SEO and Google Rankings help

[tj2419]

Hi

 

We have a school website which is schoolname.area.sch.uk we also have a VLE which is moodle.schoolname.area.sch.uk

 

OUr website has disappeared off google search. When you type the school name our website doesn't appear but our VLE does. A bit of research has lead me to think that moodle might be nicking our rankings with the domain being similar. Anyone had similar issues before or know what I can try to resolve this?

 

I am using google search console as part of their webtools console and google analytics.

 

We also don't appear at the top on bing either. If it means anything our bounce rate has gone to practically 0 also which makes me think it's getting confused with our vle too.

 

Cheers

[ZeroHour]

You should add a robots.txt to your moodle to delist it and block bots firstly. Then try adding the schools main site manually to indexes and see if that gets them to crawl.

[mavhc]

So there's no warnings or info in Search Console? You've requested a recrawl?

 

Do you have a sitemap.xml file?

 

Each subdomain is treated as a different entity in search engines, because of blogger, tumblr etc, so that shouldn't be an issue

[tj2419]

So there's no warnings or info in Search Console? You've requested a recrawl?

 

Do you have a sitemap.xml file?

 

Each subdomain is treated as a different entity in search engines, because of blogger, tumblr etc, so that shouldn't be an issue

 

No warnings or errors and have requested a recrawl. I have uploaded the sitemap.xml to the google console

 

I read somewhere about searching site:domain to see what is returned and it returns one page from the website and the rest from moodle.

 

Would I put the norobots.txt in the inetpub folder or wwwroot?

 

Thanks

[mavhc]

robots.txt goes in the root of the subdomain, if that's what you want to block. So on your moodle server

 

site: is supposed to do that, could do site:com for example.

[ZeroHour]

Yeah on the root so moodle.school.co.uk/robots.txt should work.

You can see the disallow text you need here: The Web Robots Pages

 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Doubt check if your public site has a robots.txt already as that may be messing it up.

[tj2419]

Yeah on the root so moodle.school.co.uk/robots.txt should work.

You can see the disallow text you need here: The Web Robots Pages

 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Doubt check if your public site has a robots.txt already as that may be messing it up.

 

Just found a robots.txt in the directory "/home/.../html" and the contents was:

 

User-Agent: *Disallow:

 

Would that have blocked the search engines? If so I have just fetched as Google and requested the pages be indexed again. ANy idea how long this can take?

 

I've no idea who put that file there

[mavhc]

Possibly.

 

Make sure you're the only one with direct access to the web server file system, otherwise anything/one can easily make your site insecure

[tj2419]

When I hit my website /robots.txt it still previews the file with that entry in even though I've deleted it from the server. Is this normal or should I have edited the file to something else?

 

Thanks for the help guys

[mavhc]

if you're in chrome, press f12 to open the dev tools, and with that open right click on the reload button in the main browser tab will have options to Empty Cache and Hard Reload

[tj2419]

if you're in chrome, press f12 to open the dev tools, and with that open right click on the reload button in the main browser tab will have options to Empty Cache and Hard Reload

 

hmmm still shows up

[ZeroHour]

Are you using IIS? may be worth restarting some of IIS's services as it can cache content for a while.

 

It can take a bit for search engines to start to add your content back in and remove the VLE content but I would just submit your site again and they will start the process of checking.

[tj2419]

Are you using IIS? may be worth restarting some of IIS's services as it can cache content for a while.

 

It can take a bit for search engines to start to add your content back in and remove the VLE content but I would just submit your site again and they will start the process of checking.

 

No, it's hosted with GoDaddy. Just can't get why that robots.txt is still showing up if it has been deleted.

 

Cheers

[ZeroHour]

No, it's hosted with GoDaddy. Just can't get why that robots.txt is still showing up if it has been deleted.

 

Cheers

 

100% the correct root directory? GoDaddy are pretty amazingly bad for hosting so they may be doing all sorts of trickery with caching to save on hardware costs. Try browsing to robots.txt with a ?blahblah after it and see what happens.

[tj2419]

100% the correct root directory? GoDaddy are pretty amazingly bad for hosting so they may be doing all sorts of trickery with caching to save on hardware costs. Try browsing to robots.txt with a ?blahblah after it and see what happens.

 

It was a caching issue at GoDaddy

 

Is it better to have no robots.txt or have one that says allow?

 

Thanks again

[ZeroHour]

It was a caching issue at GoDaddy

Is it better to have no robots.txt or have one that says allow?

Thanks again

You can have one that specifies where your sitemap is. You could also say disallow any kind of admin area/login page to prevent it showing up in search results if you want. I would probably add a sitemap link though to the robots.txt

[suvantech]

first of all check whether your site is indexed .After that you submit your site for recrawling.