Weird Indexing Problem ?

  • I don’t know exactly where this question belongs (so if an admin wants to move it… fine!), and I don’t know if it IS a WP problem or not, but I’m posting this to see if anyone has any suggestions or feedback they could give? (maybe the same thing has happened to you too?).

    I converted my existing website to WP (using a plugin), around about middle of last year. It’s only a small site with no more than about 5 or so pages. Fast forward a few weeks (starting around Oct/Nov I think?), everything seems well, apart from 2 pages that just won’t get indexed by Google at all (one in particular I’m more keen on than another!). I’ve even tried manually requesting page submission using the GSC, but seemingly ignored! The two pages in question show as “Discovered – currently not indexed”, so essentially Google knows the pages exist, but has decided not to crawl and index them yet.

    In the last couple of months or so, I wanted to make a major update to my site, and before I did so, I wanted to set up a staging site so that I could test changes to see what would happen, before affecting my main website. For those that don’t know, a staging site is an exactly copy/replica of an existing site (a sort of test-bed site if you like).

    I asked my hosting provider about this, and they said that I would need to create a subdomain and then make a copy of the WP database and plonk it in the newly created subdomain. I did exactly this.

    In the last week or so, by accident, I’ve discovered that, using a site: search on Google, not only is my main domain indexed in Googles index, but the subdomain is too! Not only that, but the two pages that I haven’t been able to index (even by manual request), now appear in the index, but obviously under my subdomain!

    The only thing I can now conclude is that Google doesn’t appear to have indexed the troublesome page because of a problem with the page, but with something else, which I still don’t know why! The only thing I can think of trying is to make a copy of the main ‘trouble’ page (on my main domain), delete the original one, and then publish it again, and see what Google does with it?!

    If you understand what I’ve been saying here, anyone any ideas?

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  • In a staging environment, I would recommend checking the box to prohibit indexing by search engines (Settings > Reading). Subdomains are also easy to find, especially since they are stored in the publicly accessible DNS, which is also scanned by bots.

    Why Google behaves in this way when indexing the subpages can hardly be answered in a WordPress forum. If you use an SEO plugin, you could contact their support forum. However, I would recommend asking the question in the Google Search Community: https://support.google.com/webmasters/community?hl=en

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