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
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • 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.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • 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.

    What is your Brand Authority?
    Moz

    What is your Brand Authority?

    Check yours now
  • 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.

    • SEO Q&A

      Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • 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.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • 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. Omitted results

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.

Omitted results

Technical SEO
3
6
1.3k
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.
  • Poptafic
    Poptafic last edited by Jul 1, 2014, 2:13 AM

    Hello

    We are facing a loss in ranking and organic traffic from 3 months on our ecommerce website.

    Mostly we have lost our ranking on our product pages. These pages are gone in the "omitted results" of google.

    It all started 3 months ago, when we had to face a duplicate content issue due to a technical priblems with our servers: 2 other domains that we own have been pushed online on google, while they shouldn't have. They have created millions of links to our main domain in a few days, and duplicate version / redirection to our main website.

    We have fixed this a long time ago now.

    But in GWT we still see that these domains are bringing links to our main ecommerce. It has dowgraded from 36 millions links to 3 millions.... Even if today there is no link !

    We have done a lot of optimizations on site like adding specific content to our most important page, rebuilding the navigation, adding microdatas, adding canonical urls on products pages that we found were very similar (we sell very technical products, and we have products that are very similar. Now we have choosen 1 product to put in canonical each time it was necessary)

    Bt still our products pages don't rank in google. They stay in the "omitted results". Before they were ranking very well on 1st page of google's results.

    And we have noticed that some adswe put on ads listing websites are now well ranked in the google's results!... Like if the ads were having more authority on the subject than our own webpages...

    We started to delete some of these ads. But it's not always possible. And 2-3 of them are still online.

    Any advice to get our most important webpages at the top on the google's results back?

    Regards

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Poptafic
      Poptafic @BlueprintMarketing last edited by Jul 1, 2014, 9:32 AM Jul 1, 2014, 9:32 AM

      Hello again

      I've just seen in our GWT that we have a message "Googlebot encountered an extremely high number of URLs on your site"

      It is from 4 days ago only.

      I don't understand why we have this message. As we haven't change the number of pages. And in fact, as we have put gathered some pages very similar with a canonical url for the most important of them each time, Google should "see" less pages than before...

      Any idea about what happen? And what to do to fix it quickly?

      Regards

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Poptafic
        Poptafic @BlueprintMarketing last edited by Jul 1, 2014, 9:04 AM Jul 1, 2014, 9:04 AM

        Hello Thomas

        Thank you for your answer.

        1/ About clearing the DNS records of those 2 domains

        What does it mean?

        2/ DMTA

        I have no message in my GWT. So I understand that it is content duplication the problem?

        But I have to add that we have around 500 000 products. These are technical products and our competitors  use the same database of information about the products. So we have pretty much the same content on our product pages between us... Since 15 days we started to put online specific content that we wrote ourself about our best products. I think we can upgrade up to 1000 or 2000 product pages in the next 3 month. But we won't be able to do it for the 500 000 products...

        And for the moment the pages upgraded with specific content are not ranked better (too early I think)

        3/ Clearing the issues

        You say: "I think if you start with the beginning of the issues and start clearing  them up instead of spending time trying to optimize you will make much more progress. "

        You mean we have to focus only on eradicating the ads where we have our products on other domains? But what if we can't on a few domains? And what about our competitors that have the same content? We can't tell them to delete their product pages... And until 3 months ago we were ranking very well with these pages.

        Or do you mean something else by "clearing them up" ?

        Regards

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Poptafic
          Poptafic @tomwhite last edited by Jul 1, 2014, 7:19 AM Jul 1, 2014, 7:19 AM

          Hello

          Thank you for the answer.

          1/ Redirect 301: yes we had a redirect 301 from the 2 domains to the main domain. But this has been removed since April ( more than 2 months)

          Now each url that had existed on these 2 domains redirect only to an index.html webpage.

          On this index.html page we only have a sentence clickable to go and visit our main domain (<a href="">visit our shop online</a>)

          About the 2 domains

          We also added a "disallow" code in the robots.txt after we deleted the 301 redirection to our main domain

          2/ Ads on other websites vs our website

          We have more authority than these websites (despite the fact that we lose several points of authority these last months). So you think our website has still a penalty from google for duplicate content? How can we recover from it faster?

          Regards

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • BlueprintMarketing
            BlueprintMarketing last edited by Jul 1, 2014, 4:01 AM Jul 1, 2014, 4:01 AM

            _"Mostly we have lost our ranking on our product pages. These pages are gone in the "omitted results" of google. _

            It all started 3 months ago, when we had to face a duplicate content issue due to a technical problems with our servers: 2 other domains that we own have been pushed online on google, while they shouldn't have. They have created millions of links to our main domain in a few days, and duplicate version / redirection to our main website."

            so I am on the same page when your servers published the two additional domains that created this issue  I am assuming that you have removed those domains are no longer being served right?

            when they were live they were on the same C block or IP? as you said they were served from the same server so going to say yes.

            then request removal of the offending domains.

            http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/requesting-removal-of-content-from-our.html

            http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/15389/removing-domain-from-google-search-results

            http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-remove-wrong-crawled-domain-from-google-index

            http://www.1stonthelist.ca/articles/omitted-results/

            I would go as far as clearing the DNS records of those domains after you export the zone files in order to keep this from happening in the future.

