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.
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
-
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap.
The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google.
Anyone?
(I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
-
If you can get a developer to create a list of all the pages Google has crawled within a date range then you can use this python script to check if the page is indexed or not.
http://searchengineland.com/check-urls-indexed-google-using-python-259773
The script uses the info: search feature to check the urls.
You will have to install Python, Tor and Polipo for this to work. It is quite technical so if you aren't a technical person you may need help.
Depending on how many URL's you have and how long you decide to wait before checking each URL, it can take a few hours.
-
Thanks for your input guys! I've almost landed on the following approach:
- Use this http://www.chrisains.com/seo-tools/extract-urls-from-web-serps/ to collect a number (3-600) of URLs based on the various problem URL-footprints.
- Make XML "problem sitemaps" based on above URLs
- Implement 301s
- Ping the search engines with the XML "problem sitemaps", so that these may discover changes and see what the site really looks like (ideally reducing the # of indexed pages by about 85%)
- Track SE traffic as well as index for each URL footprint once a week for 6-8 weeks and follow progress
- If progress is not satisfactory, then go the URL Profiler route.
Any thoughts before I go ahead?
-
URL profiler will do this, as well as the other recommend scraper sites.
-
URL Profiler might be worth checking out:
It does require that you use a proxy, since Google does not like you scraping their search results.
-
Im sorry to confirm you that google does not want to everyine know that they have in their index. We as SEOs complain about that.
Its hard to belive that you couldnt get all your pages with a scraper. (because it just searches and gets the SERPS)
-
I tried thiss and a few others http://www.chrisains.com/seo-tools/extract-urls-from-web-serps/. This gave me about 500-1000 URLs at a time, but included a lot of cut and paste back and forth.
I imagine there must be a much easier way of doing this...
-
Well, There are some scrapers that might do that job.
To do it the right way you will need proxies and a scraper.
My recommendation is Gscraper or Scrapebox and a list of (at list) 10 proxies.Then, just make a scrape whit the "site:mydomain.com" and see what you get.
(before buying proxies or any scraper, check if you get something like you want with the free stuff) -
I used Screaming to discover the spider trap (and more), but as far as I know, I cannot use Screaming to import all URLs that Google actually has in its index (or can I?).
A list of URLs actually in Googles index is what I'm after
-
Hi Sverre,
Have you tried Screaming Frog SEO Spider? Here a link to it: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
It's really helpfull to crawl all the pages you have as accesible for spiders. You might need the premium version to crawl over 500 pages.
Also, have you checked for the common duplicate pages issues? Here a Moz tutorial: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
Hope it helps.
GR.
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
-
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
How long after https migration that google shows in search console new sitemap being indexed?
We migrated 4 days ago to https and followed best practices..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
In search console now still 80% of our sitemaps appear as "pending" and among those sitemaps that were processed only less than 1% of submitted pages appear as indexed? Is this normal ?
How long does it take for google to index pages from sitemap?
Before https migration nearly all our pages were indexed and I see in the crawler stats that google has crawled a number of pages each day after migration that corresponds to number of submitted pages in sitemap. Sitemap and crawler stats show no errors.0 -
Wrong URLs indexed, Failing To Rank Anywhere
I’m struggling with a client website that's massively failing to rank. It was published in Nov/Dec last year - not optimised or ranking for anything, it's about 20 pages. I came onboard recently, and 5-6 weeks ago we added new content, did the on-page and finally changed from the non-www to the www version in htaccess and WP settings (while setting www as preferred in Search Console). We then did a press release and since then, have acquired about 4 partial match contextual links on good websites (before this, it had virtually none, save for social profiles etc.) I should note that just before we added the (about 50%) new content and optimised, my developer accidentally published the dev site of the old version of the site and it got indexed. He immediately added it correctly to robots.txt, and I assumed it would therefore drop out of the index fairly quickly and we need not be concerned. Now it's about 6 weeks later, and we’re still not ranking anywhere for our chosen keywords. The keywords are around “egg freezing,” so only moderate competition. We’re not even ranking for our brand name, which is 4 words long and pretty unique. We were ranking in the top 30 for this until yesterday, but it was the press release page on the old (non-www) URL! I was convinced we must have a duplicate content issue after realising the dev site was still indexed, so last week, we went into Search Console to remove all of the dev URLs manually from the index. The next day, they were all removed, and we suddenly began ranking (~83) for “freezing your eggs,” one of our keywords! This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, but once again, the positive sign was dampened by the fact it was non-www page that was ranking, which made me wonder why the non-www pages were still even indexed. When I do site:oursite.com, for example, both non-www and www URLs are still showing up…. Can someone with more experience than me tell me whether I need to give up on this site, or what I could do to find out if I do? I feel like I may be wasting the client’s money here by building links to a site that could be under a very weird penalty 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
How to get content to index faster in Google.....pubsubhubbub?
I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Google News URL Structure
Hi there folks I am looking for some guidance on Google News URLs. We are restructuring the site. A main traffic driver will be the traffic we get from Google News. Most large publishers use: www.site.com/news/12345/this-is-the-title/ Others use www.example.com/news/celebrity/12345/this-is-the-title/ etc. www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ www.example.com/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ (Celebrity is a channel on Google News so should we try and follow that format?) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title/12345/ www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title-12345/ (unique ID no at the end and part of the title URL) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ Others include the date. So as you can see there are so many combinations and there doesnt seem to be any unity across news sites for this format. Have you any advice on how to structure these URLs? Particularly if we want to been seen as an authority on the following topics: fashion, hair, beauty, and celebrity news - in particular "celebrity name" So should the celebrity news section be www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ or what? This is for a completely new site build. Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deepti_C0 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0