Single page not appearing in Google Search
- by Dan
Description
I have a static franchise website which has various sub pages each dedicated to an individual franchisee.
For each franchisee the page, the only thing slightly similar between all of them are the page titles, they follow this structure:
<title>
Welcome to THE_COMPANY - PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION Services, THE_LOCATION
</title>
THE_COMPANY and PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION are the same across all franchisees, however THE_LOCATION changes depeding on where they are located in the UK.
Each franchisee page has the following <meta /> tags:
<meta name="DC.creator" content="user"/>
<meta name="DC.format" content="text/html"/>
<meta name="DC.language" content="en"/>
<meta name="DC.date.modified" content="2014-01-23T11:22:31+00:00"/>
<meta name="DC.date.created" content="2014-01-23T11:22:09+00:00"/>
<meta name="DC.type" content="Page"/>
<meta name="DC.distribution" content="Global"/>
<meta name="robots" content="ALL"/>
<meta name="distribution" content="Global"/>
The main content on each franchisee page is completely different.
The Problem
There is one particular franchisee page, located in Area A.. Which will not appear in Google Search results at all. However every single other franchisee (if you Google Search for "THE_COMPANY, THE_LOCATION" is number 1). And if I do the same search on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, the Area A franchisee is the first result on all of them.
Has Google for some reason black listed one page on the site?
What I Have Tried
Ensuring the page is referenced in my sitemap.xml file
'Fetching as Google Bot' the link www.the_company.co.uk/areaa
When that came back as OK I would submit to index
Resubmitting the sitemap.xml file in Webmaster Tools
Linking to the Area A page from another pages content
For this I also waited about 3 weeks before checking again to give Google time to re-index
Making a change to the page content and waiting another 2 / 3 weeks
Removing the page completely and recreating it with an alternative URL
The closest thing I have found to this issue is this StackOverflow question
but this particular franchisee has existed for almost a year, it used to appear on Google searches however no longer does. I'm guessing the Panda update wasn't too happy with something on the page, but it hasn't effected anything else on the site and I am at a loss for things to try.
I would greatly appreciate any information or thoughts as to what could have caused this
Thanks.
Update
In line with Daniel Fukudas answer below, I have followed some of his steps but everything seems to check out alright:
HTTP Headers
HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>
Date => Tue, 25 Feb 2014 16:31:29 GMT
Server => Zope/(2.12.16, python 2.6.6, linux2) ZServer/1.1
Content-Length => 40078
Expires => Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT
Content-Type => text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Language => en
Vary => Accept-Encoding
Connection => close
Robots <meta /> tag:
<meta name="robots" content="ALL"/>
I have updated this <meta /> tag to read content="INDEX" instead now.
robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*sendto_form$
Disallow: /*folder_factories$
Using site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk:
Searching for 'AREA A site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk' does not return the page, but regardless of that searching just for site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk will not necessarily return every indexed page, or so I understand...
Update
It appears Google likes to drop pages every now and then from the index, despite my steps above, I left the site alone and the page appeared back in the SERPs by itself.
