Google Sitemap only indexing 50% Is that a problem?
-
We have about 18,000 pages submitted on our Google Sitemap and only about 9000 of them are indexed. Is this a problem?
We have a script that creates a sitemap on a daily basis and it is submitted on a daily basis. Am I better off only doing it once a week? Is this why I never get to the full 18,000 indexed?
-
My robots, tags and redirects are all good now. Any other things to look at?
-
Have you done some troubleshooting? If there's that much of a % change, did you check your robots, tags, redirects, etc. to see if any of the technical side may be hindering indexing?
-
It is a large e-commerce site with pretty much the exact situation described. We re did the site about 6 weeks ago and the site before was always close to 100% indexed. It was about 17900 out of 18000.
-
Great answer Donford. We have a large site, with many items that are basically the same but usually have one different attribute value. So Google will typical index a parent page and list the rest as:
Results 1 - 15 of 15 – Medium Duty - Swivel Top Plate - Capacity to 400 lbs ...
So even though the page may not be in the primary index, it will still help the visitor get to what they are looking for. So I would advise grabbing a snippet of text on a page not indexed and using it as a query to see if this is the case.
-
Google will index more as they find value in more links. The last ecommerce site I worked on had 12,000 pages as of the end of the year they were 85% indexed.
It is quite common from my experience for larger sites to take awhile to be fully indexed if ever at all. Here is what Goolge says about ensuring proper setup, but other then what they say, its all about content and uniqueness. A particular challenge for some e-commerce sites whom sell items that are similar in nature. Like 1/2"x1" screw vs 5/8" x 1" screw. Its very hard to develop unique content for items that similar.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My website is my name. Overnight it went from being the number one google search to not showing up at all when you google my name. Why would this happen?
I built my website via square space. It is my name. If you google my name it was the number one hit. Suddenly 2 weeks ago it doesn't show up AT ALL. I went through square spaces SEO check list, secured my site etc. Still doesn't show up. Why would this happen all of the sudden and What can I do? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jbark0 -
Best Practice Approaches to Canonicals vs. Indexing in Google Sitemap vs. No Follow Tags
Hi There, I am working on the following website: https://wave.com.au/ I have become aware that there are different pages that are competing for the same keywords. For example, I just started to update a core, category page - Anaesthetics (https://wave.com.au/job-specialties/anaesthetics/) to focus mainly around the keywords ‘Anaesthetist Jobs’. But I have recognized that there are ongoing landing pages that contain pretty similar content: https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ https://wave.com.au/asa/ We want to direct organic traffic to our core pages e.g. (https://wave.com.au/job-specialties/anaesthetics/). This then leads me to have to deal with the duplicate pages with either a canonical link (content manageable) or maybe alternatively adding a no-follow tag or updating the robots.txt. Our resident developer also suggested that it might be good to use Google Index in the sitemap to tell Google that these are of less value? What is the best approach? Should I add a canonical link to the landing pages pointing it to the category page? Or alternatively, should I use the Google Index? Or even another approach? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Google only indexing the top 2/3 of my page?
HI, I have a page that is about 5000 lines of code total. I was having difficulty figuring out why the addition of a lot of targeted, quality content to the bottom of the pages was not helping with rankings. Then, when fetching as Google, I noticed that only about 3300 lines were getting indexed for some reason. So naturally, that content wasn't going to have any effect if Google in not seeing it. Has anyone seen this before? Thoughts on what may be happening? I'm not seeing any errors begin thrown by the page....and I'm not aware of a limit of lines of code Google will crawl. Pages load under 5 seconds so loading speed shouldn't be the issue. Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yandl1 -
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Google is indexing the wrong pages
I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself. I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post. a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same. In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Google Processing but Not Indexing XML Sitemap
Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange. I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern. Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has. The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning. Anyone know what's going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Removing content from Google's Indexes
Hello Mozers My client asked a very good question today. I didn't know the answer, hence this question. When you submit a 'Removing content for legal reasons report': https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_legalother?product=websearch will the person(s) owning the website containing this inflammatory content recieve any communication from Google? My clients have already had the offending URL removed by a court order which was sent to the offending company. However now the site has been relocated and the same content is glaring out at them (and their potential clients) with the title "Solicitors from Hell + Brand name" immediately under their SERPs entry. **I'm going to follow the advice of the forum and try to get the url removed via Googles report system as well as the reargard action of increasing my clients SERPs entries via Social + Content. ** However, I need to be able to firmly tell my clients the implications of submitting a report. They are worried that if they rock the boat this URL (with open access for reporting of complaints) will simply get more inflammatory)! By rocking the boat, I mean, Google informing the owners of this "Solicitors from Hell" site that they have been reported for "hosting defamatory" content. I'm hoping that Google wouldn't inform such a site, and that the only indicator would be an absence of visits. Is this the case or am I being too optimistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
Need to duplicate the index for Google in a way that's correct
Usually duplicated content is a brief to fix. I find myself in a little predicament: I have a network of career oriented websites in several countries. the problem is that for each country we use a "master" site that aggregates all ads working as a portal. The smaller nisched sites have some of the same info as the "master" sites since it is relevant for that site. The "master" sites have naturally gained the index for the majority of these ads. So the main issue is how to maintain the ads on the master sites and still make the nische sites content become indexed in a way that doesn't break Google guide lines. I can of course fix this in various ways ranging from iframes(no index though) and bullet listing and small adjustments to the headers and titles on the content on the nisched sites, but it feels like I'm cheating if I'm going down that path. So the question is: Have someone else stumbled upon a similar problem? If so...? How did you fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gustav-Northclick0