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.
Getting google impressions for a site not in the index...
-
Hi all
Wondering if i could pick the brains of those wise than myself... my client has an https website with tons of pages indexed and all ranking well, however somehow they managed to also set their server up so that non https versions of the pages were getting indexed and thus we had the same page indexed twice in the engine but on slightly different urls (it uses a cms so all the internal links are relative too). The non https is mainly used as a dev testing environment.
Upon seeing this we did a google remove request in WMT, and added noindex in the robots and that saw the index pages drop over night. See image 1. However, the site still appears to getting return for a couple of 100 searches a day! The main site gets about 25,000 impressions so it's way down but i'm puzzled as to how a site which has been blocked can appear for that many searches and if we are still liable for duplicate content issues.
Any thoughts are most welcome. Sorry, I am unable to share the site name i'm afraid. Client is very strict on this.
Thanks,
Carl
-
Hi Chris
Thanks for the reply.
I think i confused myself with terms. Meant added a noindex to the header of the pages in the relevant tags. We removed the urls from WMT which usually drops them all from the engine in a matter of hours but have read that sometimes this can expire so we put the noindex tag in place incase the WMT did happen to expire and the pages started to get indexed again.
Regards
Carl
-
Carl,
I'm wondering what you mean by "added noindex in the robots".
If you mean you disallowed those pages in the robots.txt file, that won't be enough to remove or keep them removed from the index. Typically, the robots meta tag
[](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en)
is used to keep the pages out of the index. And if you use the robots meta tag on those pages, do not use the robots.txt file to disallow bots from those pages, as that will prevent bots from viewing their meta data.
-
Sorry, it appeared I could only upload 1 image in the first post so here is the second image.
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
-
PDF best practices: to get them indexed or not? Do they pass SEO value to the site?
All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)
Reporting & Analytics | | hlwebdev1 -
Losing referrer data on http link that redirects to an https site when on an https site. Is this typical or is something else going on here?
I am trying to resolve a referral data issue. Our client noticed that their referrals from one of their sites to another had dropped to almost nothing from being their top referrer. The referring site SiteA which is an HTTPs site, held a link to SiteB, which is also an HTTPs site, so there should be no loss, however the link to SiteB on SiteA had the HTTP protocol. When we changed the link to the HTTPs protocol, the referrals started flowing in. Is this typical? If the 301 redirect is properly in place for SiteB, why would we lose the referral data?
Reporting & Analytics | | Velir0 -
"index.htm" for all url's in google analytics
I don't have this issue with other wordpress websites, only this one website, and I don't know what's causing the issue: Google Analytics is adding an "index.htm" to every single page on the website. So it is tracking the pages, I see no errors - is it tracking the right page? When I click on the page link in a report, I naturally go to a "404 page not found" since the website address isn't "www.example.com/rewards/index.htm" - but instead the actual address would be:
Reporting & Analytics | | cceebar
"www.example.com/rewards/". I have navigated to View Settings in GA to insure "default page" is empty. Although adding anything else to this field does not effect the page url in analytics reports either. Could it be htaccess file - or a plugin effecting the htaccess file?_Cindy0 -
Tasks for Google Analytics training
Hi Mozzers, I'm delivering some Google Analytics (Fundamentals level) training, and trying to make it was fun and as interesting as possible... which is quite a challenge when it comes to GA. I was just wondering if you're aware of training tasks, or interactions, I could bring into this kind of training session? The group are particularly interested in user journeys and the effectiveness of content. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | A_Q0 -
Why is Google Analytics showing index.php after every page URL?
Hi, My client's site has GA tracking code gathering correct data on the site, but the pages are listed in GA as having /index.php at the end of every URL, although this does not appear when you visit the site pages. Even if there is a redirect happening for site visitors, shouldn't GA be showing the pages as their redirect destination, i.e. the URL that visitors actually see? Could this discrepancy be adversely affecting my search performance? Example page: http://freshstarttax.com/innocent-spouse/ shows up in GA as http://freshstarttax.com/innocent-spouse/index.php thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | JMagary0 -
How to get a list of robots.txt file
This is my site. http://muslim-academy.com/ Its in wordpress.I just want to know is there any way I can get the list of blocked URL by Robots.txt In Google Webmaster its not showing up.Just giving the number of blocked URL's. Any plugin or Software to extract the list of blocked URL's.
Reporting & Analytics | | csfarnsworth0 -
Easiest way to get out of Google local results?
Odd one this, but what's the easiest way to remove a website from the Google local listings? Would removing all the Google map listings do the job? A client of ours is suffering massively since the Google update in the middle of last month. Previously they would appear no1 or no2 in the local results and normally 1 or 2 in the organic results. However, since the middle of last month any time they rank on the first page for a local result, their organic result has dropped massively to at least page 4. If I set my location as something different in google, say 100 miles away, they then rank well for the organic listings (obviously not appearing for local searches). When I change it back to my current location the organic listing is gone and they are back to ranking for the local. Since the middle of July the traffic from search engines has dropped about 65%. All the organic rankings remain as strong as ever just not in the areas where they want to get customers from!! The idea is to remove the local listing and get the organics reranking as the ctr on those is much much higher. On a side note, anyone else notice very poor ctr on google local listings? Maybe users feel they are adverts thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ccgale0 -
AW Stats vs Google Analytics
Hey Moz Community, I am looking to get opinions on the best practice for analytics/traffic analysis. From experience I know that AW Stats reads high and Google Analytics reads low for traffic for reason in this article http://www.smartz.com/blog/2009/01/23/analytic-confusion-%E2%80%93-awstats-vs-google-analytics/ It drives me a little nuts how far off both are for some pages. I have one article that shows 100 views (GA) and AW stats shows 5 times that number of views. Any suggestions or systems you recommend? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | johnshearer0