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
-
My Website's Home Page is Missing on Google SERP
Hi All, I have a WordPress website which has about 10-12 pages in total. When I search for the brand name on Google Search, the home page URL isn't appearing on the result pages while the rest of the pages are appearing. There're no issues with the canonicalization or meta titles/descriptions as such. What could possibly the reason behind this aberration? Looking forward to your advice! Cheers
Technical SEO | | ugorayan0 -
What's the best way to test Angular JS heavy page for SEO?
Hi Moz community, Our tech team has recently decided to try switching our product pages to be JavaScript dependent, this includes links, product descriptions and things like breadcrumbs in JS. Given my concerns, they will create a proof of concept with a few product pages in a QA environment so I can test the SEO implications of these changes. They are planning to use Angular 5 client side rendering without any prerendering. I suggested universal but they said the lift was too great, so we're testing to see if this works. I've read a lot of the articles in this guide to all things SEO and JS and am fairly confident in understanding when a site uses JS and how to troubleshoot to make sure everything is getting crawled and indexed. https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/javascript-seo-resources/ However, I am not sure I'll be able to test the QA pages since they aren't indexable and lives behind a login. I will be able to crawl the page using Screaming Frog but that's generally regarded as what a crawler should be able to crawl and not really what Googlebot will actually be able to crawl and index. Any thoughts on this, is this concern valid? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Could using our homepage Google +1's site wide harm our website?
Hello Moz! We currently have the number of Google +1's for our homepage displaying on all pages of our website. Could this be viewed as black hat/manipulative by Google, and result in harming our website? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
What's another good SEO plugin for WordPress besides Yoast?
I know most people typically use Yoast, we use it on our sites, but we have one site where Yoast is causing a conflict. I wanted to investigate some other options and see what the best solution may be. Anyone else have an effective plugin they like?
Technical SEO | | AdamWormann0 -
New Website, New URL, New Content - What do we do with the old site? Are 301's the only option?
We've just built a new site for a client. They were adamant on changing the url. The new site is entirely new content, however the subject mater is the same. Some pages are even titled very similarly. Is is advisable to keep the old site running, and link it to the new site? Permanently, or temporarily? Do we simply place redirects from the old site the new? Old site was 30 pages, new site is 80 pages. So redirects won't be available to all the new pages. It seems a shame to trash the old site, it is getting some good traffic, and the content - although outdated is unique and of a high quality. Old url is 4+ yrs old, the new url is new. Some enlightened opinions would be greatly welcomed. Thanks
Technical SEO | | MarketsOnline0 -
Redirect old URL's from referring sites?
Hi I have just came across some URL's from the previous web designer and the site structure has now changed. There are some links on the web however that are still pointing at the old deep weblinks. Without having to contact each site it there a way to automatically sort the links from the old structure www.mydomain.com/show/english/index.aspx to just www.mydomain.com Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
/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>
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO
<url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/index.php</loc></url> thank you in advance, Martin0