Index bloating issue
-
Hello,
In the last month, I noticed a huge spike in the number of pages indexed on my site, which I think is impacting my SEO quality score.
While I've only have about 90 pages on my site map, the number of pages indexed jumped to 446, with about 536 pages being blocked by robots. At first we thought this might be due to duplicate product pages showing up in different categories on my site, but we added something to our robot.txt file to not index those pages. But the number has not gone down. I've tried to consult with our hosting vendor, but no one seems to be concerned or have any idea why there was such a big jump in the last month.
Any insights or pointers would be so greatly appreciated, so that I can fix/improve my SEO as quickly as possible!
Thanks!
-
in order to determine if your website is hacked this is one of the best tools I know of both to find out and to remove the malware.
In order to determine rather not you have on-site SEO problems on a very technical and granular scale I would use
https://www.deepcrawl.com/ $80 a month you cannot go wrong
another amazing tool and it's free for the first 500 pages and if you want the added features which you do or more pages only about $150 a year is
-
Thank you. These are helpful suggestions.
-
A couple of things to note:
- As Robert mentioned, I would definitely make sure there is no longer an issue on your wordpress site relating to your previous hack.
- Robots.txt disallow does not stop pages from being indexed. It merely tells search engines to stop crawling that page from here out. The meta noindex tag is more applicable for noindexing pages that are already out there.
- I would check your search console crawl errors to see if there's a hefty spike in 404 errors as well, as it may be old spam pages you removed from the site.
- If these pages that are bloating your index are all still old spam filled pages from when you were hacked, you could start by using the search console's "remove url's" tool, which will remove all these url's from the index temporarily. For a more long term approach, instead of them giving off a 404 if they have been removed, making the server give off a "410" response would tell google they are gone forever, and thus they will be removed from the index as time goes on.
-
When I do the search for my main url - the results are clean. Just the pages to my site show up. And the index results for this site still bloated. However, for my wordpress site, which is a subdomain and on a different platform to my main site, there are some issues (it was hacked as Rob noted below). But we have since cleaned up the pages etc, reuploaded the site maps, etc. So I'm a little stumped on my main site (which wasn't hacked - that I'm aware of).
-
What do you see if you do a search for site:yoursite.com ?
-
Hello Julie,
This sounds like you might have a hacking issue on your website. You probably need someone to conduct a full code audit of your site to determine whether any files you have uploaded (plugins, for example) were contaminated. If a site is hacked, new pages can be added that are hidden from view and difficult to detect unless handled by a security specialist.
We recently brought on a new client who had this issue and discovered that his site had 1000's of pages dedicated to testosterone pills, etc. We had to go through GWT and the site logs to determine what new pages were created and it was a complete hack job.
In terms of fixing your SEO, the first step is to determine where/if the hack exists. Once that is decided, you have to clean up the site and restore the site's security.
I would be happy to help you with the next steps if you would like. I am always available!
Thanks and best of luck,
Rob
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
-
Google search console image indexing issue
Google search console tells that only '58 out of the 3553' images in the images sitemap are indexed. But if I search "site:example.com" in Google images there seem to be lots of images. There are no errors in the sitemap and I am still getting reasonable number of image search hits daily. Are the webmaster tools stats for images indexed accurate? When I click on the Sitemap Errors & Index Errors this is what i get - Error details: No errors found. https://www.screencast.com/t/pqL62pIc
Technical SEO | | 21centuryweb0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Duplicate content issue: staging urls has been indexed and need to know how to remove it from the serps
duplicate content issue: staging url has been indexed by google ( many pages) and need to know how to remove them from the serps. Bing sees the staging url as moved permanently Google sees the staging urls (240 results) and redirects to the correct url Should I be concerned about duplicate content and request Google to remove the staging url removed Thanks Guys
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
RSS feed issue
My Wordpress blog RSS feed is not working correctly and I can't figure why. This is the error I am getting in my sidebar where the RSS feed used to work properly. My Blog is http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/ RSS Error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 274, column 32 Any insight would be appreciated greatly! Rob
Technical SEO | | sdwellers0 -
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.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
Should i index or noindex a contact page
Im wondering if i should noindex the contact page im doing SEO for a website just wondering if by noindexing the contact page would it help SEO or hurt SEO for that website
Technical SEO | | aronwp0 -
OUTGOING LINK ISSUES
NO LINK TO HOME MY WEBSIDE PROFITIOK.COM FOR EXAMPLE YOU SEE THE PAGE I HAVE CHANGE TWO DAYS BACK PREVIOUS
Technical SEO | | Luckykhullar
ABOUT US - Profitok.com 2 DAYS BACK I CHANGED THE TITLE title>Commodity tips | Mcx TIPS | Mcx Daily Tips |Mcx Good tips Provider BUT WHEN I CHECKING IT IS NOT UPDATED THIS TITLE DEAR SIR CAN Y GIVE ME THE CORRECT ANSWER0 -
Getting Posts Indexed
On a Wordpress site I'm working on you can get to any product from home in 2 clicks but I'm a llittle concerned about the URL which looks like this: domain/categoryname/subcategoryname/productpage Will I have trouble getting my products indexed?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0