: Redesigned website, transferred content, and now invisible to Google I recently completely redesigned my website, http://concourstee.fr. We used to have a fairly good ranking in Google, but when
I recently completely redesigned my website, concourstee.fr. We used to have a fairly good ranking in Google, but when redesigning the website I thought I'd try to make things better. (WordPress Yoast plugin for SEO, better use of keywords, etc.)
So I moved the old website to concourstee.fr/old/ and uploaded the new version of the website. (Both versions are running WordPress)
Since then, my website has just completely disappeared from Google, I have absolutely no idea why... I realized that Google only found the old website, under concourstee.fr/old/ when doing a search for site:concourstee.fr, so I moved it downloaded a backup of the old website and deleted it. Google can still only find concourstee.fr/old/, about a week afterwards, and it still won't display the new website, even when searching for things as basic as "Concours Total EDHEC Entreprendre", which is the actual name of the site, and appears several times on the main page.
I then realized I had an error in my code :
<meta name="robots" content="none" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="none" />
Which I fixed two days ago, changing none to index,follow, but I am still not appearing in Google...
So what am I to do? We have a big event coming up and we really need our Google visibility back!
More posts by @Martha676
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In your case, I guess you have a duplicate content issues between old and new site. Google doesn't know which site it must display in its index. That's why when you type site:concourstee.fr on Google, you find some URLs from the old site and others from the new site (for your information, if Google discovered the old site, this is because Googlebot found a link to it, thus check your new site links don't point to the old one).
To fix your problem, you can remove the old/ folder, return 410 HTTP status for all old URLs and block the folder in your robots.txt. Then, you can let Google removing old URLs by its own (410 HTTP status is here for this) or ask removal from your Google Webmaster Tools account; in two cases, it takes time (can be weeks or months) to remove all old URLs from Google index. By following this procedure, you should see the new site URLs showing up in Google index because your duplicate content issues will have gone.
The disallowing of indexing/following with the <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NONE"> will be the reason that your website disappeared from Google's index. You've since amended this but you'll have to wait for GoogleBot to revisit your website, crawl all pages and reindex them again now. You can speed up this process with:-
Linking to your website from somewhere else (anywhere), ideally a followed link.
Submitting your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
Pinging your sitemap using a service such as this one.
+1'ing (sharing) some pages from your website on Google+.
It would also be recommended to prevent everything at /old from getting indexed by either:-
Manually requesting the removal of each URL in Google Webmaster Tools.
Inserting a <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> into the <head> on the entire /old directory.
Adding a disallow directive in your robots.txt such as Disallow: /old/
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