Sitemap url's not being indexed
-
There is an issue on one of our sites regarding many of the sitemap url's not being indexed. (at least 70% is not being indexed)
The url's in the sitemap are normal url's without any strange characters attached to them, but after looking into it, it seems a lot of the url's get a #. + a number sequence attached to them once you actually go to that url. We are not sure if the "addthis" bookmark could cause this, or if it's another script doing it.
For example
Url in the sitemap: http://example.com/example-category/0246
Url once you actually go to that link: http://example.com/example-category/0246#.VR5a
Just for further information, the XML file does not have any style information associated with it and is in it's most basic form.
Has anyone had similar issues with their sitemap not being indexed properly ?...Could this be the cause of many of these url's not being indexed ?
Thanks all for your help.
-
Anders,
Thanks for the reply. I definitely agree a self referring canonical might just be a good extra addition on these product pages, so I'm definitely adding that to our list of to do's if it does not improve.
In terms of indexing pages - We have not restricted crawl frequency, we have it set to "allow google to determine the optimal crawl rate". No other warnings found within the search console either.
Thanks for your help.
-
I agree - i probably would ignore everything after the "#".
But have you tried added a <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page-url" /> to your pages and see if this will update it? Also: Add the sitemap to your robots.txt if not allready done.
Regarding indexing pages - have you restricted crawl frequency in Google Search Console, or is it set to be determined by GoogleBot? Any other warnings or messages in Search Console?
Best regards,
Anders -
Lesley,
Thanks for the confirmation on that one and the article. Since it doesn't seem like a lot of people on the site are using that address share function, I do not think it would do any harm to remove it.
At least we know the root cause of why it's doing it to the url's. Now the real question is...could it be getting in the way of indexing those url's ?...one would think not, as from what I've read, google would simply ignore what comes after the #.
Thoughts ?
Appreciate the help.
-
Patrick,
We'd prefer to keep the actual url's private, however I can provide further information to help hopefully allow the community to dissect this further:
- It's an E-commerce website, meaning many facets, filters, and possible duplicate content angles
- It seems many of the static pages (/products main page, /contact,etc) are indexed, however it seems the individual products are mostly not being indexed through the sitemap
- While the url's found in webmaster tools under "index" has also steadily been going down, it definitely doesn't correspond with the lack of pages indexed vs submitted within the sitemap
- We have checked robots.txt, and it is not blocking any important pages. (I also had them allow robots to crawl css and js so google could have full access)
- The individual product pages all have the "addthis" feature, meaning they all have a #. + number sequence added to the url's. However one would think this wouldn't be the cause of this lack of indexation ?
Thanks for your help.
-
Yes, add this is doing this to your url. I hate it, that is one reason why I do not use them.
Here is an article on how to remove them, http://support.addthis.com/customer/portal/articles/1013558-removing-all-hashtags-anchors-weird-codes-from-your-urls
-
Hi there
Could you provide you website's URL? It would help the community take a deeper look - thanks!
Good luck!
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
-
Blog page won't get indexed
Hi Guys, I'm currently asked to work on a website. I noticed that the blog posts won't get indexed in Google. www.domain.com/blog does get indexed but the blogposts itself won't. They have been online for over 2 months now. I found this in the robots.txt file: Allow: / Disallow: /kitchenhandle/ Disallow: /blog/comments/ Disallow: /blog/author/ Disallow: /blog/homepage/feed/ I'm guessing that the last line causes this issue. Does anyone have an idea if this is the case and why they would include this in the robots.txt? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Getting a Vanity (Clean) URL indexed
Hello, I have a vanity (clean looking) URL that 302 redirects to the ugly version. So in other words http://www.site.com/url 302 >>> http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx What I'm trying to do is get the clean version to show up in search. However, for some reason Google only indexes the ugly version. cache:http://www.site.com/directory/directory/url.aspx is showing the ugly URL as cached and cache:http://www.site.com/url is showing not cached at all. Is there some way to force Google to index the clean version? Fetch as Google for the clean URL only returns a redirect status and canonicalizing the ugly to the clean would seem to send a strange message because of the redirect back to the ugly. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Digi12340 -
Add selective URLs to an XML Sitemap
Hi! Our website has a very large no of pages. I am looking to create an XML Sitemap that contains only the most important pages (category pages etc). However, on crawling the website in a tool like Xenu (the others have a 500 page limit), I am unable to control which pages get added to the XML Sitemap, and which ones get excluded. Essentially, I only want pages that are upto 4 clicks away from my homepage to show up in the XML Sitemap. How should I create an XML sitemap, and at the same time control which pages of my site I add to it (category pages), and which ones I remove (product pages etc). Thanks in advance! Apurv
Technical SEO | | AB_Newbie0 -
Google webmaster tool doestn allow me to send 'URL and all linked pages"
Hello! I made a lot of optimization changes in my site ( seo urls, and a lot more ) , I always use Google Webmaster tools, fetch as Google Bot to refresh my site but now it doesnt allow me to 'Send URL and all linked pages' check the attachment Thank you
Technical SEO | | matiw0 -
Wordpress New Category URL's
Were just about to redesign our site and put all the blogs over to the new site. Previously most blogs have been added to the uncategorised section of the blog and I'm now weighing up the benefit of sifting through all the blogs and changing them to relevant categories. From an SEO perspective would it be better to Leave them in their current category but start afresh with all new blogs by adding them to relevant categories? Work out which blogs should go in which new category and 301 all previous URL's to the new one. Obviously number one will take a lot more time than number two.
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Moz Reporting Incorrect 404's
Hi Guys SEOMoz is telling me that we have 191 404 errors f. I have checked this with several other crawlers and this not the case. For example, http://www.opticalexpress.co.uk/eyecare/corporate-savings.html%0D%0A2027 But correct links its http://www.opticalexpress.co.uk/eyecare/corporate-savings.html which is fine... We have no record of these links so why is it appending these characters at the end of the URL which is causing the 404's....
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
Are URL's with trailing slash seen as two different URLs
Hello, http://www.example.com and http://ww.example.com/ Are these seen as two different URL's ? Just as with www or non www ? Or it doesn't make any difference ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050