Hello,
Can anyone help me troubleshoot why a two-year old site with thousands of users a day has just recently disappeared from search engines/Google? The only recent change had to do with us switching servers from DigitalOcean to AWS, in which case a new environment (called ‘aws’ was created) — WP_ENV
was not initially set to Production, but I have since then redeployed the server and explicitly declared that variable. Here is all I know:
(1) Tried to simply resubmit it through Webmaster tools but Google Search console is saying that the “URL is not available to Google” with a reason being: “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”. This didn’t seem to be the case, and more over, I have since then added: <meta name='robots' content='index, follow' />
(2) The site uses the The SEO Framework plugin, which I have run through every option to ensure it doesn’t interfere — furthermore, had disabled it with no real change.
(3) Search engine visibility under Settings > Reading does not have “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checkbox enabled.
(4) There is an age-gate in place, but it still has all the proper meta tags in place that the search engine should read. I have since then also created a whitelist to allow all crawlers to be able to access the content.
(5) We have a staging site that has a duplicate database in place, but it is not public facing and forces a login to access. For some reason, it doesn’t have a notice displayed via bedrock-disallow-indexing
mu-plugin saying that it is excluded from being indexed, as some of my other sites do. Just to be sure, I have deleted that plugin from the AWS production server to be sure.
None of this has seemed to work, and I still have this issue with the URL inspector in Google Search console that denies the site from being reindexed:
I’m all out of ideas, the only thing I can think of is that maybe there are some additional NGINX configurations or some security/access rules in place on the server level being set in place by the IT team that setup the production server, as they have always made security a top level priority.
Any ideas at all would be greatly appreciated as I am starting to run out of leads at this point.
Thank you!