Google not indexing Category Pages

[FrancisChung]

Hi, I have an ongoing issue with Google SEO that I can't seem to fix. Wondering if anyone has come across a similar situation?

We deployed a new version of the website using a new deployment methodology and unfortunately, the wrong robots.txt file was deployed basically telling Googlebot not to scrape the site.

The end result is that if our target keywords are used for a (Google) search, our website is displayed on the search page with "No information is available for this page." 

Google provides a link to fix this situation on the search listing, but so far everything I have tried in it hasn't fixed the situation.
I was wondering if anyone has gone through this scenario and what was the steps to remedy it?
Or perhaps it has worked and I have misunderstood how it works?

The steps I have tried in the Google Webmaster Tool :

1. Gone through all crawl errors
2. Restored the Robots.txt file and Verified with Robots.txt tester
3. Fetch/Fetch and Render as Google as both Desktop/Mobile, using root URL and other URLs, using Indexing Requested / Indexing Requested for URL and Linked Pages.
4. Uploaded a new Sitemap.xml 

Particularly on the Sitemap page, it says 584 submitted, 94 indexed.

 

Would the Search Engine return "No Information available" because the page is not indexed? The pages I'm searching for are our 2 most popular keywords and entry points into site. It's also one of 2 most popular category pages.  So I'm thinking it probably isn't the case but ...

How can I prove / disprove the category pages are being indexed?

The site in questions is Sprachspielspass.de. The keywords to search are fingerspiele and kindergedichte.

 

[teppo]

Just wondering, but how long has this been happening? In somewhat similar situations I've had delays of hours .. days.

Another thing I noticed is that your (current) robots.txt has a max-age of 30 days. According to Google's docs, they may "increase the time" a robots.txt file is cached based on this header, so in theory they could still be holding on to the old version. In that case I don't really know which steps to take, but first I'd wait for a few days to make sure that it isn't just Google's regular delay

[FrancisChung]

Hi @teppo, it's been going on for a few weeks now. Very frustrating.
It's definitely beyond a wait and see approach stage now.

Is the robots.txt max-age defined in .htaccess? I don't recall creating such setting for robots.txt specifically, but I do recall such setting for the website in general for cache-headers.

 

[FrancisChung]

I run the robots.txt file through this
http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

It says :
Cache-Control => max-age=2592000
Expires => Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:21:44 GMT

Which is a bit baffling.

The Homepage and Main Category pages are showing Cache-Control : No Cache at the moment.
I do have Procache installed but currently, it's off at the moment. 

This is our current Cache-Control settings.

 

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  # Ignore comments, everything is set to 8 days atm.
  # 1 week for fonts
  <filesMatch "\.(ico|jpe?g|jpg|png|gif|swf)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=691200, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(eot|svg|ttf|woff|woff2)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=691200, public"
  </filesMatch>
  # 1 day for css / js files
  <filesMatch "\.(css)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=691200, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(js)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=691200, private"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(x?html?|php)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "private, must-revalidate"
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>

I will add a separate filesMatch module for Robots.txt and see what happens ...
 

  <filesMatch "^robots.(txt|php)$">
    Header Set Cache-Control "max-age=0, public"
  </filesMatch>

 

[dragan]

I guess you're committing major SEO sins here... You deliver the exact same content under several URLs / domains. Google is not amused by such practises.

e.g.

http://sprachspielspass.de/kinderlieder/alle-kinderlieder/ri-ra-rutsch/

http://kinder-reime.com/kinderlieder/alle-kinderlieder/ri-ra-rutsch/

http://finger-spiele.com/kinderlieder/alle-kinderlieder/ri-ra-rutsch/

This is called "black hat SEO", and frowned upon. I only discovered these other domains by checking your HTTP headers, where it says

access-control-allow-origin: kinder-reime.com, finger-spiele.com, sprachspielspass.de

 

[FrancisChung]

21 hours ago, dragan said:

I guess you're committing major SEO sins here... You deliver the exact same content under several URLs / domains. Google is not amused by such practises.

e.g.

http://sprachspielspass.de/kinderlieder/alle-kinderlieder/ri-ra-rutsch/

http://kinder-reime.com/kinderlieder/alle-kinderlieder/ri-ra-rutsch/

http://finger-spiele.com/kinderlieder/alle-kinderlieder/ri-ra-rutsch/

This is called "black hat SEO", and frowned upon. I only discovered these other domains by checking your HTTP headers, where it says

access-control-allow-origin: kinder-reime.com, finger-spiele.com, sprachspielspass.de

 

@Dragan, the other two domains are our test server / test domains. In theory, Google or any other crawlers shouldn't be indexing them because robots.txt for those other sites instructs it not to. Surely this isn't a frowned upon practice?

In fact, the reason why I'm in such a pickle is because I migrated the code + contents from our UAT site to our live site including the robots.txt file from the UAT. 

I'm aware of what Google does to punish sites that circumvent around Seach Engine rules and I thought it's pretty hard to circumvent them these days. And I assure you that's not our intention here to cannibalise our own SEO rankings.

Perhaps I need to fix the access-control-allow-origin to have only one domain? I wasn't sure listing all our domains would have a negative impact? 

[Christophe]

Hi,

Also, you don't have the non-www version redirected to the www version, or vice versa.

And you should normally only have one meta name="canonical" version in your source code. 
Currently, it changes depending on the non-www or www version.

[FrancisChung]

I've managed to get Google display our meta description correctly again today in their search results.

Not sure which of the following corrected it, but the steps are took were :

1) Not to cache Robots.txt (.htaccess) 

  <filesMatch "^robots.(txt|php)$">
    Header Set Cache-Control "max-age=0, public"
  </filesMatch>

2) Removed other test sites from access-control-allow-origin
3) Created a sitemap-category.xml file where it listed the homepage plus important category pages and uploaded it to Google.
4) Uploaded sitemap.xml to Google again after fixing 1) & 2)

I initially tried 3) but it didn't fix the problem initially (Google initially indexed 0 pages ... then 1 page today ).

I tried 2) 3) 4) today and it seems to have fixed it. 
Process 1) I tried when I first posted this thread.

It's also quite possible it "organically" fixed itself today by coincidence and none of my steps was actually effective.

As for the canonical meta-name issues, I'm using MarkupSEO module so it possibly is an issue with that.
I'll post any updates here.

Thanks again to @dragan , @Christophe & @teppo for responding.