Google has indexed some of our old posts. What took so long and will we lose rank for their brevity?
-
Hi,
We just had a few of our old blog posts indexed by Google. There are short formed posts, and I want to make sure we're not going to get dinged by Google for their length. Can you advise?https://www.policygenius.com/blog/guaranteed-issue
-
No problem. Screaming Frog (or any crawler) won't pick it up, because it's not being linked to within the website (it's an "orphaned" page).
Google could still index them because they are in the sitemap, but it took so long because they are no actually linked to from the website.
So... if it's not supposed to be indexed at all in the first place, you can add a meta "noindex" tag to the page and remove it from the sitemap. Then you'll be all set
-
Thanks, Dan!
Is there a reason why Screaming Frog wouldn't pick up, even though it was on the sitemap to be crawled?
Google has actually indexed two pages for these pages here (trailing slash and non-trailing slash). We've got our 301 redirects and canonical tags setup correctly though.
To add another layer to this puzzle looks like this URL shouldn't be indexed at all, as it is instead of the home of content referenced in other places, like here: https://www.policygenius.com/blog/glossary/life-insurance.
Appreciate the help!
Looks like this URL shouldn't be indexed at all, as it is instead of the home of content referenced in other places, like here: https://www.policygenius.com/blog/glossary/life-insurance.
-
It was probably indexed so late because Google couldn't find it
I just crawled the whole site with Screaming Frog and that URL wasn't picked up in the crawl --> http://screencast.com/t/xzunkNR3K
But it's in your sitemap --> https://www.policygenius.com/blog/post-sitemap.xml - so this makes total sense why it took Google so long to find it
-
It depends on how accessible they are to search engines. If you've recently updated your sitemap, and those posts are on the new one, but weren't on the old one, that could cause it. New internal/external links pointing to those pages could have helped as well.
-
Thanks for the responses! Is there a reason why some of these pages were indexed so late (we published them several months ago)? We've had some newer posts index quicker than this one. I know there's not an exact reason, but trying to get some insights.
Thanks!
-
Hi Francois,
As Logan said, the problem comes when the whole site has short content issue.
I might ask, if that post is ranking well, why dont you edit it and creat some valuable content? Google loves when re-editing and improving your content.
Hope it helps.
GR. -
Hi,
As long as that's not the bulk of your content, I don't see it being a problem. Thin content penalties are more common when short-form content is the majority of a site. I've mostly seen this with ecommerce sites where product detail pages make up about 95% of the page count and the product descriptions are thin or non-existent. It's hard to be viewed as authoritative or trustworthy when only 5% of your pages have a decent amount of content.
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
-
Absolutely gigantic drop in Ranking overnight
The site in question has been operating for around 3 months and for the first two months was nowhere to be seen in google results (literally page 10, 11 etc for all but branding searches). Then through a lot of hard work and the help of MozPro I managed to build it to a respectable 6th-10th place for the main keyphrases. Overnight on Wednesday we suddenly dropped half a dozen places or so and were rooted firmly mid table page 2 for both these phrases. Last night however we suddenly dropped from 14th to the very last result on page 10! for the biggest keyphrase where it has slowly dropped through the day to currently be sitting in 8th on page 11. Nothing is showing in Dashboard, theres no reason that I know of to be penalised, however even if we were penalised then surely that would be the site as a whole and not just 1 keyphrase? The weird thing is, when you look at the 1st 2 pages of the search a number of items have changed, a competitor which closed down is suddenly sitting mid table while other newcomers that were doing well have dropped, some of the older faces have gone up suddenly. If I didnt know better I would say that google has suffered a timewarp and is now serving results from a month ago for this keyphrase. Ive now noticed that the MozCast is reporting very stormy weather last night, surely however this couldnt be down to a change in Algorithm etc, not to produce such a massive drop for a site that has followed the rules (I refuse to link with a site that even remotely could be thought of as spam). Someone please tell me that google has been glitching and all will be well when I wake in the morning? Peter
Algorithm Updates | | Pwhitfield0 -
Increase in impressions reported by Google Analytics
Because Universal Analytics (and Google Webmaster) only stores SEO data for 3 months, I've been downloading SEO data (from the Acquisition tab of Analytics) to get a record of how impressions, clicks, CTR etc are changing in the long term (our business is seasonal, so these long-term patterns are important). Today, I downloaded data for September, and found a very large increase in the number of impressions compared to previous months. I looked back at the data for August, which I've already downloaded, and found that Analytics is now reporting much higher numbers of impressions than I have in my downloaded data. The total number of impressions has roughly doubled, and the increase for individual URLs varies, with some increasing by a factor of 10. The number of clicks has also increased, by about 15% in total. Because of the 3 month cut-off, I could only look back as far as the 11th of July, but the impressions for the end of July are also much higher than in my downloaded data. I've noticed that Analytics has changed some other details in its reporting of SEO data. For example, the impressions and clicks data is no longer rounded. Could this increase in impressions be a result of those changes? Has anyone else experienced something similar? We can go ahead and use the new data but it will throw our analysis off for past months (which have the lower numbers). If others have experienced something similar it would be good to know, so that we can adjust our historical numbers accordingly.
