Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added

[Kingalan1]

Greetings MOZ Community:

On June 14th Google Webmaster tools indicated an increase in the number of indexed pages, going from 676 to 851 pages. New  pages had been added to the domain in the previous month. The number of pages blocked by robots increased at that time from 332 (June 1st) to 551 June 22nd), yet the number of indexed pages still increased to 851.

The following changes occurred between June 5th and June 15th:

-A new redesigned version of the site was launched on June 4th, with some links to social media and blog removed on some pages, but with no new URLs added. The design platform was and is Wordpress.

-Google GTM code was added to the site.

-An exception was made by our hosting company to ModSecurity on our server (for i-frames) to allow GTM to function.

In the last ten days my web traffic has decline about 15%, however the quality of traffic has declined enormously and the number of new inquiries we get is off by around 65%. Click through rates have declined from about 2.55 pages to about 2 pages.

Obviously this is not a good situation.

My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline.

My developer is examining the issue. They think there may be some tie in with the installation of GTM. They are noticing an additional issue, the sites Contact Us form will not work if the GTM script is enabled. They find it curious that both issues occurred around the same time.

Our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader. Does anyone have any idea why these extra pages are appearing and how they can be removed? Anyone have experience with GTM causing issues with this?

Thanks everyone!!!
Alan

[Kingalan1]

Yes, and I appreciate it!
Alan

[EGOL]

I did what I asked you to do.

1. 2. 3. 4. in my first post and repeated frequently.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Egol:

How did you locate this duplicate or re-published content?

Obviously what you have pointed out is a major source of concern so I ran Copyscape search this afternoon for duplicate content and did not locate any the URLs you mention in the "this", "this" link above. It appears you entered the URL of the blog post in Google's search bar. Would that work? This method would be pretty slow going with 600 URLs.

Thanks,
Alan

[EGOL]

Those are the 448 URLs from your website that have been filtered.

You should find garbage in them like shown below.

Have you done what I have suggested three times above?   Do that if you want to identify the problem pages.

• www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

  A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

• www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

  A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

• www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

  A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Egol:

Thanks for the suggestion.

When I click on _ repeat the search with the omitted results included _I get 448 results not the entire 859 results. Seems very strange. Some of these URLS have light content but I don't believe they are dups. I don't see any content outside our website when I click this.

Am I doing something wrong? I would think the total of 859 would appear not 447 URLs.

Thanks!!
Alan

[EGOL]

I don't know.  You should ask someone who knows a lot about canonicalization.

Did you drill down through all of those indexed pages to see if you can identify all of them?

I've suggested it twice.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Egol:

In the content of launching an upgraded site, could the canonicalization have implemented incorrectly? That could account for 175 pages sudden new content as the thin content has been there for some time.

I am particularly suspicious regarding canonicalization as there was an issue involving multi page URLs of property listings when the site was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress last Summer.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Alan

[EGOL]

Apparently infitter24.rssing.com/chan-13023009/all is poaching my content, taking my original content and adding it to there site. I am not quiet sure what to do about that.

You can have an attorney demand that they stop, you can file DMCA complaints. Be careful

**However it does not explain the sudden appearance of the 175 pages on Googles index **

1. Do this query:  site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

2. Start drilling down the SERPs.  One page at a time.   Look for content that you didn't make.   Look for duplicates.

3. Get a spreadsheet that has all of your URLs.  Drill down through the SERPs checking every one of them.   Can you account for your pagination.  You have a lot of it and that type of page is usually rubbish in the index.  Combine, canonicalize, or get rid of them.

[Kingalan1]

Hi Egol:

Thanks so much for taking the time for your thorough response!!

Apparently infitter24.rssing.com/chan-13023009/all is poaching my content, taking my original content and adding it to there site. I am not quiet sure what to do about that.

You have pointed out something very useful and I appreciate it and will act upon it. However it does not explain the sudden appearance of the 175 pages on Googles index that did not appear at the end of May and somehow coincided with uploading of the new version of our website in early June. Any ideas???

Thanks,
Alan

[EGOL]

1. Do this query:  site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

2. Start drilling down the SERPs.  One page at a time.   Look for content that you didn't make.   Look for duplicates.

3. When you drill down about 44 pages you will find this...

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 440 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

The bad stuff is usually behind that link.  Google doesn't want to show that stuff to people.   It could be thin, it could be duplicate, it could be spammy, they just might not like it.

4. Find out what is in there.

Possible problems that I see....

I see dupe content like this and this.  Either your guys are grabbin' somebodyelse's content or they are grabbin' yours.  Can get you in trouble with Panda. You need original and unique.  Anything that is not original and unique should be deleted, noindexed or rewritten.

A lot of these pages are really skimpy.   Think content can get you into trouble with Panda.   Anything that is skimpy should be deleted, noindexed or beefed up.

I see multiple links to tags on lots of these posts.  That can cause duplicate content problems.

The tag pages are paginated with just a few pages on each.  These can generate extra pages that are low value, suck up your linkjuice or compound duplicate content problems.

You have archive pages, and category pages and more pagination problems.