Hi guys!
I recently noticed a major issue with indexing on search engines – i’ve always done fairly well but all of a sudden, a lot of pages haven’t been indexed.
I have taken a look at Google Search Console, and it shows that my sitemap has been processed successfully, and URL’s discovered, but when I look at this sitemap, the URL’s are not any of the URL’s on my website, and all are going to 404 pages. They all also have things like “.photo” or “.wtf” or “.auction” after the links (that are filled with letters and numbers – my links across my website are all human readable). I assume this is my indexing issue.
I am using XML Sitemap plugin to generate the page, but have tried a couple of different plugins to see whether there was an issue with the plugin after any updates, and this doesn’t seem to be the case. I’ve also disabled all plugins and turned on/off each to see if any plugin seemed to be causing the issue, but doesn’t seem to be the case either.
I’m a bit stumped now as to what’s going on, but in the meantime i’m really getting hit with rankings and would love if anyone has any suggestions? We recently updated servers/wordpress, but that was about a month ago and the issues seem to have just started last week.
Any thoughts or help here? I thank you hugely in advance, it’s been worrying me since its happened all weekend!!
Thanks all, Emily