Homestead's Search Engine Optimization

Hello Chris.  I have the website Work Of Art Greeley.  I would like help with SEO please give me a call to discuss.  Thank you!
https://www.workofartgreeley.com/

Chris, how much does this seo cost? www.firstclassballoons.com is our website. thanks

Ok.. I would like help with SEO as well.

www.stlouisaustralianlabradoodles.co,

Hello please have someone call me today to discuss SEO.

please call me at 804-359-3679

I would like someone to get in touch with me about SEO, thanks.  triptrike@live.com 

Hello Dawn,

I can schedule a SEO  agent to reach out and discuss options. What is a good phone number to have them contact you at? 

I'm sorry, got it taken care of elsewhere.  Thanks, have a blessed day.

Hi Homestead,

I have some questions related to search engine rankings. I just posted a question about sitemaps separately. But here are some things that jump out at me looking at the Google Search Console (this is concerning all my sites here at homestead), but specifically www.accessrite.com.
1. It's well known that Google prefers secure (HTTPS:..) sites in terms of rankings. Is there a way to make my site secure? I note that Homestead.com (your home page) is secure.
2. The search console is excluding all or most of my pages as duplicates without user-selected canonical. I think this is because its seeing them in both mobile and non-mobile form and I noticed that they are being hit by the mobile bot.
3. In this case, I really want to mark the non-mobile versions of my pages as canonical as the mobile pages exclude some important information needed for my PC-based audience.
4. I forced google to crawl/index my pages by manually submitting them each individually, but it needs to be automatic and per the sitemap and for some reason I think the mobile bot (Googlebot smartphone) is tripping up on the site map. I may be completely off-base on this, but something isn't working well.

Thanks

Kindly escalate this to the highest levels of engineering possible. Houston, we have a problem.

This is a consolidated discussion concerning Google Indexing and subsequent ranking along with another topic concerning sitemaps. I got my engineering degree many years ago and gradually moved to software development over the last few decades. I started building my own websites in the early 2000’s and researched SEO heavily in the mid-2000’s. Along the way, at times I’ve achieved stellar search engine rankings. I know a fair amount about the importance of keywords and content in SEO, but in the last 10 years, I’ve been busy with my software, so I admit my SEO skills aren’t that current. As an aside and apology in advance, if I sound like a grumpy old man, well, I am old at 64, and looking at the things below, I’m getting very grumpy.

Recently I’ve noticed I can’t get organic rankings no matter what I do and have resorted to paid ad campaigns to get noticed. I discovered Google Search Console recently and started using it as it seems far superior to the old Webmaster Tools. It gives a lot of in-depth information to help understand issues with one’s sites. So, I’ve spent hours last night looking at every page on every one of my sites as Google Search Console sees them. I also discovered that Bing has a better tool for identifying specific problems with the tags and content, but I had to create a CNAME alias record to verify it for them.

Let’s get this straight: Months ago, I verified all my sites in the GSC and submitted sitemaps of all of them except #3 below which is newer. Now here is the horrible summary of what I’ve found:

1.       Only one page on one site seemed to be Indexed per the sitemap and that was the home page.

2.       Most of the rest of pages were indexed (because I’d manually submitted them) but listed as NOT in the Sitemap.

3.       And, here’s the absolute worse thing: Some of my pages were listed as “UNKNOWN” to Google despite being in the sitemap for a long time. Unknown means the page will never show in any search, and, just as bad, the indexing process can’t associate anything on the page with the content of the other pages on the site!

My conclusion is that something is wrong with the sitemap and the graphics below seem to support my suspicions: The robots.txt files are disallowing the sitemaps, and my research indicates that’s the wrong thing to do.

In the last year, I developed four sites here at Homestead, verified them with Google and submitted sitemaps for all of them. Now that I’ve allowed enough time for Google to crawl them, I went back to look at them. I am very upset to find the most incredibly balled up situation imaginable. I believe there are major issues with the way the homestead sites are appearing to Google and this has fouled up any possibility of decent rankings.

The websites I’m referring to are:

1.       iManageInformed.com where I sell my core product.

