Sitemap indexed pages dropping
-
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
-
Just wanted to update this, it took a month but since I decided to completely remove canonical tags and try and handle duplicate content with url rewrites and 301 redirects and I now have 114 out of 149 indexed from my sitemap which is much better. it ended up to dropping to 5 out of 149 at one point.
-
Hi Stephen,
Great that you've probably found the cause - this will absolutely cause mass de-indexation. I had a client a year ago canonicalise their entire site (two sites, actually) to the home page. All their rankings and indexed pages dropped off over a matter of about six days (we spotted the tag immediately but the fix went into a "queue" - ugh!).
The bad news is that it took them a long time to get properly re-indexed and regain their rankings (I am talking months, not weeks). Having said this, the sites were nearly brand new - they had very few backlinks and were both less than six months old. I do not believe that an older site would have had as much problem regaining rankings, but I can't be sure and I have only seen that situation take place first-hand once.
-
I may have found the issue today. Most of the articles are pulled from a database and I think I placed a wrong canonical tag on the page which screwed up everything. Does anyone know how long it takes before a fix like this will show?
-
Thats a good catch, I fixed that. I do use that in WMT and it has been fine for the longest time. I guess its not that big of an issue, my main concern was the pages being indexed. Was reading another Q&A thing and used the info: qualifer to check some of the pages and all the ones I checked are indexed and its more then the 11. I just don't understand why its dropped all a sudden, and if that number really means anything.
-
How are the indexed numbers looking in WMT today? I see 3,370 results for a site: search on the domain, but those can be iffy in terms of up to date accuracy: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agoautohub.com&oq=site%3Agoautohub.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.798j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8
Not that this should matter too much if you are submitting a sitemap through WMT but your robots.txt file specifies sitemap.xml. There is a duplciate sitemap on that URL (http://goautohub.com/sitemap.xml) - are you using sitemap.php, which you mention here, in WMT? .php can be used for sitemaps, but I would update the robots.txt file to reflect the correct URL - http://i.imgur.com/uSB1P1g.png, whichever is meant to be right. I am not aware of problems with having duplicate sitemaps, as long as they are identical, but I'd use just one if it were me.
-
Thanks for checking, I haven't found anything yet.The site is goautohub.com. it's a custom site and the site map file is auto generated. It's goautohub.com/sitemap.php. I've done it like that for over a year. I did start seeing an error message about high response times and I've been working on improving that. It makes since because we have been advertising more to get the site seen. In regards to the rest of Williams points I have checked those but no improvement yet. Thank you
-
Hi Stephen,
Checking in to see if you had checked the points William has raised above. Do you see anything that could have resulted in the drop? Also, are you comfortable sharing the site here? We might be able to have a look too (feel free to PM if you are not comfortable sharing publicly).
Cheers,
Jane
-
Try to determine when the drop off started, and try to remember what kinds of changes the website was going through during that time. That could help point to the reason for the drop in indexing.
There are plenty of reasons why Google may choose not to index pages, so this will take some digging. Here are some places to start the search:
-
Check your robots.txt to ensure those pages are still crawlable
-
Check to make sure the content on those pages isn't duplicated somewhere else on the Web.
-
Check to see if there was any updates to canonical changes on the site around when the drop started
-
Check to make sure the sitemap currently on the site matches the one you submitted to Webmasters, and that your CMS didn't auto-generate a new one
-
Make sure the quality of the pages is worth indexing. You said your traffic didn't really take a hit, so it's not de-indexing your quality stuff.
-
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
-
Page Indexing without content
Hello. I have a problem of page indexing without content. I have website in 3 different languages and 2 of the pages are indexing just fine, but one language page (the most important one) is indexing without content. When searching using site: page comes up, but when searching unique keywords for which I should rank 100% nothing comes up. This page was indexing just fine and the problem arose couple of days ago after google update finished. Looking further, the problem is language related and every page in the given language that is newly indexed has this problem, while pages that were last crawled around one week ago are just fine. Has anyone ran into this type of problem?
Technical SEO | | AtuliSulava1 -
Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
I have this problem for the site's blog
Technical SEO | | seomozplan196
There is no problem when I check the yoast plugin setting , but some of my blog content is not on the map site but indexed. Did you have such a problem? What is the cause? my website name is missomister1 -
Help Center/Knowledgebase effects on SEO: Is it worth my time fixing technical issues on no-indexed subdomain pages?
