Why are so many pages indexed?
-
We recently launched a new website and it doesn't consist of that many pages. When you do a "site:" search on Google, it shows 1,950 results. Obviously we don't want this to be happening. I have a feeling it's effecting our rankings. Is this just a straight up robots.txt problem? We addressed that a while ago and the number of results aren't going down. It's very possible that we still have it implemented incorrectly. What are we doing wrong and how do we start getting pages "un-indexed"?
-
What's to stop google from finding them? They're out there and available on the internet!
Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file
You can do this by putting:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
in the robots.txt file.
You might also want to stop humans from accessing the content too - can you put this content behind a password using htaccess or block access based on network address?
-
Sounds like you need to put a robots.txt on those subdomains (and maybe consider some type of login too).
Quick fix: put a robots.txt on the subdomains to block them from being indexed. Go into Google Webmaster Tools and verify each subdomain as its own site, then request removal of each of those subdomains (which should be approved, since you've already blocked it in robots.txt).
I took a quick look at lab.capacity.com/robots.txt and it isn't blocking the entire subdomain, though the robots.txt at fb.capacitr.com is.
-
I most certainly do not want those pages indexed, they're used for internal purposes only. That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out here. Why are those subdomains being indexed? They should obviously be private. Any insights would be great.
Thanks!
-
What are are you searching for? I notice that if you do a site:.capacitr.com you get the 1,950 results you mention above.
If you do a search for site:www.capacitr.com then you only get 29 results.
Its looks like there's a whole load of pages being indexed on other subdomains - fb.capacitr.com and lab.capacity.com. (Which has 1,860 pages!)
What are these used for, do you really want these in the index!
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
-
Page with metatag noindex is STILL being indexed?!
Hi Mozers, There are over 200 pages from our site that have a meta tag "noindex" but are STILL being indexed. What else can I do to remove them from the Index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Why Is this page de-indexed?
I have dropped out for all my first page KWDs for this page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/dollies-load-movers-door-skates Can anyone see an issue? I am trying to find one.... We did just migrate to HTTPS but other areas have no problem
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed
Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,0 -
How many inner links on one page?
I have seen Matt Cutts video about links per page and know that too many links "may" harm the flow of link juice. But what should e-commerce sites do? We have category pages with more than a few thousands products in each of them. So linking to each of them dilutes the PR flow? We could use pagination, but doesn't it give a disadvantage in user experience when he needs to go 10 links deep to reach a product? And Google robots won't update the information frequently because it will be on the lowest part of our site? Now our goal is to make all our products appear like Facebook scroll down page. We know that Google doesn't use Ajax to see more links so robots and all the users that don't have JavaScript could see the paginated results. Is it a good way to put all products and links like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas1 -
Getting Google in index but display "parent" pages..
Greetings esteemed SEO experts - I'm hunting for advice: We operate an accommodation listings website. We monetize by listing position in search results, i.e. you pay more to get higher placing in the page. Because of this, while we want individual detailed listing pages to be indexed to get the value of the content, we don't really want them appearing in Google search results. We ideally want the "content value" to be attributed to the parent page - and google to display this as the link in the search results instead of the individual listing. Any ideas on how to achieve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0 -
Why my own page is not indexed for that keyword?
hi, I recently recreated the page www.zenucchi.it /ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.html on the third level domain poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it by putting it on the home page. The first page is still indexed for the keyword poltrona frau brescia . But the new page is no indexed for that keyword and i don't know why ( even if the page is indexed in google ) .. I state that the new domain has the same autorithy and that i put a 301 redirect to pass his authority to the new one that has many more incoming links that did not have previous .. i hope you'll help me thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0 -
We are changing ?page= dynamic url's to /page/ static urls. Will this hurt the progress we have made with the pages using dynamic addresses?
Question about changing url from dynamic to static to improve SEO but concern about hurting progress made so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | h3counsel0