Troubleshooting Google Crawling Issues Following Domain Reactivation and Content Overhaul

In the world of SEO and website management, maintaining visibility on search engines is vital, especially after making significant changes to your site. Recently, a website owner faced a common but challenging problem: Google stopped crawling their site following a domain reactivation and substantial content updates. Here’s an overview of the situation and some expert insights on how to address it.

Understanding the Situation

The website in question originally operated as a news portal, housing approximately 413 articles. After a period of inactivity and deactivation—lasting about four months—the owner decided to reactivate the domain. With the reactivation, a complete content rebrand was undertaken: all previous articles were deleted, and new, entirely different content was published.

However, shortly after these changes, the website experienced issues with Google Search Console: the sitemap was not recognized, and only a handful of pages (about 15) were being crawled compared to the original 413 pages. Furthermore, some articles appeared with temporary errors in Search Console, indicating crawling difficulties.

Key Details

• The site is managed with the Yoast SEO plugin, which is a common and reliable tool for sitemap management and SEO optimization.
• The primary concern is the absence of crawl coverage on the new content, which hampers the site’s visibility on Google.

Recommendations for Resolving Crawl Issues

1. Verify and Resubmit Your Sitemap:
2. Ensure that your sitemap is correctly generated in Yoast seo.
3. Submit the updated sitemap through Google Search Console to inform Google of your new content structure.

4. Check for any errors or warnings in Search Console related to your sitemap.

5. Use the URL Inspection Tool:

6. Utilize Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool to test individual pages.
7. Submit the most important URLs to prompt Google to crawl them promptly.

8. Confirm that pages return a ‘Live’ status and review any crawling issues.

9. Check Robots.txt and Meta Tags:

10. Verify that your robots.txt file is not blocking Google bots from crawling your site or specific pages.

11. Ensure that no meta directives (like noindex) are unintentionally preventing indexing.

12. Implement Proper Redirects and Remove Old Content:

13. Since old articles were deleted, consider setting up 301 redirects from URLs of deleted pages to relevant existing pages (if any) to prevent 404 errors.
14. Use Google Search Console’s