2 Quick Tips from Google’s Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts, head of Google‘s Webspam team, took to Twitter last night with a couple of useful tips for those who feel they‘ve lost rankings due to a penalty or update. Check it out here.
#1 – Don‘t See Your Site in Google‘s Results?
Quick tip: if you don‘t see your site in Google‘s results, check http://t.co/LpjDwVlrlg for any manual webspam actions.
— Matt Cutts (mattcutts) October 17, 2013
If you don’t see your website in Google’s results, Matt suggests checking Google’s Webmaster Tools for manual webspam actions as a first course of action.
How?
It’s quite simple actually!
– Sign in to Webmaster Tools, assuming you have an account.
– Click on Search Traffic in the left sidebar.
– Finally, click on Manual Actions.
If you see: “No manual webspam actions found.” – congrats!
Types of Manual Actions
There are a variety of manual spam actions and alerts that can be displayed on this page, some of which are listed below. Learn more about manual actions here.
– User-generated Spam
– Hidden Text and/or Keyword Stuffing
– Pure Spam
– Thin Content
– Unnatural Links to Site
– Unnatural Links from Site
If you have any alerts of imposed manual spam actions for your website, you will need to take action immediately to rectify the problem(s) before submitting a reconsideration request to Google along with evidence of actions you took to fix the issue(s).
#2 – Fetch as Google
Tip #2: If that doesn’t resolve it, try our Fetch as Google feature: https://t.co/WDERQZTpuq . Your web server might be blocking Googlebot.
— Matt Cutts (mattcutts) October 17, 2013
The second Twitter tip from Matt involves using their ‘Fetch as Google’ feature to see if your web server is causing the issues and blocking Googlebot.
How?
Again, it‘s quite simple!
– Sign in to Webmaster Tools, assuming you have an account.
– Click on Crawl in the left sidebar.
– Click on Fetch as Google.
You will now see your website URL along with a form field which allows you to fetch internal pages of your website – ignore this for now. Click on the FETCH button.
If you see: “Fetch Status: Success” – you can rule this problem out.
Is Googlebot Blocked?
There are many technical things which could be blocking Googlebot‘s attempts to crawl your website and thus result in it not being indexed by Google, some of which are listed below.
– DNS Issues
– Firewalls
– Robots.txt
Let‘s discuss further on Twitter! @epicnewmedia