How Google Carwler Cached Orphan pages and directory?
-
I have website www.test.com
I have made some changes in live website and upload it to "demo" directory (which is recently created) for client approval.
Now, my demo link will be www.test.com/demo/
I am not doing any type of link building or any activity which pass referral link to www.test.com/demo/
Then how Google crawler find it and cached some pages or entire directory?
Thanks
-
Try putting the URL into Google and see if you find any pages linking to it.
I knew a company that created a test site that was a copy of a live site (made with a specific hosted CMS). Didn't exclude the test site in robots because "we all know we won't link to it so it'll be ok". Site got indexed, and it was because a person at the company was having problems with the implementation of the test site, went to the help forum (which person didn't think would be indexed) and posted the URL to the test site.
I found the above by just putting in the URL of the test site into Google, and I saw the post in the help desk. You might try the same to see if somehow there is a rogue link.
-
Is google crawling our mails?
Is it possible?
-
Yup, correct.
I was certain I'd replied to this
Anyway, you ever notice how the ads in gmail are always relevant to the content of your emails? Google are totally reading them
-
The <conspiracy hat="">side of things was him commenting that Google is sometimes accused of processing everything in Gmail and could have possibly pulled your link to the demo directory from that.</conspiracy>
-
Hi Barry,
Yes, We were used Gmail for reporting.
Is it make any sense??
-
<conspiracy-hat></conspiracy-hat>
Did either you or your client use gmail when you sent him the demo link?
Regardless, Dan's advice to noindex and block the directory from spiders is the future when doing development work.
-
Hi JoelHit,
NO, There is not any single refferal link to "Demo" directory from entire website and also from third party websites.
I am aware about Google Crawling and Indexing Systems.
Thanks.
-
Hi Thetjo,
I know about it.
My question is that how Google Crawl it without any referral link?
Thanks.
-
Hi Dan,
No, i am not exclude "demo" directory from robots.txt for any search engine.
I am not using wordpress its simple stattic HTML website (Not using any type of CMS).
-
Did this actually happen or are we talking about a hypothetical situation here? It could be that there is a link to the demo directory you've overlooked? Has the /demo folder perhaps been used in the past and there were still old links to it?
As a meta-solution to this problem: prevent crawlers and nosy people from accessing the content by adding a .htpasswd login to the area used for client approval.
-
Did you block the /demo/ directory in your robots.txt file? This is step number one to try and ensure they don't get crawled. Also, are you using wordpress? If so, wordpress automatically pings search engines when you add a post and if you use the common sitemap plugin, when it creates the sitemap it submits it automatically to Google, so that's another way Google could have found it.
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 to handle images (lazy loading, compressing, caching...) to impact page load and thus SEO?
Hi all, I am looking for a conclusive answer on how to handle images on Wordpress websites. Most of the time we encounter the same problems regarding images. There are several options to make sure that images don't increase page load too much: Page caching and compressing: standard Lazy loading: helps decrease page load time, but Google might not crawl the images so not good for SEO. See this article on Googlebot scrolling. Correct image format (for example WebP): tried it several times and doesn't help much to decrease page load time. What is best practice? Are there standards or preferred options for the image dimensions and quality (max height, width, number of pixels, rectangular or square) before you upload it, also regarding responsiveness? Is it better to use .jpg, .png or WebP? To sum up, what should you do by default to handle images on websites so you can still have a good page speed even with loads of images? Thanks for your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
How to get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google suddenly indexing 1,000 fewer pages. Why?
We have a site, blog.example.org, and another site, www.example.org. The most visited pages on www.example.org were redesigned; the redesign landed May 8. I would expect this change to have some effect on organic rank and conversions. But what I see is surprising; I can't believe it's related, but I mention this just in case. Between April 30 and May 7, Google stopped indexing roughly 1,000 pages on www.example.org, and roughly 3,000 pages on blog.example.org. In both cases the number of pages that fell out of the index represents appx. 15% of the overall number of pages. What would cause Google to suddenly stop indexing thousands of pages on two different subdomains? I'm just looking for ideas to dig into; no suggestion would be too basic. FWIW, the site is localized into dozens of languages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Pagination on a product page with reviews spread out on multiple pages
Our current product pages markup only have the canonical URL on the first page (each page loads more user reviews). Since we don't want to increase load times, we don't currently have a canonical view all product page. Do we need to mark up each subsequent page with its own canonical URL? My understanding was that canonical and rel next prev tags are independent of each other. So that if we mark up the middle pages with a paginated URL, e.g: Product page #1http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2" />**Product page #2 **http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692" />http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3" />Would mean that each canonical page would suggest to google another piece of unique content, which this obviously isn't. Is the PREV NEXT able to "override" the canonical and explain to Googlebot that its part of a series? Wouldn't the canonical then be redundant?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
How to make Google include our recipe pages in its main index?
We have developed a recipe search engine www.edamam.com and serve the content of over 500+ food bloggers and major recipe websites. Our legal obligations do not allow us to show the actual recipe preparation info (e.g. the most valuable from the content), we can only show a few images, the ingredients and nutrition information. Most of the unique content goes to the source/blog. By submitting XML sitemaps on GWT we now have around 500K pages indexed, however only a few hundred appear in Google's main index and we are looking for a solution to include all of them in the index. Also good to know is that it appears that all our top competitors are in the exactly same situation, so it is a challenging question. Any ideas will be highly appreciated! Thanks, Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edamam0 -
Duplicate Page Title/Content Issues on Product Review Submission Pages
Hi Everyone, I'm very green to SEO. I have a Volusion-based storefront and recently decided to dedicate more time and effort into improving my online presence. Admittedly, I'm mostly a lurker in the Q&A forum but I couldn't find any pre-existing info regarding my situation. It could be out there. But again, I'm a noob... So, in my recent SEOmoz report I noticed that over 1,000 Duplicate Content Errors and Duplicate Page Title Errors have been found since my last crawl. I can see that every error is tied to a product in my inventory - specifically each product page has an option to write a review. It looks like the subsequent page where a visitor can fill out their review is the stem of the problem. All of my products are shown to have the same issue: Duplicate Page Title - Review:New Duplicate Page Content - the form is already partially filled out with the corresponding product My first question - It makes sense that a page containing a submission form would have the same title and content. But why is it being indexed, or crawled (or both for that matter) under every parameter in which it could be accessed (product A, B, C, etc)? My second question (an obvious one) - What can I do to begin to resolve this? As far as I know, I haven't touched this option included in Volusion other than to simply implement it. If I'm missing any key information, please point me in the right direction and I'll respond with any additional relevant information on my end. Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DakotahW0 -
Handling Similar page content on directory site
Hi All, SEOMOZ is telling me I have a lot of duplicate content on my site. The pages are not duplicate, but very similar, because the site is a directory website with a page for cities in multiple states in the US. I do not want these pages being indexed and was wanting to know the best way to go about this. I was thinking I could do a rel ="nofollow" on all the links to those pages, but not sure if that is the correct way to do this. Since the folders are deep within the site and not under one main folder, it would mean I would have to do a disallow for many folders if I did this through Robots.txt. The other thing I am thinking of is doing a meta noindex, follow, but I would have to get my programmer to add a meta tag just for this section of the site. Any thoughts on the best way to achieve this so I can eliminate these dup pages from my SEO report and from the search engine index? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cchhita0