Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
-
Hi,
I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.)
Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix?
It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag?
Any help appreciated,
Karen
-
Take a look at the pages that are indexed. Chances are that since it is a cart or CMS-based site, you just need to use robots.txt to block out some areas you don't want indexed. You also need to look at your indexed pages, to see if any of them are duplicates, meaning you have 2 or more url's that display the same content.
"It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? "
Could be that your cms or cart is not forwarding all the pages to the canonical version. Again, check to see if you can access multiple versions of the same page. Ecom and CMS sites always have these types of errors if you dont keep a close eye on the URL's since they are database driven, vs static HTML. Look for www or non-www versions of pages, url's with and without index.php, etc.
Once you target what the offending url's are, use redirects to forward them to the proper and search engine friendly version.
-
Hi,
Thanks so much for that, it's really interesting.
I've resolved the issue now, it was a case of some (a lot!) of missing canonical tags. Phew!
Thanks for your help!
-
Sorry wrong interpretation of your question. Have you excluded the site search pages using robots.txt.? If not this might be the reason why you've that many pages indexed.
Anyway this discussion might give you more answers:
-
Just 1 at the moment.
-
Are you using just one sitemap or multiple?
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
-
Does Google ignore content styled with 'display:none'?
Do you know if an H1 within a div that has a 'display: none' style applied will still be crawled and evaluated by Google? We have that situation on this page on line 136: view-source:https://www.junk-king.com/services/items-we-take/foreclosure-cleanouts Of course we also have an H1 up at the top of the page and are concerned that the second one will cause interference with our SEO efforts. I've seen conflicting and inconclusive information on line - not sure. Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rastellop0 -
Sitemap Indexed vs. Submitted
My sitemap has been submitted to Google for well over 6 months and is updated frequently, a total of 979 URLs have been submitted by only 145 indexed. What can I do to get Google to index them all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Why isn't the canonical tag on my client's Magento site working?
The reason for this mights be obvious to the right observer, but somehow I'm not able to spot the reason why. The situation:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
I'm doing an SEO-audit for a client. When I'm checking if the rel=canonical tag is in place correctly, it seems like it: view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15) (line nr 15) Anyone seing something wrong with this canonical? When I perform a site:http://quickplay.no/ search, I find that there's many url's indexed that ought to have been picked up by the canonical-tag: (see picture) ..this for example view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15 I really can't see why this page is getting indexed, when the canonical-tag is in place. Anybody who can? Sincerely 🙂 GMdWg0K0 -
Can you no index a page in Wordpress from just Google news?
I'm trying to find a plugin for Wordpress that enables you to no-index an individual page from Google news but not from Google search results. We want to remove some of our pages from Google news without hurting others.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | uSw0 -
How to remove my site's pages in search results?
I have tested hundreds of pages to see if Google will properly crawl, index and cached them. Now, I want these pages to be removed in Google search except for homepage. What should be the rule in robots.txt? I use this rule, but I am not sure if Google will remove the hundreds of pages (for my testing). User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
Disallow: /
Allow: /$0 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0