Google Index Status Falling Fast - What should I be considering?
-
Hi Folks,
Working on an ecommerce site. I have found a month on month fall in the Index Status continuing since late 2015. This has resulted in around 80% of pages indexed according to Webmaster.
I do not seem to have any bad links or server issues. I am in the early stages of working through, updating content and tags but am yet to see a slowing of the fall.
If anybody has tips on where to look for to issues or insight to resolve this I would really appreciate it.
Thanks everybody!
Tim
-
Hi dude, thank you so much for taking time to look at this site. It is really kind of you. I will be taking a look at all the points raised over the next week to see what we can achieve. Thanks, Tim
-
Thank you for taking so much time to look at our site. I really appreciate it. I will dig in to the points to see what we can achieve. Thanks again, Tim
-
Thanks dude, I will take a look at this. Really appreciate you taking time to respond.
-
Hi Tim,
I agree with Laura on the canonical tags. I've worked on several large Magento sites and I've never seen any issue with the way Magento handles it - by canonicalizing product URLs to the root directory.
In fact, I actually prefer this was over assigning a product to a 'primary' category and using that as the canonical.
As Laura said, a reduction in the total number of indexed pages might actually be a really big positive here! More pages indexed does not mean it's better. If they are low quality/duplicate pages that have been removed from index, that's a really good thing.
I did find some issues with your robots.txt file:
- Disallow: /media/ - should be removed because it's blocking images from being crawled (this is a default Magento thing and they should remove it!)
- Disallow: /? - this basically means that any URLs containing a ? will not be crawled and with the way pagination is setup on the site, this means that any pages after 1 are not being crawled.
This could be impacting how many product pages you have indexed - which would definitely be a bad thing! You would obviously want your product pages to be crawled and indexed.
Solution: I would leave Disallow: /? in robots.txt because it stops a product filter URLs being crawled, but I would add the following line:
Allow: */?p=
This line will allow your paginated pages to be crawled, which will also allow products linked from those pages to be crawled.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David
-
I would be interested in seeing examples of where this has happened. Were the canonical tags added after the URLs were already indexed or were the canonicals in place when the site launched?
-
However, the canonical is only an advisory tag. I've had few cases where people have relied on their canonical tag when their site has numerous product url types (as above with category in the url and just product url) which has many references to these different urls elsewhere (onsite and offsite) and they are now indexed as both versions, which is not always ideal. It also means that reporting tools such as Screaming Frog only show the true URLs on the site. It's also saving crawl budget as it doesn't have to crawl the category produced url and the canonical url.
Whilst it's not a major issue, it's something I would look at changing.
-
If I understand you correctly, you are referring to the following two URLs:
https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/customer-displays/pole-mounting-kit-94591.html
https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html
Both of these have the same canonical referenced, which is https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html.
It doesn't matter what actually shows in the address box. For the purposes of indexation, what matters is what is referenced in the canonical tag.
.
-
What I've suggested will be avoiding these duplicate urls? Here's some actual examples, going via a tier two category I get the following product url:
https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/customer-displays/pole-mounting-kit-94591.html
With a canonical of:
https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html
Yet when going from https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/?limit=32&p=2 (a tier 1 category) I get the canonical url.
So if there are products listed in multiple tier two categories then that's multiple urls for the same product. With the suggestion I made, there would only be one variation of this product url (the canonical)
-
A reduction in the number of pages indexed does not necessarily mean something is wrong. In fact, it could mean that something is right, especially if your rankings are improving.
How are you determining that only 80% of pages are indexed? Can you provide a specific URL that is not being indexed?
If you made changes to your canonical tag, robots.txt , or meta robots tag, these could all cause a reduction in the number of pages being indexed.
-
The canonicals appear to be set up correctly, and I would not advise listing the product URLs as their canonicals in the category as suggested above. That will create duplicate URLs with the same content, which is exactly what canonical tags are designed to avoid.
-
Just going through Laura's list as a checklist for ones that are applicable:
- Have you checked your robots.txt file or page-level meta robots tag to see if you are blocking or noindexing anything?
Nothing that I can see, that's causing a major issue.
- Is it a large site? If so, check for issues that may affect crawl budget.
