Going Bald Pulling My Hair Out On This One
- SEO |
So I had this site indexing pages just fine, traffic was growing, everything was looking awesome. I decided to try and have the pages load faster to have the pages rank higher. I changed some cache/java settings with moving to Cloudflare CDN.
This destroyed my traffic as all pages stopped being indexed but the home page. Whats messed up is nothing would get indexed. Showed the pages were fine and could be indexed, but would never get indexed. With this my child sitemaps would not get read. Before it had no problems reading the sitemap.
After pulling my half my hair out trying to figure out what happen, I dumped Cloudflare. This did not fix the issue.
I changed my cache to wp-optimize from fastest cache and my Yoast SEO to Rank Math thinking it may have compatibility issues. That wasn't the problem, It still wont index pages or read my sitemap. Thats when the rest of the hair went lol.
So right now I have the site loading pretty fast, faster than before (no CDN). Schema/enhancements look good, showing no issues (took time to get it right). The robot.txt is not blocking anything and has the sitemap in it. I see nothing wrong with the index.php and htacces files. I have index now APIs for Google & Bing, both are working perfectly.
I been working on this for weeks now and out of ideas. The main thing is why it wont read the childs sitemap. I changed the sitemap a few times, it will process it, show the same discovered URLs for weeks with no child sitemaps. The home page gets indexed no problem, but that even says its not in the sitemap.
I know it takes time, but going from 1600 pages to 1 and staying at 1, time is not the problem.
Anyone have any tips on what to look for?