Why do we have so many pages scanned by bots (over 250,000) and our biggest competitors have about 70,000? Seems like something is very wrong.
-
We are trying to figure out why last year we had a huge (80%) and sudden (within two days) drop in our google searches. The only "outlier" in our site that we can find is a huge number of pages reported in MOZ as scanned by search engines. Is this a problem? How did we get so many pages reported? What can we do to bring the number of searched pages back to a "normal" level?
BT
-
Hi. A mystery indeed! Have you recently upgraded or changed Web platforms or changed or upgraded what you are using for your site navigation?
-
Stewart_SEO
Thanks for your quick response. We did review the robots.txt of the competitors. Not line by line - they took surprisingly different approaches to the robots.txt. But there were the usual exclusions for wish lists, etc. We've gone back and tightened up our robots.txt and haven't yet seen any changes. Several months ago we were at about 600,000 pages and it is dropping. Very mysterious.
-
Have you looked at your competitors robots.txt file? they are probably blocking the very same searches you are talking about. if there is a particular bot like a Chinese crawler for example baidu that you don't want to come to your site you can block them via the command: User-agent: Baiduspider
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
-
Does using non-https links (not pages) impact or penalise the website rankings?
Hi community, We have couple of pages where we we have given non-https (http) hyperlinks by mistake. They will redirect to http links anyway. Does using these http links on page hurt any rankings? Thansk
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking gone for the original page and a shortened url ranks instead.
Hi Experts!!! Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year In Advance. I am been facing a issue with a few of my SERP results for "Singapore Visa" and related keyword. Until last to last Saturday i.e 16th December, I ranked for Singapore visa keyword with this url https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx !!! But since 18th December I am ranking for "Singapore Visa" keyword with this url and message below it in place of description. Singapore visa - Musafir.com
Algorithm Updates | | sainath
go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa
No information is available for this page.
Learn why The go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa redirects to https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx with some UTM parameters. The URL go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa is a shortened URL which was used for SMS marketing and all of a sudden Google has picked it in SERP instead of Singapore VIsa Landing Page. The Singapore visa Main page is not blocked by Robots.txt file. Please help me to resolve this.1 -
Domain has been redirected our site; but many incoming links from sub domain. Will this hurts?
Hi all, This is the scenario: Our website is newwebsite.com. Our old website is oldwebsite.com which has been redirected to newwebsite.com (years back). But one of the old website's sub domain has a lot of back links to our current website like: seo.oldwebsite.com to newwebsite.com. Will this scenario hurts with any wrong linking? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Does using parent pages in WordPress help with SEO and/or indexing for SERPs?
I have a law office and we handle four different practice areas. I used to have multiple websites (one for each practice area) with keywords in the actual domain name, but based on the recommendation of SEO "experts" a few years ago, I consolidated all the webpages into one single webpage (based on the rumors at the time that Google was going to be focusing on authorship and branding in the future, rather than keywords in URLs or titles). Needless to say, Google authorship was dropped a year or two later and "branding" never took off. Overall, having one webpage is convenient and generally makes SEO easier, but there's been a huge drawback: When my page comes up in SERPs after searching for "attorney" or "lawyer" combined with a specific practice area, the practice area landing pages don't typically come up in the SERPs, only the front page comes up. It's as if Google recognizes that I have some decent content, and Google knows that I specialize in multiple practice areas, but it directs everyone to the front page only. Prospective clients don't like this and it causes my bounce rate to be high. They like to land on a page focusing on the practice area they searched for. Two questions: (1) Would using parent pages (e.g. http://lawfirm.com/divorce/anytown-usa-attorney-lawyer/ vs. http://lawfirm.com/anytown-usa-divorce-attorney-lawyer/) be better for SEO? The research I've done up to this point appears to indicate "no." It doesn't make much difference as long as the keywords are in the domain name and/or URL. But I'd be interested to hear contrary opinions. (2) Would using parent pages (e.g. http://lawfirm.com/divorce/anytown-usa-attorney-lawyer/ vs. http://lawfirm.com/anytown-usa-divorce-attorney-lawyer/) be better for indexing in Google SERPs? For example, would it make it more likely that someone searching for "anytown usa divorce attorney" would actually end up in the divorce section of the website rather than the front page?
Algorithm Updates | | micromano0 -
Do scraped or borrowed articles with my links still pass page rank?
I wrote some articles for Ezine Articles a few years back and i still see links in the ose to my site that are from these articles that were borrowed from the Ezine Articles bank. Do the links in these articles still count toward my site including link juice and anchor text or does google discount them as duplicate content? I was told that Google counts these links for about 3 weeks and then discounts them as duplicate content so it's like they don't exist. Any truth to this or should i make the articles on my site available for people to copy and paste into their blogs as long as they keep my links intact? Thanks, Ron
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
Does Schema.org markup create a conflict with Power Reviews' standard microformat markup for e-commerce product pages?
Does anyone have experience implementing Schema.org markup on e-commerce websites that are already using Power Reviews (now Bazaar)? In Google's documentation they say that it's generally not a good idea to use two types of semantic markup for the same item (reviews in this case), but I wouldn't think that there would be a problem marking up other items on the page with Schema such as price, stock status, etc... Anyone care to provide some insight? Also in a related topic, have you all noticed that Google has really dialed back the frequency in which they display rich snippets for product searches? A few weeks ago the site that I'm referring to had hundreds of products that were displaying snippets, now it seems that only about 10% (roughly) of them are still showing. Thanks everybody.
Algorithm Updates | | BrianCC0 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0