Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Reporting & Analytics
    4. Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added

    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.

    Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added

    Reporting & Analytics
    2
    11
    4348
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Kingalan1
      Kingalan1 last edited by

      Greetings MOZ Community:

      On June 14th Google Webmaster tools indicated an increase in the number of indexed pages, going from 676 to 851 pages. New  pages had been added to the domain in the previous month. The number of pages blocked by robots increased at that time from 332 (June 1st) to 551 June 22nd), yet the number of indexed pages still increased to 851.

      The following changes occurred between June 5th and June 15th:

      -A new redesigned version of the site was launched on June 4th, with some links to social media and blog removed on some pages, but with no new URLs added. The design platform was and is Wordpress.

      -Google GTM code was added to the site.

      -An exception was made by our hosting company to ModSecurity on our server (for i-frames) to allow GTM to function.

      In the last ten days my web traffic has decline about 15%, however the quality of traffic has declined enormously and the number of new inquiries we get is off by around 65%. Click through rates have declined from about 2.55 pages to about 2 pages.

      Obviously this is not a good situation.

      My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline.

      My developer is examining the issue. They think there may be some tie in with the installation of GTM. They are noticing an additional issue, the sites Contact Us form will not work if the GTM script is enabled. They find it curious that both issues occurred around the same time.

      Our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader. Does anyone have any idea why these extra pages are appearing and how they can be removed? Anyone have experience with GTM causing issues with this?

      Thanks everyone!!!
      Alan

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Kingalan1
        Kingalan1 @EGOL last edited by

        Yes, and I appreciate it!
        Alan

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • EGOL
          EGOL @Kingalan1 last edited by

          I did what I asked you to do.

                1. in my first post and repeated frequently.
          Kingalan1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Kingalan1
            Kingalan1 @EGOL last edited by

            Hi Egol:

            How did you locate this duplicate or re-published content?

            Obviously what you have pointed out is a major source of concern so I ran Copyscape search this afternoon for duplicate content and did not locate any the URLs you mention in the "this", "this" link above. It appears you entered the URL of the blog post in Google's search bar. Would that work? This method would be pretty slow going with 600 URLs.

            Thanks,
            Alan

            EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • EGOL
              EGOL @Kingalan1 last edited by

              Those are the 448 URLs from your website that have been filtered.

              You should find garbage in them like shown below.

              Have you done what I have suggested three times above?   Do that if you want to identify the problem pages.

              • www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

                A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

              • www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

                A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

              • www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/wp-content/plugins/...

                A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • Kingalan1
                Kingalan1 @EGOL last edited by

                Hi Egol:

                Thanks for the suggestion.

                When I click on _ repeat the search with the omitted results included _I get 448 results not the entire 859 results. Seems very strange. Some of these URLS have light content but I don't believe they are dups. I don't see any content outside our website when I click this.

                Am I doing something wrong? I would think the total of 859 would appear not 447 URLs.

                Thanks!!
                Alan

                EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • EGOL
                  EGOL @Kingalan1 last edited by

                  I don't know.  You should ask someone who knows a lot about canonicalization.

                  Did you drill down through all of those indexed pages to see if you can identify all of them?

                  I've suggested it twice.

                  Kingalan1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Kingalan1
                    Kingalan1 @EGOL last edited by

                    Hi Egol:

                    In the content of launching an upgraded site, could the canonicalization have implemented incorrectly? That could account for 175 pages sudden new content as the thin content has been there for some time.

                    I am particularly suspicious regarding canonicalization as there was an issue involving multi page URLs of property listings when the site was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress last Summer.

                    Thoughts?

                    Thanks, Alan

                    EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • EGOL
                      EGOL @Kingalan1 last edited by

                      Apparently infitter24.rssing.com/chan-13023009/all is poaching my content, taking my original content and adding it to there site. I am not quiet sure what to do about that.

                      You can have an attorney demand that they stop, you can file DMCA complaints. Be careful

                      **However it does not explain the sudden appearance of the 175 pages on Googles index **

                      1. Do this query:  site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

                      2. Start drilling down the SERPs.  One page at a time.   Look for content that you didn't make.   Look for duplicates.

                      3. Get a spreadsheet that has all of your URLs.  Drill down through the SERPs checking every one of them.   Can you account for your pagination.  You have a lot of it and that type of page is usually rubbish in the index.  Combine, canonicalize, or get rid of them.

                      Kingalan1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Kingalan1
                        Kingalan1 @EGOL last edited by

                        Hi Egol:

                        Thanks so much for taking the time for your thorough response!!

                        Apparently infitter24.rssing.com/chan-13023009/all is poaching my content, taking my original content and adding it to there site. I am not quiet sure what to do about that.

                        You have pointed out something very useful and I appreciate it and will act upon it. However it does not explain the sudden appearance of the 175 pages on Googles index that did not appear at the end of May and somehow coincided with uploading of the new version of our website in early June. Any ideas???

                        Thanks,
                        Alan

                        EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • EGOL
                          EGOL last edited by

                          1. Do this query:  site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

                          2. Start drilling down the SERPs.  One page at a time.   Look for content that you didn't make.   Look for duplicates.

                          3. When you drill down about 44 pages you will find this...

                          In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 440 already displayed.
                          If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

                          The bad stuff is usually behind that link.  Google doesn't want to show that stuff to people.   It could be thin, it could be duplicate, it could be spammy, they just might not like it.