2.       iSpecQA.com where I sell a companion application to the core product

3.       Accessrite.com which is a new website to sell programming and development services

4.       HVAC-Scams.com which is an informational website about fraud in the heating and air-conditioning service industry

I found that having a secure website (HTTPS) helps a bit with ranking. For some reason, two of the new sites (1 and 4 above) were set up as secure, but others were not. WHY? I didn’t request secure or not secure initially, so I’m curious as to why half appeared as secure and half did not. Did it having something to do with the templates I chose, the phase of the moon or what? Yesterday I asked that they all be switched to secure, but only 3 above was changed. No matter, I’ll get the other one switched too. Realize this entails more work in Google Ads since the landing page URLs change when switching.

But here is the real problem and it occurs with every one of my sites in the Google Search Console. Google apparently can’t use the sitemaps. The sitemaps do appear to be correct and list the individual page URLs. I’m wondering if the problem traces to the robots.txt file disallowing the sitemaps. This is an example of what I see:

I researched this and some say this was done originally to keep sitemaps from appearing in search results, but others say that problem doesn’t happen anymore, and you are, in effect, telling Google not to “crawl” or look at the sitemap. So, perhaps that’s the problem with what I’m seeing.

Let’s start with www.ispec.com. It has four pages, and all are showing severe issues:

Home Page: Indexed (because I submitted it manually) NOT SUBMITTED IN SITEMAP
http://www.ispecqa.com/the-core: Indexed, NOT SUBMITTED IN SITEMAP
http://www.ispecqa.com/pricing URL IS NOT ON GOOGLE  (WOW) | COVERAGE DUPLICATE WITHOUT USER SELECTED CANONICAL | LAST CRAWL 7/19/2019 GOOGLEBOT DESKTOP
http://www.ispecqa.com/features Indexed, NOT SUBMITTED IN SITEMAP

This is really screwed up! All four pages don’t exist in the sitemap, according to Google, but they sure as hell do! That’s why I’m wondering if that robots.txt disallow statement is a large part of the problem.

Here is another clue pointing to this issue. When I inspect the home page URL, here’s what Google Reports which again, seems to point to that disallow statement in the robots.txt file. This is home page! Google is saying it NOT GOOD: ROBOTS.TXT is blocking it:

So, let’s get this fixed as it may be impacting other issues I found!

Claude, I do want to help to the best of my ability and I am doing what I can to research a resolution for what you may be running into but I hope you do understand this is out of Homestead scope of support. We have tested a few WebsiteBuilder sites on our end and were able to successfully get the sitemap submitted and get everything indexed. We definitely want to help where we can, to start can you please send a screen shot of the sitemaps tab?

Thanks, I understand. Perhaps someone changes something on the engineering level since the initial build/testing was done. Feel free to work with me and my sites on testing solutions.
Here is my accessrite.com sitemap as it appears in chrome:

Here is what I'm seeing in GSC (note I had to submit it again today since we switched it to HTTPS)

Thank you for that. If you see a url that was not successfully indexed in GCS under coverage you can click on "inspect url" and then click in the option "request indexing".
Based off the sitemap from your website and what is being pulled into your GSC everything is functioning correctly. There are 10 urls in the site map provided and that coincides with number of urls google is discovering. After provided with the sitemap it is now on google to inspect and decide what they are going to index and Homestead has no control or influence in that process.

Hello Claude,

I did want to reach out to you to provide an update on the escalated issue. The ticket has been closed and here is a copy of the resolution. 

"From google search console we see the sitemap submission was successful. This means that google did not find any errors with the sitemap.

Google provides documentation of the status messages and their meaning in their help documentation.https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451001?hl=en

The robots.txt file contains two directives User-agent: and SITEMAP:, The User-agent: directive gives the option to disallow files or directories from indexing, while the SITEMAP: directive defines the sitemap. The sitemap is not being blocked from the robots.txt file we are actually telling search engines where to find the sitemap.

Google does not Guarantee that they will index or crawl all pages whether they are submitted in the sitemap or found organically. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34441?hl=en
The best place to find answers to any google search console questions is on their help page.https://support.google.com/webmasters#topic=9128571https://support.google.com/webmasters#topic=9128571"

Overall, it would be best to use the GSC support to get more information on how their software functions. If there is any technical issues in the future that we are able to assist with, we would be glad to help out! I hope this addresses your concerns.

I'm going to do a little test. Reconstructing my site at SquareSpace.com and will move the domain over shortly. Let's give it a month to index and see what happens.