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.
How to check if the page is indexable for SEs?
-
Hi, I'm building the extension for Chrome, which should show me the status of the indexability of the page I'm on.
So, I need to know all the methods to check if the page has the potential to be crawled and indexed by a Search Engines. I've come up with a few methods:
- Check the URL in robots.txt file (if it's not disallowed)
- Check page metas (if there are not noindex meta)
- Check if page is the same for unregistered users (for those pages only available for registered users of the site)
Are there any more methods to check if a particular page is indexable (or not closed for indexation) by Search Engines?
Thanks in advance!
-
I understand the difference between what you're doing and what Google shows, I guess I'm just not sure when I'd want to know that something could technically be indexed, but isn't?
I guess I'm not your target market!
Good luck with your tool. -
With "site:site.com" you can only see if the page is indexED, but to know if it's indexABLE you need to dig deeper. That is why I've decided to automate this process.
As I already told, this gonna be a browser extension, once you got on any page, this ext. automatically checks the page, and show the status (with color, I guess), if this page indexed, if not - it shows if its indexABLE. When I'm looking for linkbuilding resources, this little tool should help a lot
-
Ah, gotcha. Personally, I use Google itself to find out if something is indexable: if it's my own site, I can use Fetch as Google, and the robots.txt tester; if it's another site, you can search for "site:[URL]" to see if Google's indexed it.
I think this tool could be really good if you keep it as an icon and it glows or something if you've accidentally deindexed the page? Then it's helping you proactively.
Hope this helps!
Kristina
-
Actually I'm not. That's why I'm asking, to not to miss this basic stuff, so I really appreciate your advice. Thank you!
If I get your question correctly, you are asking why this extension is need for?
Well, 2 main aims:
-
When I want to check any of pages on my own websites, I just visit the page and see if it's ok with all the robots stuff. (or if it should be closed from robots, see if it really is)
-
For linkbuilding purposes. When I come to the page and see a link from it to external website and I know for sure that I can get the same link to my site, I'm asking myself, if it worth getting link from the page like this, if it's gonna be indexed. Why waste your time on getting links from pages that are closed from indexation.
-
-
Hello Peter,
First of all, thank you for the great ideas.
I don't think it's necessary to call the API, as this check references to only one URL (so no aggressiveness) , I need it to be done as fast as possible. But the idea with Structured Data - bravo!
Thanks a lot!
-
You're probably already doing this, but make sure that all of your tests are using the Googlebot user agent! That could cause different results, especially with the robots.txt check.
A sense check: what is your plugin going to offer over Google Search Console's Fetch as Google and robots.txt Tester?
-
You also can check for HTTP header results for crawling too:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tagAlso you can use some of Google services for this. Specially PageSpeed API:
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v2/reference/Once you call this API it return JSON with list of blocked resources. It's little bit slower but i found that this is safe. Some hostings have IDS (intruder detection systems) and when some crawl them little bit aggressive they block whole IP or IP range. I know few cases when site is OK to be seen from users, but blocked from Google IP. Webmasters wasn't happy when they discover this. They call hosting few times and got "there isn't issues from our side, we didn't block anything". And 6 hours later they get "seems that another department was blocked this server for few specific IPs".
About checking for logged/nonloged users. You can use StructuredData Testing Tool. Also one call to get JSON with full HTTP response and then compare it with your result.
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
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
React.js Single Page Application Not Indexing
We recently launched our website that uses React.js and we haven't been able to get any of the pages indexed. Our previous site (which had a .ca domain) ranked #1 in the 4 cities we had pages and we redirected it to the .com domain a little over a month ago. We have recently started using prerender.io but still haven't seen any success. Has anyone dealt with a similar issue before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m_van0 -
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Should I Allow Blog Tag Pages to be Indexed?
I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0