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  • February 15, 2019 at 6:37 pm #1067515
    ThisTime

    Hi

    I am having difficulty with a website I’ve recently launched:

    Home

    using the current Enfold theme.

    The client was keen for it to be launched quickly to replace an old site, so I did that.
    Everything appeared to work well in desktop and mobile browsers, so the launch went ahead.
    It was only when I installed Yoast SEO and discovered an alert that the home page couldn’t be indexed by googlebot.
    Sure enough, from within Google Search Console it was confirmed there was a 5xx error. I thought this was odd since there’s no indication of any problem with normal browsing.
    In my troubleshooting, I’ve done numerous online searches for people encountering similar problems.
    I’ve looked at robots.txt, htaccess, theme configurations etc. but so far I’ve drawn a blank.
    I’ve now deactivated all extraneous WordPress plugins (except for Yoast SEO) and still Google can’t index the site’s home page. Other pages on the site seem to have been indexed okay and are appearing in the search results.
    I’ve wondered if there could be a legacy issue, because the new website replaces a previous one (by a different designer using a different theme). I’d renamed all the old pages and put them in the WordPress ‘bin’.

    In twenty-odd years, I’ve never encountered anything like this.

    What is also different on this occasion, is that the domain and website are hosted by GoDaddy on this client’s own account. Could GoDaddy’s system have cached outdated settings somehow that are still being served?

    Note: Although Search Console was initially showing a 5xx error, other validation sites appear to be showing 404 errors – even though the new site has always worked in browsers.

    It’s a real puzzle that I’d welcome your thoughts and suggestions on.

    Thanks

    February 18, 2019 at 7:18 am #1068153
    Rikard

    Hey ThisTime,

    Are you using the custom 404 page in the theme? If so then please try to turn that off to see if anything changes. If not then please post admin login details in private so that we can have a closer look.

    Best regards,
    Rikard

    February 18, 2019 at 2:44 pm #1068379
    ThisTime

    Hi Rikard

    Thanks for responding.

    Yes, I had previously been using the Custom 404 Page – and it is one of the things I’d turned-off in my troubleshooting. However, because I’ve also been making so many other changes in my troubleshooting it’s hard at the moment for me to isolate the cause to just one thing. Also, I think it may have taken time for Google to have responded to any of those changes, which didn’t help.

    The good thing is that something somewhere has indeed made a difference, and in Google Search Console this morning I could see that the Home page had now been crawled, but not indexed – and there was a link to do that. I clicked it and upon doing a site: search in Google I could see it had now been included. Better still, on then doing a search for the page’s main keyphrase, it appeared in No: 3 in the search results, so I’m very happy about that.

    From your experience, if you think the Custom 404 Page can cause 5xx errors I’ll keep it in mind for the future.
    It would be a pity though, because it’s otherwise a useful feature.

    Thanks again!

    February 19, 2019 at 7:02 am #1068783
    Rikard

    Hi,

    Thanks for the update. We’ve had a bit of problems with that functionality unfortunately, but that should be fixed in a future release of the theme. If it was the theme functionality which caused your problems then we are very sorry for the problem.

    Best regards,
    Rikard

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