The main thing I can see is that the product urls and canonicals are different, is there anyway of listing the product urls as their canonical versions in the category?
-
<a name="_GoBack"></a>Sorry for the delay in response. Website is symectech.com
We have fixed various issues including a noindex issue earlier this year but our index status is continuing to fall. However, the ranking seems to be improving week on week according to MOZ. Thanks.
Tim
-
Just to echo what Laura has said, if you can share a URL that would be great so we can help you get to the source of the problem.
Try running a tool like screamingfrog (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) to check the issues above that Laura has mentioned, as doing a lot of those by hand can be quite time consuming.
Also, do you have a drop in rankings with your pages falling out the index?
-
Any chance you can share the URL? That would make it much easier for someone to help in this forum. Without the URL, I can offer a few diagnostic questions.
- Have the number of pages on the site remained the same and pages are being removed from the index? Or have you added more content, but the percentage in the index has decreased?
- Have you checked your robots.txt file or page-level meta robots tag to see if you are blocking or noindexing anything?
- Have you submitted an XML sitemap? If so, check the XML sitemap to make sure what's being submitted should be indexed. It's possible to submit a sitemap that includes noindexed pages, especially with some automated tools.
- Is it a large site? If so, check for issues that may affect crawl budget.
- Have you changed any canonical tags?
- Have you used the Fetch as Google tool to diagnose a specific URL?
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
Fetch as Google -- Does not result in pages getting indexed
I run a exotic pet website which currently has several types of species of reptiles. It has done well in SERP for the first couple of types of reptiles, but I am continuing to add new species and for each of these comes the task of getting ranked and I need to figure out the best process. We just released our 4th species, "reticulated pythons", about 2 weeks ago, and I made these pages public and in Webmaster tools did a "Fetch as Google" and index page and child pages for this page: http://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons/index While Google immediately indexed the index page, it did not really index the couple of dozen pages linked from this page despite me checking the option to crawl child pages. I know this by two ways: first, in Google Webmaster Tools, if I look at Search Analytics and Pages filtered by "retic", there are only 2 listed. This at least tells me it's not showing these pages to users. More directly though, if I look at Google search for "site:morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons" there are only 7 pages indexed. More details -- I've tested at least one of these URLs with the robot checker and they are not blocked. The canonical values look right. I have not monkeyed really with Crawl URL Parameters. I do NOT have these pages listed in my sitemap, but in my experience Google didn't care a lot about that -- I previously had about 100 pages there and google didn't index some of them for more than 1 year. Google has indexed "105k" pages from my site so it is very happy to do so, apparently just not the ones I want (this large value is due to permutations of search parameters, something I think I've since improved with canonical, robots, etc). I may have some nofollow links to the same URLs but NOT on this page, so assuming nofollow has only local effects, this shouldn't matter. Any advice on what could be going wrong here. I really want Google to index the top couple of links on this page (home, index, stores, calculator) as well as the couple dozen gene/tag links below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jplehmann0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Google Re-Index or multiple 301 Redirects on the server?
Over a year ago we moved a site from Blogspot that was adding dates in the URL's (i.e.. blog/2012/08/10/) Additionally we've removed category folders (/category, /tag, etc). Overall if I add all these redirects (from the multiple date options, etc) I'm concerned it might be an overload on the server? After talking with the server team they had suggested using something like 'BWP Google Sitemaps' on our Wordpress site, which would allow Google some time to re-index our site. What do you suggest we do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Ranking with other pages not index
The site ranks on page 4-5 with other page like privacy, about us, term pages. I encounter this problem allot in the last weeks; this usually occurs after the page sits 1-2 months on page 1 for the terms. I'm thinking of to much use the same anchor as a primary issue. The sites in questions are 1-5 pages microniche sites. Any suggestions is appreciated. Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m3fan0 -
How can I block unwanted urls being indexed on google?
Hi, I have to block unwanted urls (not that page) from being indexed on google. I have to block urls like example.com/entertainment not the exact page example.com/entertainment.aspx . Is there any other ways other than robot.txt? If i add this to robot.txt will that block my other url too? Or should I make a 301 redirection from example.com/entertainment to example.com/entertainment.aspx. Because some of the unwanted urls are linked from other sites. thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VipinLouka780