Updated site disappears from search engines [RESOLVED]

I've updated a site to Evo 1.0.5 and YAMS. Everything appears to be working just fine, but after a week or two it became obvious that the site has completely disappeared from Google and the other major search engines. I've added it to my Google Webmaster Tools and run it through all kinds of diagnostics, which it passes with no problems. I've set up the YAMS sitemap.xml file and registered it with the webmaster tools, and Google seems happy with it. I've even made sure my aliases are the same as they were and set up a block in my .htaccess file to rewrite the old domain.com/english/page.html to the new YAMS-generated domain.com/en/page.html so all the external links from other sites are working.

Does anyone have any experience with something like this? Should I give it another couple of weeks to get adjusted to the new URLs before I try to get help from Google? [ed. note: sottwell last edited this post 14 years, 8 months ago.]

Did you also check your robots.txt?

Yes, it's fine.

Check the headers, it may not be giving off the right header.

The really funny thing is that if I do the site:domain.com search, I get results of the login page which is linked to in the footer of all pages and files in the assets folder linked to in one second-level page for download, all of which I have disallowed in the robots.txt file! It's as if the robots.txt file is being applied in reverse. Although two of the files listed are listed at the old site's location and produce 404 pages.

Having Google fetch pages directly through the Webmaster Tools works just fine.

I don't see anything unusual with the headers. The pages all validate, too.

The site is bmptrans.ch, if anybody can see anything wrong with it I'd be more than grateful.

Ok, I got a rather grumpy response on the Google help forums; it seemed that when I was developing the new site update on my dev subdomain I had put



in the template head to prevent the temporary dev installation from being crawled. Then I stupidly forgot about it and didn't remove it when I moved it to the live server. And that's why I was seeing dowloadable files and the noscript login page; no template with the noindex meta tag!

Just a little remark: The html tag has always lang="en", you could set the cultureKey there as well.
Nice page

It's Evo with YAMS. No culture key.

Had the same problem some while ago after removing the intro on a site :S