Anyone managed to decrease the "not selected" graph in WMT?
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Hi Mozzers.
I am working with a very large E-com site that has a big issue with duplicate or near duplicate content. The site actually received a message in WMT listing out pages that Google deemed it should not be crawling. Many of these were the usual pagination / category sorting option URL issues etc.
We have since fixed the issue with a combination of site changes, robots.txt, parameter handling and URL removals, however I was expecting the "not selected" graph in WMT to start dropping.
The number of roboted pages has increased by around 1 million pages (which was expected) and indexed pages has actually increased despite removing hundreds of thousands of pages. I assume this is due to releasing some crawl bandwidth for more important pages like products.
I guess my question is two-fold;
1. Is the "not selected" graph cumulative, as this would explain why it isn't dropping?
2. Has anyone managed to get this figure to significantly drop? Should I even care? I am relating this to Panda by the way.
Important to note that the changes were made around 3 weeks ago and I am aware not everything will be re-crawled yet.
Thanks,
Chris -
Very interesting. I'm also convinced the "not selected" graph is a big clue towards a Panda penalty. I guess I will have to wait another couple of weeks to see if our changes have affected the graph. Maybe this time lag is why it can take upwards of 6 months to get recover from Panda!
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Hi Chris
Here is the nice information about the "Not Selected" data in WMT. I hope this post will help you more to understand about the Not Selected Graph : http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366
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The "Not Selected" isn't cumulative. The "Ever Crawled" is though.
I have a large Wordpress content site. It was hit by Panda on a very same day that my "not selected" multiplied by 8. I don't think it was a coincidence, and I didn't make any large changes to the site besides the regular addition of about 10 posts per week.
I've been able to effect a downward movement on the not selected count by removing/redirecting things like "replytocom" variable URLs in the comments section;reworking print and email versions of each article, etc. It very slow though, only reducing by an average of 100 per week.
Needless to say, I think the not selected metric means quite alot.
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