Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
-
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
-
Just wanted to update this, it took a month but since I decided to completely remove canonical tags and try and handle duplicate content with url rewrites and 301 redirects and I now have 114 out of 149 indexed from my sitemap which is much better. it ended up to dropping to 5 out of 149 at one point.
-
Hi Stephen,
Great that you've probably found the cause - this will absolutely cause mass de-indexation. I had a client a year ago canonicalise their entire site (two sites, actually) to the home page. All their rankings and indexed pages dropped off over a matter of about six days (we spotted the tag immediately but the fix went into a "queue" - ugh!).
The bad news is that it took them a long time to get properly re-indexed and regain their rankings (I am talking months, not weeks). Having said this, the sites were nearly brand new - they had very few backlinks and were both less than six months old. I do not believe that an older site would have had as much problem regaining rankings, but I can't be sure and I have only seen that situation take place first-hand once.
-
I may have found the issue today. Most of the articles are pulled from a database and I think I placed a wrong canonical tag on the page which screwed up everything. Does anyone know how long it takes before a fix like this will show?
-
Thats a good catch, I fixed that. I do use that in WMT and it has been fine for the longest time. I guess its not that big of an issue, my main concern was the pages being indexed. Was reading another Q&A thing and used the info: qualifer to check some of the pages and all the ones I checked are indexed and its more then the 11. I just don't understand why its dropped all a sudden, and if that number really means anything.
-
How are the indexed numbers looking in WMT today? I see 3,370 results for a site: search on the domain, but those can be iffy in terms of up to date accuracy: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agoautohub.com&oq=site%3Agoautohub.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.798j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8
Not that this should matter too much if you are submitting a sitemap through WMT but your robots.txt file specifies sitemap.xml. There is a duplciate sitemap on that URL (http://goautohub.com/sitemap.xml) - are you using sitemap.php, which you mention here, in WMT? .php can be used for sitemaps, but I would update the robots.txt file to reflect the correct URL - http://i.imgur.com/uSB1P1g.png, whichever is meant to be right. I am not aware of problems with having duplicate sitemaps, as long as they are identical, but I'd use just one if it were me.
-
Thanks for checking, I haven't found anything yet.The site is goautohub.com. it's a custom site and the site map file is auto generated. It's goautohub.com/sitemap.php. I've done it like that for over a year. I did start seeing an error message about high response times and I've been working on improving that. It makes since because we have been advertising more to get the site seen. In regards to the rest of Williams points I have checked those but no improvement yet. Thank you
-
Hi Stephen,
Checking in to see if you had checked the points William has raised above. Do you see anything that could have resulted in the drop? Also, are you comfortable sharing the site here? We might be able to have a look too (feel free to PM if you are not comfortable sharing publicly).
Cheers,
Jane
-
Try to determine when the drop off started, and try to remember what kinds of changes the website was going through during that time. That could help point to the reason for the drop in indexing.
There are plenty of reasons why Google may choose not to index pages, so this will take some digging. Here are some places to start the search:
-
Check your robots.txt to ensure those pages are still crawlable
-
Check to make sure the content on those pages isn't duplicated somewhere else on the Web.
-
Check to see if there was any updates to canonical changes on the site around when the drop started
-
Check to make sure the sitemap currently on the site matches the one you submitted to Webmasters, and that your CMS didn't auto-generate a new one
-
Make sure the quality of the pages is worth indexing. You said your traffic didn't really take a hit, so it's not de-indexing your quality stuff.
-
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
URLs dropping from index (Crawled, currently not indexed)
I've noticed that some of our URLs have recently dropped completely out of Google's index. When carrying out a URL inspection in GSC, it comes up with 'Crawled, currently not indexed'. Strangely, I've also noticed that under referring page it says 'None detected', which is definitely not the case. I wonder if it could be something to do with the following? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ranking-index-drop-30192.html - It seems to be a bug affecting quite a few people. Here are a few examples of the URLs that have gone missing: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/sexual-harassment-awareness-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/conflict-resolution-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/prevent-duty-training Any help here would be massively appreciated!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
Indexing product attributes in sitemap
Hey Mozzers! I'm battling a few questions about the sitemap for my ecommerce store. Could you help me out? Is it necessary to include your product attributes in the sitemap? I'm not sure why it would matter to have a sitemap that lists everything in the color cherry. Also, if the attributes were included in the sitemap, would that count as duplicate content for the same products to show up in multiple attributes? Is there any benefit to submitting the sitemaps individually? For example, submitting /product-sitemap.xml, /product_brand-sitemap.xml versus just /sitemap.xml? Any other best practices for managing my ecommerce sitemap, or great resources, would be very helpful. Thank you! a1vUz
Technical SEO | | localwork0 -
When creating parent and child pages should key words be repeated in url and page title?
We are in the direct mail advertising business: PrintLabelAndMail.com Example: Parent:
Technical SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach
Postcard Direct Mail Children:
Postcard Mailings
Postcard Design
Postcard Samples
Postcard Pricing
Postcard Advantages should "postcard" be repeated in the URL and Page Title? and in this example should each of the 5 children link back directly to the parent or would it be better to "daisy chain" them using each as parent for the next?0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
How to stop my webmail pages not to be indexed on Google ??
when i did a search in google for Site:mywebsite.com , for a list of pages indexed. Surprisingly the following come up " Webmail - Login " Although this is associated with the domain , this is a completely different server , this the rackspace email server browser interface I am sure that there is nothing on the website that links or points to this.
Technical SEO | | UIPL
So why is Google indexing it ? & how do I get it out of there. I tried in webmaster tool but I could not , as it seems like a sub-domain. Any ideas ? Thanks Naresh Sadasivan0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in sitemap?
Hello, I have found that from an HTML (not xml) sitemap of a website, a page has been listed twice. Is it okay or will it be considered duplicate content? Both the links use same anchor text, but different urls that redirect to another (final) page. I thought ideal way is to use final page in sitemap (and in all internal linking), not the intermediate pages. Am I right?
Technical SEO | | StickyRiceSEO1