebuts]

Hi jacleaves,

I'm interested to see how this works out for you!

Please post an update after you've finished your work

Cheers,

David

[jacleaves]

Hey, David Butler . . . you are probably the only person who has looked at this issue, so I want to thank you again for your input.

I wanted to follow up about this. Since I am using Wordpress for the website, I used Wordpress's rewrite_rule function.

After confirming that it was working correctly, I deleted the old sitemaps and created new ones, then  submitted them to Google.

Shortly after this, the pages were successfully indexed.

So from this experience I get the impression that using URL parameters doesn't necessary work -- I certainly am not going to use them in the future.

I am going to mark this issue as resolved.