Site gone from Google WMT

[atlrus]

Anyone having issues with the webmaster tools?

My website has been verified since 2006, today I log in to my account only to be greated by an empty screen - it seems my website is somehow completely gone from my WMT!?! All I see is "HOME" and an "Add a site" button, which does nothing when clicked. No messages or anything.

Also, when I go under my google account, it still shows that I have 1 site verified in 2006...

Google bug maybe?

[lucy24]

Anyone having issues with the webmaster tools?

Yes, but not that. Ever since I declined to give them my cell phone number (on the unimpeachable grounds that I haven't got one) they won't let me past the Home screen: I log in and then get a perpetual-motion spinner. Their intent seems to be more to annoy than to lock me out, though, because all I have to do is dig up some interior page from my browser history and I can waltz right in :)

[tedster]

I got the mobile phone number screen, too - but my declining it hasn't created any problem. Sounds like bugs.

[atlrus]

It is a bug - a browser based one :(

I opened WMT with Firefox and voila - my website is there...One of those days I'll stop using IE...

[johnhh]

Oddly I get same problem for Fetch as Googlebot in WMT in IE, just shows a blank page...

[lucy24]

Holy smokes, they've made a whole new screen. I tried in Safari and they've got pictures of my "two" sites (why do they say it's two when you've explicitly told them that with and without www are the same site, and they're indexing accordingly?), or rather a generic thingie for the non-canonical version and a thumbnail screenshot* of the "real" version, both flagged "Nothing to Report". And there's an option to Sort Alphabetically or Sort By Site Health.

!

Say what now? Can someone with lots and lots of sites shed light? What kinds of stuff would google report in this location if they did have something to report? What does Site Health mean? Should I be worried that the non-canonical address is apparently healthier than the canonical one? :)


* Not a Preview: those are 403'd at the gate by UA. But it's a brand new picture. I just added a new directory last week, and its graphic is there.

[g1smd]

To the OP, click the blue text near top right and it will take you through to the normal screen where your sites are listed.

@lucy example.com and www.example.com ARE two different sites. It's your choice to show the same content on both, so you install a redirect to fix that.

You'd expect shop.example.com and example.com to be different sites, so why do they have to be the same when it's www instead of shop?

There's a post on Google's webmasterhelp site about the Health option. Basically, instead of your sites simply appearing as a list of domains, there's now room for additiional comments next to the new thumbnail. The comments will alert you that there's a problem with the site, rather than having to click through every site in turn one at a time.


By the way, if you log into Google WMT or Analytics with a browser that claims to be Googlebot, you don't get to see any content on any of the pages. :)

[lucy24]

example.com and www.example.com ARE two different sites. It's your choice to show the same content on both

Isn't it the DNS's choice? Or possibly the host's? You have to do extra stuff to register subdomains, and I definitely haven't done it. Don't know if they would even allow www. to be treated separately.

if you log into Google WMT or Analytics with a browser that claims to be Googlebot, you don't get to see any content on any of the pages

Possibly they recognize the robot and suspect it is up to no good ;)

[incrediBILL]

Don't know if they would even allow www. to be treated separately.

Allow it?

Not like they have a choice, it's based on your server configuration.

I got the same garbage when I logged in the other day, a bunch of my domains were listed as both www and non-www, total PITA to clean up

[lucy24]

Not like they have a choice, it's based on your server configuration.

:) I meant "they", the host. The ones who set up the server configuration. Google has got the message, and shows no new information for the non-www site, but I had to add it in just to redirect it to the with-www version. This seems skewed somehow.

I just noticed something earlier in the logs

:: insert boilerplate about looking for something else ::

and went back to double-check. That thumbnail screenshot is supposed to be a Preview; g### tried again to get it at the very moment I opened GWT. Why it should be necessary to show you a Preview of your own site-- surely you know what it looks like?-- is a bit of a mystery. But they had no trouble achieving a thumbnail.

[tedster]

Why it should be necessary to show you a Preview of your own site

I work with scores of sites at any given time. Some are mine and some are clients. Some are closely related to other sites in the same WMT account. I can see how the disambiguation of a preview could be helpful at times.

[g1smd]

You should be registering both www and non-www versions of your domain in WMT. The crawl reports and the linking reports are separate entities for the "two sites".

For www I see Google spidering ~800 pages per day. For the non-www, they look at 2 to 5 pages per day and this alerts me that somewhere there are some links pointing to non-www versions of pages. The link reports show me where those links are.

[lucy24]

I don't care what they crawl, so long as it's all indexed under www. Which it is, now.

But That Other Search Engine gets redirected every single time, from without to with www. This is a slight annoyance, because I'm trying to keep track of redirects to see when it's "safe" to remove some of the bloat from .htaccess.* "Oh, that's only b###, it doesn't count." I've never found a place to specify the preferred form, so they must be doing it of their own volition.


* Helps that I only just took a closer look at one 410'd human search, leading to figuring out one more previously 410 page. And then I tossed a coin on the remaining two, wiping the slate clean of 410s. Except for the two that g### looked at in July, about five minutes before I figured out where those should be redirected, and they haven't been back since. Maybe they picked up a slew of 404s in January when I wasn't paying attention, and have simply given up. But it still leaves that unscratched-itch feeling.

[ohno]

I have redirects setup to direct non www versions of our URL's to the www version. However, in WMT's I only get a thumbnail of the sites homepages for the non www version. Have I done soemthing wrong?

[lucy24]

Do you mean local redirects (via htaccess or your host) or Google prefs settings? Paradoxically, you have to tell them about both sites in order to get them to collapse the two names in indexing. ("No! I'm not www! That's my sister's site. We went through years of probate...")

Incidentally I noticed from the logs that they first asked for the non-www preview*, and were then redirected to the www preview-- at which point they slammed into the 403. So they might have previewed both.

I work with scores of sites at any given time. Some are mine and some are clients. Some are closely related to other sites in the same WMT account. I can see how the disambiguation of a preview could be helpful at times.

"I have a grandson named Charlie!? Oh, right, the one with buck teeth." ;) But they're not so nearly identical that you need previews, are they? The thumbnail is 140x100px.


* Logs don't give the domain name-- with or without www-- but when it's the / page being redirected, there's not much else it can mean.