undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
    Moz Pro

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

    Try it free!
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Technical SEO
  4. Sitemap indexed pages dropping

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.

Sitemap indexed pages dropping

Technical SEO
3
9
5.4k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • zenstorageunits
    zenstorageunits last edited by May 13, 2014, 12:27 PM

    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.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • zenstorageunits
      zenstorageunits last edited by Jun 17, 2014, 10:38 PM Jun 17, 2014, 10:38 PM

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • topic:timeago_earlier,30 days
      • JaneCopland
        JaneCopland @zenstorageunits last edited by May 19, 2014, 5:28 AM May 19, 2014, 5:23 AM

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • zenstorageunits
          zenstorageunits last edited by May 18, 2014, 2:11 PM May 18, 2014, 2:11 PM

          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?

          JaneCopland 1 Reply Last reply May 19, 2014, 5:23 AM Reply Quote 0
          • zenstorageunits
            zenstorageunits @JaneCopland last edited by May 16, 2014, 8:13 AM May 16, 2014, 8:13 AM

            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.

            mmx7719

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • JaneCopland
              JaneCopland @zenstorageunits last edited by May 16, 2014, 5:43 AM May 16, 2014, 5:43 AM

              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.

              zenstorageunits 1 Reply Last reply May 16, 2014, 8:13 AM Reply Quote 1
              • zenstorageunits
                zenstorageunits @JaneCopland last edited by May 15, 2014, 9:54 AM May 15, 2014, 9:54 AM

                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

                JaneCopland 1 Reply Last reply May 16, 2014, 5:43 AM Reply Quote 0
                • JaneCopland
                  JaneCopland last edited by May 15, 2014, 8:38 AM May 15, 2014, 8:38 AM

                  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

                  zenstorageunits 1 Reply Last reply May 15, 2014, 9:54 AM Reply Quote 1
                  • WilliamKammer
                    WilliamKammer last edited by May 13, 2014, 2:28 PM May 13, 2014, 2:28 PM

                    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.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • 1 / 1
                    1 out of 9
                    • First post
                      1/9
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    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.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • SameerBhatia

                      Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages

                      Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
                      http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page  as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks

                      Technical SEO | Mar 28, 2018, 2:43 AM | SameerBhatia
                      0
                    • muzzmoz

                      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 | Oct 30, 2016, 3:12 PM | muzzmoz
                      1
                    • SierraPCB

                      Why google indexed pages are decreasing?

                      Hi, my website had around 400 pages indexed  but from February, i noticed a huge decrease in indexed numbers and it is continually decreasing. can anyone help me to find out the reason. where i can get solution for that?  will it effect my web page ranking ?

                      Technical SEO | Jun 19, 2014, 11:28 PM | SierraPCB
                      0
                    • CharmingGuy

                      How to block text on a page to be indexed?

                      I would like to block the spider indexing a block of text inside a page , however I do not want to block the whole page with, for example , a noindex tag. I have tried already with a tag like this : chocolate pudding chocolate pudding However this is not working for my case, a travel related website. thanks in advance for your support. Best regards Gianluca

                      Technical SEO | Feb 16, 2014, 11:25 PM | CharmingGuy
                      0
                    • ProjectLabs

                      Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?

                      Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.

                      Technical SEO | Oct 18, 2012, 9:44 PM | ProjectLabs
                      1
                    • StickyRiceSEO

                      Is it bad to have same page listed twice in sitemap?

                      Hello, I have found that from an HTML  (not xml) sitemap of a website, a page has been listed twice. Is it okay or will it be considered duplicate content? Both the links use same anchor text, but different urls that redirect to another (final) page. I thought ideal way is to use final page in sitemap (and in all internal linking), not the intermediate pages. Am I right?

                      Technical SEO | Jun 13, 2012, 4:22 PM | StickyRiceSEO
                      1
                    • RogersSEO

                      /index.php in sitemap? take it out?

                      Hi Everyone, The following was automatically generated at xml-sitemaps.com Should I get rid of the index.php url from my sitemap?  If so, how do I go about redirecting it in my htaccess ? <url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/</loc></url>
                      <url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/index.php</loc></url> thank you in advance, Martin

                      Technical SEO | Jun 20, 2011, 3:01 PM | RogersSEO
                      0
                    • 5225Marketing

                      How to handle sitemap with pages using query strings?

                      Hi, I'm working to optimize a site that currently has about 5K pages listed in the sitemap.  There are not in face this many pages.  Part of the problem is that one of the pages is a tool where each sort and filter button produces a query string URL. It seems to me inefficient to have so many items listed that are all really the same page.  Not to mention wanting to avoid any duplicate content or low quality issues. How have you found it best to handle this?  Should I just noindex each of the links?  Canonical links? Should I manually remove the pages from the sitemap?  Should I continue as is? Thanks a ton for any input you have!

                      Technical SEO | Apr 1, 2011, 4:34 AM | 5225Marketing
                      0

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.