We're a SaaS company and have a pretty extensive help center resource on a subdomain (help.domain.com). This has been set up and managed over a few years by someone with no knowledge of SEO, meaning technical things like 404 links, bad redirects and http/https mixes have not been paid attention to. Every page on this subdomain is set to NOT be indexed in search engines, but we do sometimes link to help pages from indexable posts on the main domain. After spending time fixing problems on our main website, our site audits now flag almost solely errors and issues on these non-indexable help center pages every week. So my question is: is it worth my time fixing technical issues on a help center subdomain that has all its pages non-indexable in search engines? I don't manage this section of the site, and so getting fixes done is a laborious process that requires going through someone else - something I'd rather only do if necessary.
Technical SEO | | mglover19880 -
Pages not indexed
Hey everyone Despite doing the necessary checks, we have this problem that only a part of the sitemap is indexed.
Technical SEO | | conversal
We don't understand why this indexation doesn't want to take place. The major problem is that only a part of the sitemap is indexed. For a client we have several projects on the website with several subpages, but only a few of these subpages are indexed. Each project has 5 to 6 subpages. They all should be indexed. Project: https://www.brody.be/nl/nieuwbouwprojecten/nieuwbouw-eeklo/te-koop-eeklo/ Mainly subelements of the page are indexed: https://www.google.be/search?source=hp&ei=gZT1Wv2ANouX6ASC5K-4Bw&q=site%3Abrody.be%2Fnl%2Fnieuwbouwprojecten%2Fnieuwbouw-eeklo%2F&oq=site%3Abrody.be%2Fnl%2Fnieuwbouwprojecten%2Fnieuwbouw-eeklo%2F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...30.11088.0.11726.16.13.1.0.0.0.170.1112.8j3.11.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..4.6.693.0..0j0i131k1.0.p6DjqM3iJY0 Do you have any idea what is going wrong here?
Thanks for your advice! Frederik
Digital marketeer at Conversal0 -
Sitemap.gz is being indexed and is showing up in SERP instead of actual pages.
Sitemap.gz is being indexed and is showing up in SERP instead of actual pages. I recently uploaded my sitemap file - https://psglearning.com/sitemapcustom/sitemap-index.xml - via Search Console. The only record within the XML file is sitemaps.gz. When I searched for some content on my site - here is the search https://goo.gl/mqxBeq - I was shown the following search result, indicating that our GZ file is getting indexed instead of our pages. http://www.psglearning.com/catalog 1 http://www.psglearning.com ...www.psglearning.com/sitemapcustom/sitemap.gz... 1 https://www.psglearning.com/catalog/productdetails/9781284059656/ 1 https://www.psglearning.com/catalog/productdetails/9781284060454/ 1 ... My sitemap is listed at https://psglearning.com/sitemapcustom/sitemap-index.xml inside the sitemap the only reference is to sitemap.gz. Should we remove the link the the sitemap.gz within the xml file and just serve the actual page paths? <sitemapindex< span=""> xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"></sitemapindex<><sitemap></sitemap>https://www.psglearning.com/sitemapcustom/sitemap.gz<lastmod></lastmod>2017-06-12T09:41-04:00
Technical SEO | | pdowling0 -
No existing pages in Google index
I have a real estate portal. I have a few categories - for example: flats, houses etc. Url of category looks like that: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1 Each category has about 30-40 pages - BUT in Google index I found url like: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1350 Can you explain it? This url contains just headline etc - but no content! (it´s just generated page by PHP) How is it possible, that Google can find and index these pages? (on the web, there are no backlinks on these pages) thanks
Technical SEO | | visibilitysk0 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90 -
Home Page Indexing Question/Problem
Hello Everyone, Background: I recently decided to change the preferred domain settings in WM Tools from the non www version of my site to the www version. I did this because there is a redirect from the non www to the www and I've built all of my internal links with the www. Everything I read on SEO Moz seemed to indicate that this was a good move. Traffic has been down/volatile but I think it's attributable mostly to a recent site change/redesign. Having said that the preferred domain change did seem to drop traffic an additional notch. I made the move two weeks ago. Here is the question: When I google my site, the home page shows up as the site title without the custom title tags I've written. The page that displays in the SERP is still the non www version of the site. a site:www.mysite.com search shows an internal page first but doesn't return the home page as a result. All other pages pop up indexed with the www version of the page. a site:mysite.com (notice lack of www) search DOES SHOW my home page and my custom title tags but with a non www version of the page. All other pages pop up indexed with the www version of the page. Any one have thoughts on this? Is this a classic example of waiting on Google to catch up with the changes to my tiny little site?
Technical SEO | | JSOC0