Site No Longer Indexed or Showing up in Search

  • johnnykillmore · Member ·

    I purchased a starter plan on WordPress.com and changed the DNS’s for my domain, which is registered with a 3rd party. The redirect works, aiming johnnykillmore.wordpress.com to johnnykillmore.com like it is supposed to, but now the site has disappeared from search engines.

    I went on Google Search Console and uploaded my sitemap and see my website has been crawled (it’s been several months) but that over 100 pages are not indexed. Most of them are because of a redirect from the corresponding .wordpress.com page (the official reason in the report is “page with redirect”).

    I am not savvy with Google Search Console but it is showing 89 pages, including my homepage, as not indexed. A google Search on Firefox and Brave Browser do not show up on the first page of results if I google “Johnny Killmore.” Bing and DuckDuckGo also do not show it. If I put johnnykillmore.com in quotes so Google will search for it instead of send me to the website, my site does pop up in search, in 4th, below some of my social media profiles.

    I’m really struggling to understand why the website fell out of Google’s ranking and why Search Console says the home page isn’t indexed, but it still pops up in search (it used to be the first result if I Googled “Johnny Killmore” when it was still a .wordpress.com page).

    The whole purpose of buying a WordPress.com plan was to reactivate my blog and start drawing traffic to it, without the page redirecting to the .wordpress.com address. Now the site has fallen off the first page of several search engines. What can I do?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Thank you for sharing your concern about the indexing issue with your website. I understand how crucial it is for your site to appear in search engine results, and I’m here to help.

    It sounds like the issue might be related to the transition from johnnykillmore.wordpress.com to johnnykillmore.com and the subsequent redirect. This may have caused Google to de-index some of the pages due to the “page with redirect” reason in the Search Console report. Typically when a site domain is changed there can be a short term hit to your search rank but Google usually adjusts on their own so in our experience this is recovered within a few months. What you describe sounds a bit different though.

    We are not expert in Search Console but I’ve checked over your site and for me if I manually enter the old “wordpress.com” version of URLs on your site, I am redirected seamlessly. Is this the case for you as well, or have you seen issues with redirections on your site as well?

    If you can share a screenshot of what you are seeing on that end we’re happy to take a closer look. I’m not clear on why they are having this issue but often they offer a way to resolve it on their end, so we’re hoping to get you pointed in the right direction.

    Thanks!

  • johnnykillmore · Member ·

    Hello, I have some new information, and I think my problem is different than what I initially asked about.

    Yes, the redirect from the .wordpress.com works for me also. The problem is that when I search for “Johnny Killmore” neither my .com or .wordpress.com websites make it into the results. The top results are to my social media profiles and some of the websites I’ve written articles for.

    The good news is that my website IS indexed (the home page at least). The “page with redirect” was just a different version (with the www added into the address). The page https://johnnykillmore.com is indexed though, so it looks like I have an issue with the page not being considered valuable by Google and Bing. This was not the case when I had johnnykillmore.com redirect to the .wordpress.com page though: the website used to be the first result.

    Also, Google just crawled the site again and I still have the 91 pages that are “page with redirect” but most of them are just different spellings (www. added, http instead of https, etc). Now I have 537 pages showing as “Discovered- not currently indexed.” I’ll need to wait and see if they get indexed before knowing if I have a problem or if Google just hasn’t prioritized it yet.

    The real issue I see is that — when I Google or Bing “Johnny Killmore” neither the .com or .wordpress.com site is on the first page of results. When I Google “Johnny Killmore website” the .wordpress.com home page is the first result. In Bing it is the 3rd result, though it doesn’t offer a page description, saying the robots.txt setting doesn’t allow it. The regular .com website still does not come up in the results, but this might just be because it is still too new according to Google. Right now Search Console shows only 50 indexed pages and 653 not-indexed pages.

    Still, I’m baffled as to why the .wordpress.com page is no longer the first result when I search “Johnny Killmore” (only if I Google “Johnny Killmore website”) when it has been for years, even when I wasn’t active on the blog. Perhaps it is due directly to it now being a redirect, and Google dropping its relevance? Will the .com version eventually crawl back up to the top over time perhaps? It’s been several months so I’m not sure why it hasn’t already, if the problem was it being “new” to Google’s eyes.

    Thanks so much for looking into this. It’s all a little bit over my head. I know enough to see there’s a problem but not enough to really understand what the problem is, let alone the fix.

    -John

  • staff-heroponriki · Staff ·

    Thank you for providing additional details. However, it’s important to note that we don’t have control over how Google perceives or indexes your site beyond using the Search Console tools and verifying your site, which you’re already doing.

    In addition to consistently publishing new content, which positively impacts your search engine rankings, you could consider submitting your site to Google for a reindex. While there’s no guarantee that it will improve your search engine results, it’s worth attempting.

    I hope this information is helpful! If you have any further questions or need assistance, please let us know. We’re here to help.

  • The topic ‘Site No Longer Indexed or Showing up in Search’ is closed to new replies.