Copied website not indexed by Google

Hi all,

I am new to discourse but have been using grav now since a few years. Thanks for the great work here.

Some site I have up and running is nice and I want to reuse its theme and some of its content.
I thought doing a backup to copy the backup over to a new server (extract it there) and make it visible under another URL, modify content and pictures and done.

But here is my question:

• A few months now but the new website (derived from the backup) does still not show up on google, even when I search for the exact URL in google it is not found. Why is that? Is a backup from one site not suited to use as a starting point for another website? The old website from which I derived the backup is well indexed in google.

I have some ideas why the backup might not be ideal as a starting point for a new website but couldn't quite figure out why this prevents a derived site to be unique and visible to google.

1. Maybe some unique identifieres (like security tokens) have to be recreated?

Did anyone of you try a similar approach to reuse an grav installation?

Or does anyone here have a suggestion how to edit the new website so that it becomes an indepentent and visible website?

Thanks for any hints.

Do you have different robots.txt on a new site maybe?

@MJR, Google only indexes sites it can find...

• Is there any other indexed site that links to your site?
• Did you submit your site to Google?

And there may be other reasons why Google doesn't index it

• Google might consider the website to be not relevant or trustworthy.
  • Is the content different enough from the original website?
  • Does it have a different sitemap?
  • Does it...
• Has the Google bot been blocked in robots.txt
• Have your pages been set to noindex?
• Other reasons...?

Hi @Karmalakas,

thanks for the hint to robots.txt. Actually I didn't change the robots.txt. Here is the content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /grav/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /system/
Disallow: /vendor/
Disallow: /user/
Allow: /user/pages/
Allow: /user/themes/
Allow: /user/images/
Allow: /
Allow: *.css$
Allow: *.js$
Allow: /system/*.js$

which is the default grav robots.txt.

That should not cause the problem then, right?

@MJR, OK, the initial issue seems to be solved. Please mark the issue as such.

I don't think the redirect error has anything to do with Grav as long as its defaults are being used.

Google gives a few reasons what could have gone wrong. You will have to inspect the urls in all your sites. You might find some directions/suggestions on the web about tackling these issues. You're not the first...

Just for the sake of completeness in this thread I am looking into the http -> https redirection of my hosting. This may cause some so-called redirection loop or chain that google complains about.

Actually, in the time searching for a solution to the problem of not showing up on google, the grav option "force ssl" may have an impact on a valid redirection chain. I can't explain the details, as I don't know enough about it. But the hosting service is probably doing a redirect automatically?

Meanwhile I try the setting of "force-ssl" in grav and see if this changes the judgement of google.

@MJR:
the hosting service is probably doing a redirect automatically

You need to ask your host. That would be a sane thing to do by default. Commodity hosts often don't do sensible things though.