I have a site I'm doing SEO for and in the last week or two, Google has stopped using the primary domain URL for indexing and is choosing all kinds of random URLs from the site like tag strings, arbitrary posts, etc. leading to the main site effectively disappearing from search. It was on pages 1, 2, and 3 positions originally for various target search terms as little as a month or two ago. I have no idea why Google would be choosing tags and categories with almost no content over the actual domain home page with tons of content. Any ideas on what may be causing this or how to fix it?
1 Answers
Best Answer
This seems like your canonical settings are off, otherwise google would not replace your main url with an arbitrary one. Get your robot.txt file and inspect it for any changes.
Check your index count in google by using the site: search operator. Compare this to the number of pages you actually have.
If there's a huge gap, you may be dealing with an index bloat problem due to faceted navigation issues. Go into search console, check your site map, Take your urls and plug them into the url inspector. See if they are indexed in google by testing the live url.
Check the live url reports and you'll find out if there are canonical issues
check your coverage reports and look for the excluded urls, error trends.
Then tell us what you find.
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