Some URLs in the sitemap not indexed
-
Our company site has hundreds of thousands of pages. Yet no matter how big or small the total page count, I have found that the "URLs Indexed" in GWMT has never matched "URLS in Sitemap". When we were small and now that we have a LOT more pages, there is always a discrepancy of ~10% or so missing from the index.
It's difficult to know which pages are not indexed, but I have found some that I can verify are in the Sitemap.xml file but not at all in the index. When I go to GWMT I can "Fetch and Render" missing pages fine - it's not as though it's blocked or inaccessible.
Any ideas on why this is? Is this type of discrepancy typical?
-
Thanks. Very helpful!
-
This is great to know that 10% is a good discrepancy. Hard to know otherwise.
That article about Screaming Frog is super helpful, thanks!
-
I have never had a site with 100% crawled pages, sometimes Google will drop a page off for being too similar to another, not informative enough, canonical links set, redirects.
As Ryan says, don't just rely on Moz use Screaming Frog to get a good view of your site too, see if there are any errors. Also you can run the frog whenever you like, it's just a little more technical to understand.
Xenu oooh never heard of that one Ryan thanks!
Just looked into Xenu, Screaming frog does it all and some.
-
Hi Mase,
I've managed sites with with hundreds of thousands of pages too, and in my experience a discrepancy between what's offered up via the sitemaps and what gets indexed is typical (dare I say it, a 10% discrepancy seems pretty good!). Pages deeper in the site seem to suffer this fate more frequently than those with fewer subfolders, as do those with thin content.
I agree completely with Ryan's comment about Screaming Frog: it is an invaluable tool for site audits, in addition to lots of other useful site insights. You might find this article interesting to get a sense of the many ways you can use SF: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/
-
You're welcome. Definitely take a look at a crawler that gives you more insight, especially with a site as large as yours. Just note, no matter what you might never achieve an exact match between the pages you've submitted and the number indexed as Google can decide not to index a page for other reasons aside from the page's presence in a site map. Something useful for you as well would be to look at how many of your pages recieve visits in analytics. That will give you an idea of percentages on pages in the sitemap vs the index vs active.
-
I have not run the site through those tools you mentioned, I'm unfamiliar.
I am not, however, receiving any errors on those pages. And when I "Fetch and Render" in GWMT, they look and render fine without errors. I'm able to submit them to the index one-by-one.
Thanks for your response, Ryan.
-
Hi Mase. Are you getting errors on URLs you've submitted? Or ran other crawlers on your site like Xenu or ScreamingFrog to produce any possible errors? It's also good to know which pages might not have enough content to be indexed: filters, sorting views, etc.
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
-
Index problems
“The website http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/nl/ does not show in the index of Google (site:vaneyckshutters.com/nl/). This must be the homepage in the Netherlands. Previously, the page www.vaneyckshutters.com was redirected to /nl/. This page is accessible now with a canonical tag to http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/nl/ in the hope to let /nl/ be indexed. When we look at the SERPS for keyword ‘shutters’, the page http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/ is shown in Google.nl on #32 and in Belgium #3. Problem & question: Why is it that /nl/ has not been indexed properly and why is it that we rank with http://www.vaneyckshutters.com on ‘shutters’ instead the/nl/ page?”
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
No index
Screaming frog spider does index pages on our website like: wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/assets/js/frontend/jquery-ui-touch-punch.min.js?ver=2.3.9 wp-content/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/assets/css/checkbox.min.css?ver=2.3.2 Is it a bad/good idea to set my parameters in Webmastertools and tell Google not to crawl pages that begin with wp/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
301 for a Very Long URL
Hey gang, Thanks ahead of time for the help. I have a url somehow that is very very long: http://www.colbysphotography.com/wedding-caterers-knoxville-east-tennessee/Here is an extensive list of wedding venues in the Knoxville and East Tennessee region. If you find that any of these links are not working, that the venues are no longer in business, or have a suggestion for an additional venue (at no charge), please contact Colby. Colby's Photography works hard on keeping this list helpful. I have tried Yoast Premium on a wordpress site to redirect the url but it doesn't seem to keep. I've tried a few other redirect plugins with not help either. I would love some suggestions on this one! Colby
Technical SEO | | littlecolby0 -
Google Webmaster tools Sitemap submitted vs indexed vs Index Status
I'm having an odd error I'm trying to diagnose. Our Index Status is growing and is now up to 1,115. However when I look at Sitemaps we have 763 submitted but only 134 indexed. The submitted and indexed were virtually the same around 750 until 15 days ago when the indexed dipped dramatically. Additionally when I look under HTML improvements I only find 3 duplicate pages, and I ran screaming frog on the site and got similar results, low duplicates. Our actual content should be around 950 pages counting all the category pages. What's going on here?
Technical SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Help! Pages not being indexed
Hi Mozzers, I need your help.
Technical SEO | | bshanahan
Our website (www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com) stopped being indexed in search engines following a round of major changes to URLs and content. There were a number of dead links for a few days before 301 redirects were properly put in place. And now, only 3 pages show up in bing when I do the search "site:barnettcapitaladvisors.com". A bunch of pages show up in Google for that search, but they're not any of the pages we want to show up. Our home page and most important services pages are nowhere in search results. What's going on here?
Our sitemap is at http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/sites/default/files/users/AndrewCarrillo/sitemap/sitemap.xml
Robots.txt is at: http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/robots.txt Thanks!0 -
Hyphen in URL
Hi, I would like to know if the following statement holds true today or it doesn't matter whether we use hyphens or underscore If you have a URL like keyword1_keyword2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for keyword1_keyword2 ( highly unlikely ) . But If you have a URL like keyword1-keyword2, that page can be returned for the searches - keyword1,keyword2 and even “keyword1keyword2” Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Video Sitemap Help
MOZ Helpers, Currently our clients videos are hosted on Viemo and that will not change as our client likes the creative/artist vibe and community via Viemo. That being said we need to create a video sitemap. BTW, Our site uses wordpress. When someone in house uploads a video in the future we want them to be able to enter the video title, description, and tags on the video and when they hit "update" the video and information will get added to our video site map. Wistia has this option here http://wistia.com/doc/video-seo , but like I mentioned above our client has all videos via Viemo. I found a Google XML wordpress plugin, but that said it only works for Youtube video's. The Jr. developer is not confident in creating one himself from the Google webmaster instructions and asked me to search for another solution. Check out the attached pic, that is what I am looking for. Is their a plugin or another option where we can use for easy sitemap updating and management for our Viemo videos? Thanks in advance! M video-seo-dialog.png?id=video-seo video-seo-dialog.png?id=video-seo
Technical SEO | | matthew-2202000