Sitemaps and Indexed Pages
-
Hi guys,
I created an XML sitemap and submitted it for my client last month.
Now the developer of the site has also been messing around with a few things.
I've noticed on my Moz site crawl that indexed pages have dropped significantly.
Before I put my foot in it, I need to figure out if submitting the sitemap has caused this.. can a sitemap reduce the pages indexed?
Thanks
David.
-
Sorry - I missed the part about you looking specifically at the Moz crawler. While useful, it's a stand-in for what will actually be used for rankings - namely the actual crawls by the search engine crawlers themselves. I'd be looking right to the source for that info if you're concerned there's an issue, rather than trusting just Mozbot. You can find the SE crawlers data in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Look for trends and patterns there, especially around the sitemap report.
The challenge to a Screaming Frog-rendered sitemap is that it can only find what's linked. If the site has orphaned pages or an ineffective internal linking scheme, a crawl could easily miss pages. It's certainly better than no sitemap, but a map generated by the site's technology itself (usually the database) is safer.
P.
-
Thanks Paul,
Yes there has been a big clean up of pages. There were over 80,000 to begin with. I managed to get that down to about 14k but then last month MOZ bot only crawled about 4,000 pages.
I was just a bit worried that the sitemap generated by Screaming Frog was incorrect and therefore that was the reason for the drop.
I was referring mainly to the MOZ site crawl. I guess I was worried that the MOZ bot only followed the sitemap!
There were loads of filter URL's and all sorts going on so it's a bit of a spiders web!
-
No - submitting a sitemap won't reduce the crawl of a site. The search engines will crawl the sitemap and add these pages to the index if they consider them worthy. But they'll still also crawl any other links/pages they can find in other ways and index those as well if they consider them worthy.
Note though - having the number of indexed pages drop is not necessarily a bad thing. If removing a large number of worthless/duplicate/canonicalised/no-indexed pages cleans up the site, that will also be reflected in fewer crawled pages - an indication that quality improvement work was effective.
That help?
Paul
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
-
Crawler unable to access pages
Hi crawler is unable to access site and crawl properly. Mainly for the backlink checker, it's producing no results There is nothing in the robots.txt file blocking crawler access. Any help is much appreciated as it's driving me crazy!
API | | 2Cubedie0 -
Moz Crawl: Can't check page optimization error https
Help needed, when I try to do a page optimization check i get the following error : The URL you entered does not appear to be returning a page successfully. Please make sure that you've entered the URL of valid, working page. But i can do a site crawl, what should be the problem? Checked with frog seo spider and add no problem, robots.txt its also clean. Anyone knows what can be wrong? Thanks
API | | Luis-Pereira0 -
Spring is here and so is our May Index Update!
Happy Index Release Day! For the second month in a row, our hard-working, supremely dedicated Big Data team has delivered our Index Update EARLY! Beyond being punctual, the May Index is one of our most comprehensive and largest update of the year for Moz. Let’s dig into the details: 162,225,495,455 (162 billion) URLs. 1,135,327,420 (1.1 billion) subdomains. 194,346,505 (194 million) root domains. 1,168,465,575,815 (1.1 Trillion) links. Followed vs nofollowed links 2.84% of all links found were nofollowed 65.80% of nofollowed links are internal 34.20% are external Rel canonical: 28.89% of all pages employ the rel=canonical tag The average page has 92 links on it 76 internal links on average. 16 external links on average.. Go have fun with your new data! PS - For any questions about DA/PA fluctuations (or non-fluctuations) check out this Q&A thread from Rand: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores
API | | IanWatson5 -
Have Questions about the Jan. 27th Mozscape Index Update? Get Answers Here!
Howdy y'all. I wanted to give a brief update (not quite worthy of a blog post, but more than would fit in a tweet) about the latest Mozscape index update. On January 27th, we released our largest web index ever, with 285 Billion unique URLs, and 1.25 Trillion links. Our previous index was also a record at 217 Billion pages, but this one is another 30% bigger. That's all good news - it means more links that you're seeking are likely to be in this index, and link counts, on average, will go up. There are two oddities about this index, however, that I should share: The first is that we broke one particular view of data - 301'ing links sorted by Page Authority doesn't work in this index, so we've defaulted to sorting 301s by Domain Authority. That should be fixed in the next index, and from our analytics, doesn't appear to be a hugely popular view, so it shouldn't affect many folks (you can always export to CSV and re-sort by PA in Excel if you need, too - note that if you have more than 10K links, OSE will only export the first 10K, so if you need more data, check out the API). The second is that we crawled a massively more diverse set of root domains than ever before. Whereas our previous index topped out at 192 million root domains, this latest one has 362 million (almost 1.9X as many unique, new domains we haven't crawled before). This means that DA and PA scores may fluctuate more than usual, as link diversity are big parts of those calculations and we've crawled a much larger swath of the deep, dark corners of the web (and non-US/non-.com domains, too). It also means that, for many of the big, more important sites on the web, we are crawling a little less deeply than we have in the past (the index grew by ~31% while the root domains grew by ~88%). Often, those deep pages on large sites do more internal than external linking, so this might not have a big impact, but it could depend on your field/niche and where your links come from. As always, my best suggestion is to make sure to compare your link data against your competition - that's a great way to see how relative changes are occurring and whether, generally speaking, you're losing or gaining ground in your field. If you have specific questions, feel free to leave them and I'll do my best to answer in a timely fashion. Thanks much! p.s. You can always find information about our index updates here.
API | | randfish8 -
3 result limit to Top Pages API call
I am using the MOZ API to make calls for the top pages for a particular URL. However, when I pass in any limit value greater than 3 the API only returns 3 results. I have even tried to put in URLs like 'www.moz.com' and still only 3 results. Sample call to the API below: http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/top-pages/www.moz.com?AccessID=member-xxxxxxxxx&Expires=1419020831&Signature=xxxxxxxxx&Cols=2052&Offset=0&Limit=50
API | | solodev0 -
Does Moz's crawlers use _escaped_fragment_ to inspect pages on a single-page application?
I just got started, but got a 902 error code on some pages, with a message saying there might be an outage on my site. That's certainly not the case, so I'm wondering if the crawlers actually respect and use the escaped_fragment query parameter. Thanks, David.
API | | CareerDean0 -
On-Page Reports showing old urls
While taking a look at our sites on-page reports I noticed some of our keywords with very old urls that haven't existed for close to a year. How do I make sure moz's keyword ranking is finding the correct page and make sure I'm not getting graded on that keywords/urls that don't exist any more or have been 301'd to new urls? Is there a way to clean these out? My on-page reports say I have 62 reports for only a total of 34 keywords in rankings. As you can see from the image most of the urls for "tax folder" have now been 301'd to not include /product or /category but moz is still showing them with the old url structure. BTW our site is minespress.com 2KdGcPL.png
API | | smines0