Can anyone help me diagnose an indexing/sitemap issue on a large e-commerce site?
-
Hey guys. Wondering if someone can help diagnose a problem for me.
Here's our site: https://www.flagandbanner.com/
We have a fairly large e-commerce site--roughly 23,000 urls according to crawls using both Moz and Screaming Frog. I have created an XML sitemap (using SF) and uploading to Webmaster Tools. WMT is only showing about 2,500 urls indexed. Further, WMT is showing that Google is indexing only about 1/2 (approx. 11,000) of the urls. Finally (to add even more confusion), when doing a site search on Google (site:) it's only showing about 5,400 urls found. The numbers are all over the place!
Here's the robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /aspnet_client/
Disallow: /httperrors/
Disallow: /HTTPErrors/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /test/Disallow: /i_i_email_friend_request
Disallow: /i_i_narrow_your_search
Disallow: /shopping_cart
Disallow: /add_product_to_favorites
Disallow: /email_friend_request
Disallow: /searchformaction
Disallow: /search_keyword
Disallow: /page=
Disallow: /hid=
Disallow: /fab/*Sitemap: https://www.flagandbanner.com/images/sitemap.xml
Anyone have any thoughts as to what our problems are??
Mike
-
A site running ASP should be perfectly fine. I bet you will see substantial increases in a lot of positive metrics by just pairing down that navigation.
-
Thanks so much for your response, Russ.
You're confirming one of the many issues we have identified (too many internal links) but I had not connected it to indexing or site speed. When I use the Google Page Speed Tool, many of our pages are not even registering. It seems like it's taking too long to load them so it times out. Could the crazy amount of links have to do with this, too?
Moreover, our mobile speed is especially poor. This could be an even bigger problem in mobile, no?
Are you familiar with .asp sites, in particular, having indexing issues...or is that a false assumption?
Mike
-
Thanks for the question!
First, it is very common to get inconsistent answers from GSC, site:, sitemap and crawl results. Don't worry too much about that.
Your goal is to get as many of your pages indexed and that is a function of links pointing to your site and internal link structure. While it is an imperfect analogy, we often refer to this as "crawl budget". There are essentially 2 solutions to this...
1. Get more/better backlinks to a diversity of pages on your site.
2. Improve your internal link architecture so that Googlebot finds your pages more quickly.
I think the problem in your case is that the site inundates bots with generic navigational links. For example, this page...
http://www.flagandbanner.com/products/chrome-air-force-lt-general-flag-kit.asp
has 1400 internal links! That is crazy!
This page has 1500!
https://www.flagandbanner.com/products/citizenship-gifts.asp
You need to reel this back in dramatically. Your navigation should like to top level categories or maybe a handful of subcategories. Once in a category, you can reveal deeper categories. This will increase the likelihood that the related and "also" buy links that you find on product pages will get found and followed by Googlebot.
Finally, on a different note, you need to make sure you standardize the casing of URLs (ie: /Products/ or /products/) I noticed that you have links both internal and external that do not take this into account, causing unnecessary duplicate 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
-
Should I switch my website builder/host? Please help.
My website: www.joeborders.com is hosted with a service called jigsy: www.jigsy.com. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out if I should stay or not. Lol. I am positive I have done waaaayyy more work on my seo than many people ranking above me. I used to be on the first page, but over the last year I've slowly dropped in rankings. I've checked everything! I need to do some work on my blog, but I'm really thinking now that it might have something to do with my host. Some concerns I've identified: 1) I can't give pages individual h1 tags. The same one is blanketed across the site. 2) I'm told there are a lot of .css and JavaScript. 3) i cant redirect blog posts.....so moz is tagging me with 250 critical issues because my posts are on both www and http versions of my site .But that's all I know. I've talked with squarespace and WordPress and they have no way of transferring my site. It would probably take me a good 30 hours to set everything up....should i move? Please help 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joebordersmft0 -
Client wants to remove mobile URLs from their sitemap to avoid indexing issues. However this will require SEVERAL billing hours. Is having both mobile/desktop URLs in a sitemap really that detrimental to search indexing?
We had an enterprise client ask to remove mobile URLs from their sitemaps. For their website both desktop & mobile URLs are combined into one sitemap. Their website has a mobile template (not a responsive website) and is configured properly via Google's "separate URL" guidelines. Our client is referencing a statement made from John Mueller that having both mobile & desktop sitemaps can be problematic for indexing. Here is the article https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
We would be happy to remove the mobile URLs from their sitemap. However this will unfortunately take several billing hours for our development team to implement and QA. This will end up costing our client a great deal of money when the task is completed. Is it worth it to remove the mobile URLs from their main website to be in adherence to John Mueller's advice? We don't believe these extra mobile URLs are harming their search indexing. However we can't find any sources to explain otherwise. Any advice would be appreciated. Thx.0 -
E-commerce duplicate URLS
Hi I just realized that my e-commerce products do not have any difference except the SKUS, PRICE and THE PRODUCT name. Apart from each page has the same sidebar and a piece of content ( same ) under each product pages. And this is the reason why i am getting too many duplicate urls warning through Moz analytics. I do not have any other contents to add for each product because of the nature of the product. Only the price, product name and the SKUs will be different and rest will all be same for each products. How can i fix this ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MindlessWizard0 -
Should all pages on a site be included in either your sitemap or robots.txt?
I don't have any specific scenario here but just curious as I come across sites fairly often that have, for example, 20,000 pages but only 1,000 in their sitemap. If they only think 1,000 of their URL's are ones that they want included in their sitemap and indexed, should the others be excluded using robots.txt or a page level exclusion? Is there a point to having pages that are included in neither and leaving it up to Google to decide?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin1 -
Rel=alternate to help localize sites
I am wondering about the efficiency of the rel=alternate tag and how well it works at specifically localizing content. Example: I have a website on a few ccTLD's but for some reason my .com shows up on Google.co.uk before my .co.uk version of my page. Some people have mentioned using rel=alternate but in my research this only seems to be applicable for duplicate content in another language. If I am wrong here can somebody please help me better understand this application of the rel=alternate tag. All my research leads me to rel=alternate hreflang= and I am not sure that is what I want. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
Chris Birkholm0 -
E Commerce Blogging
I have an E commerce site that I want to boost search rank for. I had taken some else's advice and created a wp blog on a different url then created content around the products we offer and linked back to the main site using the specific keyword in anchor text. I just joined seomoz earlier this month. It seems like the main consensus here as far to install the blog in the domain.com/blog and I just did that. So now when I create content for that blog should I just link back to the specific categories and or products then? Should I be aware of duplicate content issues? So if the product is widgets and I am talking about widgets in the blog, or blog title, could they be competing or helping the main URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yevgeny0 -
Dupicated Site Issues?
We are launching a new site for the Australian market and the URL will just be siteAU.com. Currently the tech team (before we came on board) has it setup with almost exactly the same content (including the site css/nav/structure etc). Some product page content is slightly different, and category pages have different product orders, plus there are location pages that are specific to AU, but otherwise it's the same. The original site: site.ca has been around for 6+ years, with several thousand pages and solid organic ranking (though the last few months have dropped ) Will the new AU site create issues for the original domain? We also have siteUSA.com which follows the same logic and has been live for a while.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMGSEO0 -
Is there a development solution for AJAX-based sites and indexing in Bing/Yahoo?
Hi. I have outlined a solution for an AJAX-based site in order to rank preserve indexing and rank in Google using the hashbang. I'm curious if anyone has some insight for doing the same for Bing/Yahoo! (a development question)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OveritMedia0