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.
Is there a way to get a list of Total Indexed pages from Google Webmaster Tools?
-
I'm doing a detailed analysis of how Google sees and indexes our website and we have found that there are 240,256 pages in the index which is way too many. It's an e-commerce site that needs some tidying up.
I'm working with an SEO specialist to set up URL parameters and put information in to the robots.txt file so the excess pages aren't indexed (we shouldn't have any more than around 3,00 - 4,000 pages) but we're struggling to find a way to get a list of these 240,256 pages as it would be helpful information in deciding what to put in the robots.txt file and which URL's we should ask Google to remove.
Is there a way to get a list of the URL's indexed? We can't find it in the Google Webmaster Tools.
-
Looks like I can only do the first thousand. It's a start though. Thank you for the information.
Many of the URL's on my list, when put in to Google search, are giving me 80-100 other variants I can remove by hand.
http://www.mathewporter.co.uk/list-a-domains-indexed-pages-in-google-docs/ for anyone else following.
-
Finally getting around to doing this and noticed that when I change the start number to anything above 900, it doesn't work - ie: it's only letting me look at the first 1,000 results for some reason.
The list of 1,000 has given me some good URL's to search off for the filtering thingy that was generating all the garbage URL's but I'd love to get past 1,000 if I can.
Does anyone know how?
-
Correct. I have gone in to URL Parameters already and set them to Crawl 'No URLs' for those we don't want crawled.
We haven't added those parameters listed in there in to the robots.txt file yet, but I will do that now. I had an initial consult today and we ran way over time when we discovered all this stuff so I have another appointment in a couple of weeks.
We have a sitemap of all the category pages and relevant static pages on the site already and Google has those indexed nicely. We just need to get rid of the 240,000 pages it has indexed that we don't want in there (frightening I know - it's a really high number).
I greatly appreciate you taking the time to respond. Thank you.
-
Thanks. There's a lot of auto-generated content, duplicate pages and we've set the robots.txt file up to exclude a large number of them. Now we wait.
Very helpful and greatly appreciated. Thank you.
-
Hi,
I'm going to assume that as you have said it's an e-commerce site that the URL parameters are created by product variations, filters, sorts etc. If so then you must already be seeing those parameters on the URL of your site as you navigate and in your analytics or search results.
Your SEO specialist should easily be able to add those parameters to the robots file. Then personally I would resubmit a site map for completeness and wait for results to take effect.
-
Joanne,
I'm afraid there's no way to know which pages are actually indexed from your Webmaster Tools. You can use a simple search in Google: site:domain.com and it will list "all" your indexed pages, however, there's no way to export that as a report.
You can create a report using some "hack". Login to your Google Drive, create a new spreadsheet and use the following command to populate rows:
=importXml("https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.yourdomainnamehere.com&num=100&start=1"; "//cite")
This will load the first 100 results. You will need to repeat the process for every 1000 results you have, changing the last variable: "start=1" to "start=100" and then "start=200", etc (you see where I'm going). This could really be a pain in the butt for your site's size.
My recommendation is you navigate your own site, decide which pages should be removed and then create the robots.txt regardless what google has indexed. Once you complete your robots.txt, it will take a few weeks (or even a month) to have the blocked pages removed.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Conditional Noindex for Dynamic Listing Pages?
Hi, We have dynamic listing pages that are sometimes populated and sometimes not populated. They are clinical trial results pages for disease types, some of which don't always have trials open. This means that sometimes the CMS produces a blank page -- pages that are then flagged as thin content. We're considering implementing a conditional noindex -- where the page is indexed only if there are results. However, I'm concerned that this will be confusing to Google and send a negative ranking signal. Any advice would be super helpful. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | walletapp0 -
Google indexed wrong pages of my website.
When I google site:www.ayurjeewan.com, after 8 pages, google shows Slider and shop pages. Which I don't want to be indexed. How can I get rid of these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Page position dropped on Google
Hey Guys, My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week. The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk the school signs are a product of text styles. I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more. They have also said that duplicate content within the school site http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site) Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market. I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750. They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished. Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions. Either way I'm very confused. Thanks Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TextStylesUK0 -
Best way to permanently remove URLs from the Google index?
We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt. I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt). What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login. What is the next best solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0