Only the homepage is indexed by Google

[franklinaveblvd]

Hi everyone, I've set up a website on a relative domain name that I've acquired through auction with decent metrics, relative backlinks, no manual penalties and clear of spam. It's a directory style site with several thousand pages including blog/info but most are directory pages.

It's been about 4 months now of consistent optimization, performance improvements(1sec desk/ 2sec mobile) and link building but pages are nowhere to be seen on google except the main page. All pages have been broken down and added to proper sitemaps + sitemap index, double-and-triple checked the robots.txt and htaccess files as well. Attaching some stats. Bing/Yahoo are doing great btw.

I understand that it takes some time for google to index the whole site but it should've at least picked up the blog posts by now which have backlinks pointing from some authority sites. Am I missing something here? Any help is appreciated

 

[SunnyLeon]

Any manual actions on it? I have a somewhat similar problem, one of the websites get's its new pages indexed in over a month, with or without backlinks and it has a lot of powerful links already but 4 months? That's a lot. Your readers can't find out any news from you if it takes half a year for the news to show up..

 

[franklinaveblvd]

Any manual actions on it? I have a somewhat similar problem, one of the websites get's its new pages indexed in over a month, with or without backlinks and it has a lot of powerful links already but 4 months? That's a lot. Your readers can't find out any news from you if it takes half a year for the news to show up..

Nothing in manual actions and it does sound like a similar situation.

My other guess would be the 301 https redirect. Currently redirecting the root domain with + w/o www and wild card to https://domain.com, perhaps I messed up something here

 

[The Universe Legend]

Nothing in manual actions and it does sound like a similar situation.

My other guess would be the 301 https redirect. Currently redirecting the root domain with + w/o www and wild card to https://domain.com, perhaps I messed up something here

This might happen if you have been using http before, so you must re-send the sitemap.

 

[franklinaveblvd]

This might happen if you have been using http before, so you must re-send the sitemap.

Thank you for the suggestion, sitemaps have been re-submitted a while back as well.

After my last response, I decided to re-check the redirects once again and noticed that there was a redirect in cPanel that I remember specifically removing but it was still there which is removed now.

Another thing I came across while researching yesterday is that if you are using Cloudflare's free account - it does not support SSL certificates. You will need to go to DNS settings and take the orange cloud off of the domain and CNAME WWW as well.

The .htaccess file contains this code only:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Will wait and see now, and update if any progress.

 

[The Universe Legend]

Thank you for the suggestion, sitemaps have been re-submitted a while back as well.

After my last response, I decided to re-check the redirects once again and noticed that there was a redirect in cPanel that I remember specifically removing but it was still there which is removed now.

Another thing I came across while researching yesterday is that if you are using Cloudflare's free account - it does not support SSL certificates. You will need to go to DNS settings and take the orange cloud off of the domain and CNAME WWW as well.

The .htaccess file contains this code only:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Will wait and see now, and update if any progress.

Waiting for your update

 

[franklinaveblvd]

Waiting for your update

Not much of an update here yet, but after some more research I unplugged the site from cloudflare, seems like it might cause some issues with indexing and wanted to eliminate the possibility. Waiting on google to index now.