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.
What tool do you use to check for URLs not indexed?
-
What is your favorite tool for getting a report of URLs that are not cached/indexed in Google & Bing for an entire site? Basically I want a list of URLs not cached in Google and a seperate list for Bing.
Thanks,
Mark
-
I've had good results using Google Search Console for checking which URLs are indexed. It's pretty straightforward and gives a clear overview of any indexing issues halloweensquishmallows.
-
-
I can work on building this tool if there's enough interest.
-
I generally just use Xenu's hyperlink sleuth (if you thousands of pages) to listing out all the URLs you have got and I might then manually take a look at them, however, see the guitar in demand I have not come upon an automatic device yet. If all people are aware of any, I'd like to recognize as properly.
-
This post from Distilled mentions that SEO for Excel plugin has a "Indexation Checker":
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/awesome-examples-of-how-to-use-seotools-for-excel/Alas, after downloading and installing, it appears this feature was removed...
-
Unless I'm missing something, there doesn't seem to be a way to get Google to show more than 100 results on a page. Our site has about 8,000 pages, and I don't relish the idea of manually exporting 80 SERPs.
-
Annie Cushing from Seer Interactive made an awesome list of all the must have tools for SEO.
You can get it from her link which is http://bit.ly/tools-galore
In the list there is a tool called scrapebox which is great for this. In fact there are many uses for the software, it is also useful for sourcing potential link partners.
-
I would suggest using the Website Auditor from Advanced Web Ranking. It can parse 10.000 pages and it will tell you a lot more info than just if it's indexed by Google or not.
-
hmm...I thought there was a way to pull those SERPs urls into Google docs using a function of some sort?
-
I think you need not any tool for this, you can directly go to google.com and search: Site:www.YourWebsiteNem.com Site:www.YourWebsiteName.com/directory I think this will be the best option to check if your website is crwled by google or not.
-
I do something similar but use Advanced Web Ranking, use site:www.domain.com as your phrase, run it to retrieve 1000 results and generate a Top Site Report in Excel to get the indexed list.
Also remember that you can do it on sub-directories (or partial URL paths) as a way to get more than 1000 pages from the site. In general I run it once with site:www.domain.com, then identify the most frequent sub-directories, and add those as additional phrases to the project and run a second time, i.e.: site:www.domain.com site:www.domain.com/dir1 site:www.domain.com/dir2 etc.
Still not definitive, but think it does give indication of where value is.
-
David Kauzlaric has in my opinion the best answer. If google hasn't indexed it and you've investigated your Google webmaster account, then there isn't anything better out there as far as I'm concerned. It's by far the simplest, quickest and easiest way to identify a serp result.
re: David Kauzlaric
We built an internal tool to do it for us, but basically you can do this manually.
Go to google, type in "site:YOURURLHERE" without the quotes. You can check a certain page, a site, a subdomain, etc... of course if you have thousands of URLs this method is not ideal, but it can be done.
Cheers!
-
I concur, Xenu is an extremely valuable tool for me that I use daily. Also, once you get a list of all the URLs on your site, you can compare the two lists in excel (two lists being the Xenu page list for your site and the list of pages that have been indexed by Google).
-
Nice solution Kieran!
I use the same method, to compare URL list from Screaming Frog output with URL Found column from my Keyword Ranking tool - of course it doesn't catch all pages that might be indexed.
The intention is not really to get a complete list, more to "draught" out pages that need work.
-
I agree, this is not automated but so far, from what we know, looks like a nice and clean option. Thanks.
-
Saw this and tried the following which isn't automated but is one way of doing it.
- First install SEO Quake plugin
- Go to Google
- Turn off Google Instant (http://www.google.com/preferences)
- Go to Advanced search set the number of results you want displayed (estimate the number of pages on your site)
- Then run your site:www.example.com search query
- Export this to CSV
- Import to Excel
- Once then do a Data to columns conversion using ; as a delimiter (this is the CSV delimiter)
- This gives you a formatted list.
- Then import your sitemap.xml into another TAB in Excel
- Run a vlookup between the URL tabs to flag which are on sitemap or vice versa.
Not exactly automated but does the job.
-
Curious about this question also, it would be very useful to see a master list of all URLs on our site that are not indexed by Google so that we can take action to see what aspects of the page are lacking and what we need for it to get indexed.
-
I usually just use Xenu's link sleuth (if you thousands of pages) to list out all the URLs you have and I would then manually check them, but I haven't come across an automated tool yet. If anyone knows any, I'd love to know as well.
-
Manual is a no go for large sites. If someone knows a tool like this, it woul be cool to know which/ where to find. Or..... This would make a cool SEOmoz pro tool
-
My bad - you are right that it doesn't display the actual URLs. So I guess the best thing you can do is site:examplesite.com and see what comes up.
-
That will tell you the number indexed, but it still doesn't tell you which of those URLs are or are not indexed. I think we all wish it would!
-
I would use Google Webmaster Tools as you can see how many URLs are indexed based on your sitemap. Once you have that, you can compare it to your total list. The same can be done with Bing.
-
Yeah I do it manually now so was looking for something more efficient.
-
We built an internal tool to do it for us, but basically you can do this manually.
Go to google, type in "site:YOURURLHERE" without the quotes. You can check a certain page, a site, a subdomain, etc... of course if you have thousands of URLs this method is not ideal, but it can be done.
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
-
Japanese URL-structured sitemap (pages) not being indexed by Bing Webmaster Tools
Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?
I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!
Technical SEO | | jgresalfi0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0