Help with SEO & Hugo - sitemap processed but no indexing being done

darrenaddy · December 13, 2022, 8:24pm

I’ve gone LIVE with my first Hugo site for one of our companies and we’ve disappeared from Google. This is probably the biggest screw-up I’ve ever made as a webdev. Obviously it has my attention now and I seriously need some advice. I don’t want my employer to sour on Hugo when the problem is between the keyboard and the chair.

I THINK that I’ve fixed the problem, so that I now have meta description and meta keywords and the sitemap.xml being generated correctly. I was hoping that someone could look at my repository and tell me if I have anything that could be improved. https://github.com/darrenaddy/1

My Google search console for the domain is now showing that the “Sitemap processed successfully” and has 157 discovered URLs, but the “SEE INDEX COVERAGE” is greyed out and when I look at the Pages section it is showing only one page of the new Hugo-generated site as being crawled. Not a Hugo question - but is there something I need to do to get Google to try to index the discovered URLs again?

jmooring · December 13, 2022, 9:32pm

Your baseURL is http://triadmachines.com/. So your sitemap.xml contains entries like:

<loc>http://triadmachines.com/machine/material_cart/</loc>

So each of your pages is available at both http://foo and https://foo, and none of your pages includes a meta element pointing the canonical URL.

Ideally any request to http://foo is redirected to https://foo, either via DNS or your hosting setup.

Change your baseURL, and resubmit the sitemap.

devsr-gt · December 14, 2022, 12:10am

Please look into the google indexing api. This repository is an example of what can be done.

This will help once you rectify the problems that Joe said to fix. It will help index the site quicker. Learning curve is steep so is not figuring it out.

Look at your title tags and meta tags. The homepage tag is Home Page. This is does not accurately describe the business.

You can see an example of what I have done here.

The new dynamic has done it better and has it in a module.

I tried to recreate yoast only without the image indexing problem. I would look specifically at the head section. Also your site looks beautiful and I don’t think it should go away.

I would download a program like screaming frog to check your 404 errors and other errors. In my opinion i think websites links are daisy chained (like a christmas tree) if you have errors it erase thousands of links (christmas lights if one goes down) internal links and inbound links from other websites. So if you have a page that is linked to from a bunch of other websites like steelfasterners. whatever and your page is showing 404 your site will fall because the daisy chain is broken. Your site currently has 128 404 errors. That is alot because imagine every page that your have has 48 links on it thats 6,144 and yes i used a calculator. Thats a lot of broken christmas tree lights.

There are insecure request to http: . I don’t think google has yet nailed people to the wall for that yet but i believe if you run a tool and see your errors you will fix your problems. Transferring sites to hugo is risky and I feel like people like you are trying to fix the internet and not break it. At the end of the day google is a machine and doesnt discriminate. It only sees code and does not see anything else.

I would also look into how Larry Page and Sergey Brin started google. They were both English buffs. They built the search engines based off annotation like in a book. The more references to a page means the more important it is and the more value it passes. Imagine your best page 404ing.

I know this is a lot of information but I would look into it.

All of these urls below dont work (404 error) and if you fix them it will help. This will also help you index. Godspeed with your hugo project. Turn your lights back on.

Specifically Check

The resource from “https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Lato:900|Open+Sans:300,300i,400,400i,600,600i,700,700i|Raleway:300,300i,400,400i,500,500i,600,600i,700,700i&display=swap” was blocked due to MIME type (“text/html”) mismatch (X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff).

Try Self Hosting your fonts. It will improve speed and it won’t rely on other servers.

Check your errors in chrome or firefox.

chrillek · December 14, 2022, 9:48am

And it will avoid problems with the European GDPDR. At least in Germany, some lawyers go bonkers over Google-hosted fonts.

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Help with SEO & Hugo - sitemap processed but no indexing being done

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