                          1. Find out what is in there.

                          Possible problems that I see....

                          I see dupe content like this and this.  Either your guys are grabbin' somebodyelse's content or they are grabbin' yours.  Can get you in trouble with Panda. You need original and unique.  Anything that is not original and unique should be deleted, noindexed or rewritten.

                          A lot of these pages are really skimpy.   Think content can get you into trouble with Panda.   Anything that is skimpy should be deleted, noindexed or beefed up.

                          I see multiple links to tags on lots of these posts.  That can cause duplicate content problems.

                          The tag pages are paginated with just a few pages on each.  These can generate extra pages that are low value, suck up your linkjuice or compound duplicate content problems.

                          You have archive pages, and category pages and more pagination problems.

                          Kingalan1 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • RWesley

                            Fire a tag when element is loaded on page (Google Tag Manager)

                            google tag manager

                            I'm using an Element Visibility trigger to track a value that appears on a page. However, I want to track this value even when the user doesn't scroll to the area of the page where the element is (i.e. when the page is loaded, and the value is displayed below the fold, but the user doesn't scroll down there). Is there a way of doing this

                            Reporting & Analytics | | RWesley
                            0
                          • Dan-Lawrence

                            Google Search Console (new GWT) - Does a language specific sub folder need its own GSC profile

                            HI I've got a clients site set which targets 3 language/countries: English via the main site on the domain.com Turkish via a Turkish language site on a subfolder domain.com/tr/ And German via domain.de The devs have set up .com and .de in GSC and is reporting data in both However there's no data in the domain/com/tr GSC profile ! Is that because its on a subfolder so data pertaining to it is being reported in the main domain.com GSC account ? Or does something more need to be done to set up the Turkish subfolder in GSC ? If so what ? All Best Dan

                            Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence
                            0
                          • Zippy-Bungle

                            Why would page views per visitor suddenly increase?

                            My website traffic is growing by about 1% a week. It has a fairly stable page views/visitor of about 1.69. There's normally very little variability in this As we sell an industrial product. Today page views jumped by 50% and so did page views/visitor but visitor numbers stayed the same. I dont have a useful hypothesis to explain this. Analytics shows me that the traffic source, country of origin and pages viewed are pretty much the same as normal. There's been no substantive change to the site (today we changed the text in a widget to link to a new page - and no one visited it). It doesn't look like 1 person has gone through the whole site as that would skew the distribution of page views by country So why would user behavour suddenly change? I'll look at it for the rest of the week but in 7 years of looking after this website I haven't seen anything like this before.

                            Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle
                            0
                          • max.favilli

                            Why google stubbornly keeps indexing my http urls instead of the https ones?

                            I moved everything to https in November, but there are plenty of pages which are still indexed by google as http instead of https, and I am wondering why. Example: http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum correctly redirect permanently to https://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum Nevertheless if you search for pneumatici barum: https://www.google.it/search?q=pneumatici+barum&oq=pneumatici+barum The third organic result listed is still http. Since we moved to https google crawler visited that page tens of time, last one two days ago. But doesn't seems to care to update the protocol in google index. Anyone knows why? My concern is when I use API like semrush and ahrefs I have to do it twice to try both http and https, for a total of around 65k urls I waste a lot of my quota.

                            Reporting & Analytics | | max.favilli
                            0
                          • RCF

                            Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?

                            Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?

                            Reporting & Analytics | | RCF
                            0
                          • JMagary

                            Why is Google Analytics showing index.php after every page URL?

                            Hi, My client's site has GA tracking code gathering correct data on the site, but the pages are listed in GA as having /index.php at the end of every URL, although this does not appear when you visit the site pages. Even if there is a redirect happening for site visitors, shouldn't GA be showing the pages as their redirect destination, i.e. the URL that visitors actually see? Could this discrepancy be adversely affecting my search performance? Example page:  http://freshstarttax.com/innocent-spouse/ shows up in GA as http://freshstarttax.com/innocent-spouse/index.php thanks

                            Reporting & Analytics | | JMagary
                            0
                          • Robert-B

                            Localhost:4444 Showing Up in Google Analytics

                            Hello All, Lately in my Google Analytics account I have noticed a referral source labelled: localhost:4444 The number of visits is really high from this source, but I have no idea (no clue!) what it actually means. Can anyone shed some light on what this is about? Should I be creating some sort of filter to screen out this as a referral source (assuming it is not legitimate)? Many thanks in advance. Cheers!

                            Reporting & Analytics | | Robert-B
                            0
                          • ahw

                            500 errors and impact on google rankings

                            Since the launch of our newly designed website about 6 months ago, we are experiencing a high number of 500 server errors (>2000). Attempts to resolve these errors have been unsuccessful to date. We have just started to notice a consistent and sustained drop in rankings despite our hard sought efforts to correct. Two questions... can very high levels of 500 errors adversely effect our google rankings? And, if this is the case,  what type of specialist (what are they called) has expertise to investigate and fix this issue. I should also mention that the sitemap also goes down on a regular basis, which some have stated is due to the size of the site (>500 pages). Don't know if they're part of the same problem? Thanks.

                            Reporting & Analytics | | ahw
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter

                          Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.