Just some advice regarding how long indexing takes on a total site revision

Hi everyone. I originally had thousands of items listed on my website and decided to totally revise the site down to one specific product line of about 220 items. I resubmitted the new site map a month ago and the new index page is not being indexed. I have one page "specials" that is showing up in the google search but either 1) I'm doing something wrong or 2) I'm not being patient enough for it to sort out.

https://www.cheapsheetmusic.com is the site and the one that's being index'd is https://www.cheapsheetmusic.com/index.php?main_page=specials

I'm not a programmer..just your typical small biz guy trying to get ranked.....thx for any advice

mrmcastle:

Hi everyone. I originally had thousands of items listed on my website and decided to totally revise the site down to one specific product line of about 220 items. I resubmitted the new site map a month ago and the new index page is not being indexed. I have one page "specials" that is showing up in the google search but either 1) I'm doing something wrong or 2) I'm not being patient enough for it to sort out.

https://www.cheapsheetmusic.com is the site and the one that's being index'd is https://www.cheapsheetmusic.com/index.php?main_page=specials

I'm not a programmer..just your typical small biz guy trying to get ranked.....thx for any advice

You have a great deal more indexed than that (Google)

Big changes like this cause a sandboxing period. The search engines are trying to figure out what happened.... If the site was hacked, changed hands, etc. The length of time in the sandbox is 100% based on the historical quality of the website. There's nothing really effective you can do to help. Creating a sitemap is helpful, but it's not in your robots.txt (https://www.cheapsheetmusic.com/robots.txt)

Change your robots.txt to

Sitemap: https://www.cheapsheetmusic.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi_bin/

I would also recommend a sitemap generator that actually crawls your site. This help identify issues like redirects, broken links etc.

Your textual content on the site is very good and not duplicate. You need to complete your shipping policy page & conditions of use... Legally you need them and Google looks for them to increase how your website is trusted.

It's a waiting game.

~Melanie

Ok great thank you for the advice on the robot.txt file. But I'm having a major problem with conditions and shipping links. What's really weird is my privacy notice is working fine. If I go into my define pages area, both the conditions and shipping info have the data but it isn't showing up! I'm fairly certain the problem is I have the website opening to a particular category (specials) and those php files can't be found. But again, it's so weird that it still can find the privacy notice... I don't get it. Any advice or suggestions is appreciated

Under Configuration >> Define Page Status > Check that these pages are enabled with a setting of 1

Well, I'm still stuck in the sandbox. Here's a current update: Google's page indexing status shows 27 pages in the webiste. 25 of those pages are non-existent and they date as far back as August 5th. I figured Google would re-index my site after sitting in the sandbox but now I'm really starting to wonder. I'm sure my robots file is correct. I'm sure my sitemap is correct and I've ping'd Google a few times over these months to see if it would update the site but nothing. At this point I'm starting to wonder if my only solution is to remove the website from google and then re-submit it. I hate to do that but I don't know how long I want to wait to get index'd. Thanks for any advice.

mrmcastle:

Well, I'm still stuck in the sandbox. Here's a current update: Google's page indexing status shows 27 pages in the webiste. 25 of those pages are non-existent and they date as far back as August 5th.
Google has 488 if your pages indexed.

mrmcastle:

I figured Google would re-index my site after sitting in the sandbox but now I'm really starting to wonder. I'm sure my robots file is correct.
Yep
mrmcastle:

I'm sure my sitemap is correct and I've ping'd Google a few times over these months to see if it would update the site but nothing.

Have you created any new pages? Pinging Google without new content is like crying wolf. I did just notice that your robots.txt says your domain uses the www, however, your sitemap does not, your website works with both canonicals, but your rel-canonicals are non-www ... Google seems to favor non-www.

mrmcastle:

At this point I'm starting to wonder if my only solution is to remove the website from google and then re-submit it. I hate to do that but I don't know how long I want to wait to get index'd. Thanks for any advice.
Hate is an understatement, I hope you don't rely on any income from your website because you would never recover your rank.

~Melanie