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.
Indexed pages
-
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers...
- Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages
- Google search using site command: 468 results
- MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs
- Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500)
Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
-
Another option is if the site uses a CMS. If so, then you can create a sitemap for content pages/posts etc,.
Personally, I'm with Krzysztof Furtak on SF. Screaming Frog rocks. It'll find most pages, except perhaps Orphan pages as it wouldn't be able to find a link to crawl to discover the page.
If it's really important to get as many pages as possible, I'd do the following (I've put an Astrix (*) next to ones that some people may think are a tad extreme)
- Run a Screaming Frog crawl
- Grab a sitemap from your CMS
- Check any server-based analytics (AWSTATS etc)
- Check your access_log file & parse out URLs in there**(*)**
- site: queries, with & without www, and also using * as a subdomain (use something like Moz's toolbar to export)
- As Krzysztof suggests, Scrapebox would extract data too, but be careful scraping, you may get an IP slap.(*)
- Export crawl data from Moz & a tool such as Deep Crawl
- Throw the pages from all into Excel and de-dupe.
- Once you have a de-duped list, as an optional last step, go back to Screaming Frog and enter list mode (I have the paid version, not sure if it's possible with the free one) and run a crawl over all the de-duped URLs to get status codes etc
If you're going to do this sort of thing a fair bit - buy a Screaming Frog license, it's an awesome tool and can be useful in a multitude of situations.
-
The site: command is handy for asking Google what pages it knows about, however if Muzzmoz wants to know the number of pages on a site, you'd need more than this.
Also, re: your different ways or querying, I like to use:
site:*.domain.com - This can show other subdomains too, that may otherwise be missed
-
Ok so check with site something under 1000 pages and go to the last results page. You'll see that there'll be different number (in almost all cases).
-
I Will Always Prefer To Check Manually Using Site Command Because, site: operator, which will show us how many pages Google currently has indexed for the domain.
There Will Be Difference Between Index status in search console and current index as search console update the data after few days.
The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because Total indexed excludes URLs identified as duplicates, non-canonical or those that contain a meta no index tag.
Also, Check For Index(Preferred) Version Of Your Site
For E.g-
You can check More About this Here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366?hl=en
-
Hi
Most accurate number is from screaming frog (if you have less than 500 pages or paid version if more than 500).
Google indexes what it wants and if good enough to show in google index. If some pages are similar, got quality issues, blocked by robots etc then it won't show all. BTW don't think number in GSC or google index is good, check it manually because there can be 468 but in fact 200 only.
Moz can have "historical" pages that now don't exists or don't care about quality issues.
The truth is in screaming frog - most accurate number. If you used google user agent then number is the max that can appear in google index. If screaming frog user agent with turned off robots then you'll see bigger number (but google won't show it because of blocks).
If you want to check what's indexed then use tool like scrapebox. First get all urls (maybe without images if you don't care), then check indexed with sb. What's not indexed, can have some issues.
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
-
Should I "no-index" two exact pages on Google results?
Hello everyone, I recently started a new wordpress website and created a static homepage. I noticed that on Google search results, there are two different URLs landing on same content page. I've attached an image to explain what I saw. Should I "no-index" the page url? Google url.JPG In this picture, the first result is the homepage and I try to rank for that page. The last result is landing on same content with different URL. So, should I no-index last result as shown in image?
Technical SEO | | amanda59640 -
Escort directory page indexing issues
Re; escortdirectory-uk.com, escortdirectory-usa.com, escortdirectory-oz.com.au,
Technical SEO | | ZuricoDrexia
Hi, We are an escort directory with 10 years history. We have multiple locations within the following countries, UK, USA, AUS. Although many of our locations (towns and cities) index on page one of Google, just as many do not. Can anyone give us a clue as to why this may be?0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
How to stop my webmail pages not to be indexed on Google ??
when i did a search in google for Site:mywebsite.com , for a list of pages indexed. Surprisingly the following come up " Webmail - Login " Although this is associated with the domain , this is a completely different server , this the rackspace email server browser interface I am sure that there is nothing on the website that links or points to this.
Technical SEO | | UIPL
So why is Google indexing it ? & how do I get it out of there. I tried in webmaster tool but I could not , as it seems like a sub-domain. Any ideas ? Thanks Naresh Sadasivan0 -
De-indexed from Google
Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL. The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | rikmon0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110