Algorithm Updates | | MargotLoco20 -
Recent Algorithm Update Impact on Rankings
I've read that the most recent algorithm update by Google is targeting dodgy links. I have a client's website who within the last few days has been smashed out of of top positions for the most competitive keywords (and many others). I'm worried that the site has been penalised, however I can't understand why it would be. The site only has 11 domains linking to it (65 links total) and a lot of these links are coming from the same websites that link to all of our other web clients and none of them have experienced this sudden and significant drop in rankings. Does anyone know if Google is targeting a specific type of site, or how I can determine if my client's website has been penalised? I've not made any significant changes recently to the site's content or meta data, however rankings have remained steady for months now. It just seemed to happen overnight that they dropped off everything (eg. middle of page 2 to page 8 of search results for some of the better keywords) Thank you in advance for any assistance!
Algorithm Updates | | JuiceBoxOM0 -
Ranking gcctld?
I am working on a new site that uses a .io TLD. I have just started working to get the domain to rank for its own name. What are some others experience with ranking and SEO for gcctlds?
Algorithm Updates | | JoshAM0 -
Has there been a Google change in the last 24 hours?
We have come in this morning to find our site (paydayuk.co.uk) has suddenly disappeared from their SERPs, we have consistently been ranking in the top 5 for a wide range of search terms but now do not even appear for our brand name of Payday UK where we have been first for many months. Our site is still indexed and we have made no changes for a while as any SEO work is waiting on completion of a CMS system. Looking in https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking and there seem to be a lot of people having the same issues but as of yet no answers. I'd also like to add we don’t use black hat techniques so we really don’t understand why we have been penalised. Can anyone help please?
Algorithm Updates | | Sarbs0 -
Tuesday July 12th = We suddenly lost all our top Google rankings. Traffic cut in half. Ideas?
The attached screenshot shows all. Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic. Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back. Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine). Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong?? eartheasy.com wtf.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | aran0880 -
Today all of our internal pages all but completely disappeared from google search results. Many of them, which had been optimized for specific keywords, had high rankings. Did google change something?
We had optimized internal pages, targeting specific geographic markets. The pages used the keywords in the url title, the h1 tag, and within the content. They scored well using the SEOmoz tool and were increasing in rank every week. Then all of a sudden today, they disappeared. We had added a few links from textlink.com to test them out, but that's about the only change we made. The pages had a dynamic url, "?page=" that we were about to redirect to a static url but hadn't done it yet. The static url was redirecting to the dynamic url. Does anyone have any idea what happened? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | h3counsel0 -
Bounce rate and rankings
I have believed for years that a high bounce rate (from search) could lower your rankings over time. Makes sense; if users bounce right back to search after looking at your page Google should think that page wasn't very useful and will push your down the SERPs. But, how do they determine this? If a user comes back after 30 seconds that's a bounce? Or is my premise incorrect and Google does not take bounce into account? Erin
Algorithm Updates | | ErinTM0