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.
Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed
-
Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research!
My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website.
Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now.
My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed.
I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed!
I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google.
Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!
-
You need more unique content. Your site is great I like it much btter then the other lyic sites.
but I can't see any content at all you have written yourself.
-
I agree with Stephen. Tons of lyrics websites out there.
If you want to get your site more visible write a couple to a few hundred words about each song and post it on the pages above or beside the lyrics. Then you will have something unique.
Try that on a couple dozen pages to see what happens. Give it a few months.
-
You have exactly the same content as a million other lyrics websites, so why should Google be interested in your PR0, PA18, DA2 website?
I think your doing pretty good with 15000 pages indexed via site:http://lyricstatus.com
I think what you need is a USP, not technical seo responses
-
Do you have any organization to your site? I can see where some visitors would desire to find lyrics by year, singer, music style (jazz, rock, etc), music type (love songs, happy songs, etc) and so forth.
Even if users found songs by searching, crawlers move through your site through links. Unless your site is extremely well linked and has a great navigation system, you are only going to see a relatively small percentage of your site indexed.
-
Wow, that was a quick response, thanks so much Ryan!
With regards to Google WMT, yep done that as soon as I went live, and I did try and make a sitemap using xml-sitemaps.org's tool, but where I have 700,000+ songs, the XML sitemap generator kept stalling due to lack of RAM. I did upload a partial sitemap though, but to date the "URLs in web index" is stuck at 363... out of 700,000+!!
You're right, I don't have a nav as I believe users will just use the search, but there is a "Browse" link in the footer which appears on every page, and this is effectively my Site Map: http://www.lyricstatus.com/browse
So as far as I'm concerned there is a static link path to every page in my website, correct me if I'm wrong?
Good point in your last para about a unique couple hundred words on each page - tall order for 700k pages, but could definitely do that for key songs that I want to get ranked for. Thanks again Ryan!
-
Hi Ed.
A few things you can do to help get your pages indexed:
1. If you have not done so already, register with Google and go to the Google Webmaster Tools page http://www.google.com/webmasters
2. If you have not already done so, create a XML sitemap. Ideally it should be located at http://www.lyricstatus.com/sitemap
3. If you want to locate the sitemap anywhere else, you will need to create a robots.txt file and place the sitemap URL in the file. I noticed you didn't have a robots.txt file. You can learn more about them at robotstxt.org.
4. In Google WMT, go ahead and upload your sitemap (Site Configuration > Sitemap). Then check back a day later. What you want to look at is two fields: URLs submitted and URLs in index. Your goal would be to have all your URLs in the index, but that isn't realistic without a lot of work.
5. Another thing you can do is create a HTML sitemap and place a link in the footer of your home page. You don't offer site navigation so a HTML sitemap can help visitors navigate your site.
Take these steps for now and then you will have a much better idea where your site stands. You can then match up your URLs in the sitemap with the URLs in Google's index. The urls without a match are the pages you need to get into the index.
You can try link building or even placing links to these buried pages on your home page to help get them indexed.
One last note concerning duplicate content. You really should consider adding original content to the pages to help them not be considered duplicate content. Keep in mind the page is viewed as a whole so if you have a song, you probably need to write at least a couple hundred words to differentiate your pages from all the other similar pages on the web.
Good luck.
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
-
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 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
No index on subdomains
Hi, We have a subdomain that is appearing in the search results - I want to hide this as it looks really bad. If I were to add the no index tag to the sub domain would URL would this affect the whole domain or just that sub domain? The main domain is vitally important - it is just that sub domain I need to hide. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
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 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury0 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0