2 site collections in the same web app, but only one gets crawled, why?

Question

There is a root web application

• https://webapp.domain.com

And it hosts 2 host-named site collections

• https://sites.domain.com
• https://teams.domain.com

"webapp" is the Content Source. The crawl log show "sites" has numerous "Successes" and "teams" has 0 activity.

This is a rebuilt Search Service Application configured identical to the predecessor and have NOT had this issue previously (rebuilt due to index corruption).

• search permissions are full read on the web app
• checked for crawl rules that would exclude crawling (I also attempted a rule to force/include the missing site collection using the permissions of the farm admin account)
• root site collection exists (crawl worked fine using a previous instance of SSA)
• the default zone web app url is the content source and the index was reset (also new index)

What else should I investigate?

Answer 1

Check the following settings in your SharePoint central administration site:

1. Check the search service application->crawl rule, if there is any custom rule which exclude the teams site.

2. Make sure the root site collection has been created in the web application.

3. Type the default zone Web application URL in the start address in content source, then reset index and start a full crawl.

Answer 2

I resolved this by completely rebuilding Search:

• Deleted the Search Service Application and Search Databases.
• Created an app pool running the farm account.
• Used the Chopra Clean-DB-names script to recreate all search components, running as farm account.

The farm account "over-permissioned" the results ( everybody could see everything ) but I wanted to remove anything that may have been preventing all site collections from being crawled. To resolve this I later went back and edited the SSA to use the Search app pool and Search account. All is working well now.