            I would then file

            After I would check my site for duplicate content especially content that is already possibly on Manufacturers websites things like that because That will cause this type of issue on your product pages.

            I would then use

            http://www.copyscape.com/

            &

            http://www.siteliner.com/products

            _http://www.techentice.com/best-free-copyscape-alternatives/ _

            first check that everything is rendering correctly using

            http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/

            you most likely were omitted by Google for having little to no unique content. Eight Digital millennium takedown Act or DMTA

            do you know anyone that would want to harm you?

            http://moz.com/community/q/google-said-repeat-the-search-with-the-omitted-results-included

            https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/Ie9aJfZVpkw

            Jane has some wise things to say in here and remember

            http://moz.com/community/q/does-omitted-results-shown-by-google-always-mean-that-website-has-duplicate-content

            "any URLs that are different are different in Google's eyes, unless the modifier is a # symbol."

            _ This sounds like removal due to duplication rather than DMCA - the omission is usually noted as being because of DMCA notices if they are the reason, e.g. http://img.labnol.org/images/2008/07/googlesearchdmcacomplaint.png_

            I think if you start with the beginning of the issues and start clearing  them up instead of spending time trying to optimize you will make much more progress.

            I hope this was of help,

            Thomas

            Poptafic 2 Replies Last reply Jul 1, 2014, 9:32 AM Reply Quote 0
            • tomwhite
              tomwhite last edited by Jul 1, 2014, 2:48 AM Jul 1, 2014, 2:48 AM

              Have you redirected the two sites that were causing duplicate links using a 301 redirect (& told Google about the change of address through GWT?

              Links can take quite a while to be removed from GWT, but it does happen..eventually!

              The fact that the ads are showing and not your pages on your domain sounds like you either have very low domain authority, and the domain authority of the ad websites is higher and therefore ranking above you, or you still have an issue/algo penalty from your duplicate content (or something else).

              How long ago did you remove the duplicate content?

              Poptafic 1 Reply Last reply Jul 1, 2014, 7:19 AM Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              1 out of 6
              • First post
                1/6
                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

              • Digital-Murph

                Spam URL'S in search results

                We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing.  The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?

                Technical SEO | Jun 24, 2017, 9:03 PM | Digital-Murph
                0
              • davidwaring

                Seeing URL Slugs as search result titles

                I've been seeing some search results for my site that look like the first result here, where the URL slug is used as SERP title: https://drive.google.com/a/fitsmallbusiness.com/file/d/0B37y4RslpuY-a0hQYjlJQ0NxeFJicDF6RVlURFVSNFN0aGhB/view?usp=sharing The article title (and Yoast snippet title) are both "28 Press Release Examples From The Pros", but for some reason I'm seeing "press-release-examples" in the search results. I've seen this for multiple articles, and I see it now and then with different articles. I'm aware that Google often changes the titles in search results, but it seems very weird to me that they would opt for just the URL slug here. Thoughts? Has anyone else seen this issue? Any idea what might be causing this? All help much appreciated.

                Technical SEO | May 5, 2016, 5:57 PM | davidwaring
                0
              • Exotissimo

                Parked domain is first in search results

                We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed. But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed? But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks. exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.

                Technical SEO | Feb 17, 2015, 10:08 AM | Exotissimo
                0
              • Digital-DMG

                How big is the problem: 404-errors as result of out of stock products?

                We had a discussion about the importance of 404-errors as result of products which are out of stock. Of course this is not good, but what is the leverance in terms of importance: low-medium-high?

                Technical SEO | Dec 8, 2014, 2:26 PM | Digital-DMG
                0
              • csmm

                Fixing a website redirect situation that resulted in drop in traffic

                Hi, I'm trying to help someone fix the following situation: they had a website, www.domain.com, that was generating a steady amount of traffic for three years. They then redesigned the website a couple of months ago, and the website developer redirected the site to domain.com but did not set up analytics on domain.com. We noticed that there was a drop in traffic to www.domain.com but have no idea if domain.com is generating any traffic since analytics wasn't installed. To fix this situation, I was going to find out from the developer if there was a good reason to redirect the site. What would have prompted the developer to do this if www.domain.com had been used already for three years? Then, unless there was a good reason, I would change the redirect back to what it was before - domain.com redirecting to www.domain.com. Presumably this would allow us to regain the traffic to the site www.domain.com that was lost when the redirect was put in place. Does this sound like a reasonable course of action? Is there anything that I'm missing, or anything else that I should do in this situation? Thanks in advance! Carolina

                Technical SEO | Dec 12, 2012, 1:10 AM | csmm
                0
              • spiralsites

                Should I nofollow search results pages

                I have a customer site where you can search for products they sell url format is: domainname/search/keywords/ keywords being what the user has searched for. This means the number of pages can be limitless as the client has over 7500 products. or should I simply rel canonical the search page or simply no follow it?

                Technical SEO | Nov 25, 2012, 7:09 AM | spiralsites
                0
              • JordanJudson

                Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?

                When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?

                Technical SEO | May 6, 2011, 3:55 PM | JordanJudson
                0
              • Carlito-256961

                How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?

                I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result.  See attached for an example.  How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png

                Technical SEO | Mar 6, 2011, 6:07 AM | Carlito-256961
                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
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority 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.