Home Page Location Redirect
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We have recently upgraded our Wordpress site to detect your local city and redirect to the proper location. Previously we had independent sites - for example, http://atlanta.styleblueprint.com is now http://styleblueprint.com/atlanta
We've setup 301 redirects on all of the old site home pages. Now we have two issues:
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Moz will no longer crawl our domain. For two weeks now our campaign shows only four pages crawled
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None of our home pages show up in Google any longer for organic searches. We previously always ranked #1 for "styleblueprint" or "style blueprint"
Does our new auto redirect mess things up? Or is this just a function of time until Google "learns" how to index our new site?
All thoughts appreciated. Thanks in advance, Jay
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Hey Thomas,
I can actually see your site on searches for both "styleblueprint" or "style blueprint", but I have just noticed you have made a terrible error.
You have blocked search engines from indexing your site by adding the 'noindex,nofollow' robots meta tag to every page. This meta tag instructs search engines not to index the page. You need to remove this tag ASAP as you site is probably being dropped from the SERPS and that's why you cannot find your site and probably why Moz cant crawl the site.
The code to remove looks like this in your source code:
name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' /> The reason this code might be on your pages could be your settings on wordpress. On the left menu in wordpress dashboard click 'Settings', then click 'Reading' and see if the following box is checked: 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site'. If it is, uncheck it then check all your pages to see if the code has gone.
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Maximilian is right. Apparently that's the issue. Moz also respects the noindex, nofollow (I believe) and that's the reason they aren't crawling those pages either.
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Thank you! I totally missed this in the migration checklist. #facepalm
It should be correct now.
Thanks again, Jay