Total Indexed 1.5M vs 83k submitted by sitemap. What?
-
We recently took a good look at one of our content site's sitemap and tried to cut out a lot of crap that had gotten in there such as .php, .xml, .htm versions of each page. We also cut out images to put in a separate image sitemap.
The sitemap generated 83,000+ URLs for google to crawl (this partially used the Yoast Wordpress plugin to generate)
In webmaster tools in the index status section is showing that this site has a total index of 1.5 million.
With our sitemap coming back with 83k and google indexing 1.5 million pages, is this a sign of a CMS gone rogue? Is it an indication that we could be pumping out error pages or empty templates, or junk pages that we're cramming into Google's bot?
I would love to hear what you guys think. Is this normal? Is this something to be concerned about? Should our total index more closely match our sitemap page count?
-
As well as parameters mentioned you may possibly have heaps of duplicating categories, tags etc. What I would also do is start searching Google with something like site:www.example.com/directory/ or possibly site:www.example.com/category/directory/directory/ so you are tightly narrowing down the results, switch to 100 results per page and manually look for clues.
-
If you have 1.5 million pages and you think your sitemap is comprehensive at 83,000 then yes, your CMS is needlessly generating pages. It's usually not a big deal from a ranking standpoint, but it can make other important issues hard to detect. I would clean it up, but that's a business call you'll have to make.
The first step is diagnosing where are the URLs are coming from. What you do next will depend, but I will give you the best advice I can without knowing what types of extraneous URLs you have and how Google is treating them:
First, I'd start with WMT > Crawl > URL Parameters. Quite often your CMS will generate URLs, and Google usually knows how to handle them. If there are a lot of URL parameters, Google them and see if they're exactly the same as other pages. If they are, make sure you have canonical tags in place to point them to the main version. There's more you can do with parameters, but it'll depend on what you find so I won't go into more detail. As a general rule, though, a CMS should not generate a page unless it is uniquely useful as differentiated landing page or a page for people to link to.
Also check for parameters in your analytics program. They could actually be messing up your pageview data depending on how you report.There's a post on fixing that in GA here:
http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/03/29/remove-url-parameters-from-google-analytics-reports/
Next I'd look at the "Advanced" tab in WMT > Google Index > Index Status . Are there a lot of URLs removed? If so, check on these pages and see why they're removed and why they exist.
I would also run a crawl with Xenu and Screaming Frog to make sure crawlers are finding a reasonable number of pages and that they're not getting stuck in crawl loops. (crawling variations of a page endlessly). These kinds of issues can prevent new pages from being indexed on time because Google is wasting time (your crawl budget) running in circles.
-
Rob,
Your sitemap is but an indication to Google about urls on your domain. The sitemap does not limit google to crawling or indexing only the urls listed on it, nor is it a directive that tells google to remove urls from the index that it has already crawled. As stated in GWT, use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results with the URL removal tool Google webmaster tools under the "google index" link.
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
-
Two websites vs. one for SEO
I recently met with a new potential client who currently has two websites for his business - one that is for the business as a whole and another that is specific to one of his particular services (his main service and what the overall business is known for). My first question was "why do you have two websites?" His response was that he has had a really hard time ranking well organically for his main service. He worked with an SEO company for two years and never was able to establish a solid organic presence for searches related to his main service - so he went ahead and had a site built to focus specifically on that service with the hope that it would help him rank organically for searches related to that service. The new site was built very recently (Dec. 2014) and it hasn't had a lot of optimization work put into it. The original site has a much higher Domain Authority, more incoming links, etc. My typical preference has always been to use one website and drive all traffic to that site, while building out specific content for any products/services on individual pages of the site. For some reason I'm torn as to what to do with this particular situation since his main concern is ranking for his core service, which hasn't happened with the original site. I'm concerned, though, that optimizing and managing two websites will be less effective than driving all of the traffic to one site, and that it could actually be detrimental overall. What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to let me know if you need any more details.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Silo vs breadcrumbs in 2015
Hi ive heard silos being mentioned in the past to help with rankings does this still apply? and what about breadcrumbs do i use them with the silo technique or instead of which ones do you think are better or should i not be using these anymore with the recent google updates?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juun0 -
Custom sitemap or sitemap generator tool
I have recently launched a website which is using a free sitemap generator (http://web-site-map.com/). It's a large travel agency site (www.yougoadventure.com) with predominantly dynamically generated content - users can add their products as and when and be listed automatically. The guy doing the programming for the site says the sitemap generator is not up to the job and that I should be ranking far better for certain search terms than the site is now. He reckons it doesn't provide lastmod info and the sitemap should be submitted every time a new directory is added or change made. He seems to think that I need to spend £400-£500 for him to custom build a site map. Surely there's a cheaper option out there for a sitemap that can be generated daily or 'ping' google every-time an addition to the site is made or product added? Sorry for the non tech speak - Ive got my web designer telling one thing and the programmer another so im just left trawling through Q&As. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Curran0 -
Sitemap.xml
Looking for a discussion for using sitemap.xml We have used them for years and I still see that Google has an area to submit your sitemap to but from everything I research, including Google, sitemaps seem to now-a-days be almost useless. What do you think and what has your research shown? Thanks everybody! Charles Mazzini
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Canonical Tags being indexed on paginated results?
On a website I'm working on which has a search feature with paginated results, all of the pages of the search results are set with a canonical tag back to the first page of the search results, however Google is indexing certain random pages within the result set. I can literally do a search in Google and find a deep page in the results, click on it and view source on that page and see that it has a canonical tag leading back to the first page of the set. Has anyone experienced this before? Why would Google not honor a canonical tag if it is set correctly? I've seen several SEO techniques for dealing with pagination, is there another solution that you all recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
De Index Section of Page?
Hey all! We're having a couple of issues with a certain section of our page that we don't want to index. Basically, our cross sells change really quickly, and big G is ranking them and linking to them even when they've long gone. Is it possible to put some kind of no index tag for a specific section of the page? See below 🙂 http://www.freestylextreme.com/uk/Home/Brands/DC-Shoe-Co-/Mens-DC-Shoe-Co-Hoodies-and-Sweaters/DC-Black-Rob-Dyrdek-Official-Sweater.aspx Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elbeno0 -
Indexing an e-commerce site
Hi all, My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category. The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress. In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress? More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jenga110