Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added
-
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 -
Yes, and I appreciate it!
Alan -
I did what I asked you to do.
-
-
-
- in my first post and repeated frequently.
-
-
-
-
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 -
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.
-
-
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 -
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.
-
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
-
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 **
-
Do this query: site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com
-
Start drilling down the SERPs. One page at a time. Look for content that you didn't make. Look for duplicates.
-
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.
-
-
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 -
-
Do this query: site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com
-
Start drilling down the SERPs. One page at a time. Look for content that you didn't make. Look for duplicates.
-
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.
- 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.
-
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
-
Different statistics in Google Analytics
Hi! A client of mine is having some trouble on his Google Analytics overview. When he checks the yearly report with number of visitors, new visitors, returning, ... he gets statistics that doesn't match mine. Also, he gets a notation from Google that no hits were fired, although the script is still there. On the other hand, I (logged in with another account) am seeing all statistics correctly. FYI: no filters were installed, nor segments, ... Why does the client see different and incorrect statistics? There should be a setting or something I'm overseeing. Hope you guys can help.
Reporting & Analytics | | conversal0 -
Adding UTM Tags to business directories?
Hi, I'm wondering what everyone's thoughts are on adding UTM tags to your business directories such as google my business, yelp, yellow pages ect. Would it be beneficial in sorting the data in GA? That way I can easily see which directories are performing the best. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Sally940 -
I want to take down some pages, how do I inform google?
Hey Guys, I'm hoping someone can help - I'm in the midst of a site re-design - whilst one of our biggest reasons for the redesign was to create more space to write valuable content and unique content I have been reading other posts on moz about content auditing. I have come across a few articles in my own blog that are from 250 - 300 words to which the articles seem similar and the traffic is low. I'm wondering while I'm left to consolidate these articles and create a fresh article for each entry that is more in-depth, when I consolidate or delete these pages - do I need to inform google these pages have now been deleted? If so using Wordpress what is the best way to do this? Cheers and would appreciate some advise Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | edward-may0 -
800,000 pages blocked by robots...
We made some mods to our robots.txt file. Added in many php and html pages that should not have been indexed. Well, not sure what happened or if there was some type of dynamic conflict with our CMS and one of these pages, but in a few weeks we checked webmaster tools and to our great surprise and dismay, the number of blocked pages we had by robots.txt was up to about 800,000 pages out of the 900,000 or so we have indexed. 1. So, first question is, has anyone experienced this before? I removed the files from robots.txt and the number of blocked files has still been climbing. Changed the robots.txt file on the 27th. It is the 29th and the new robots.txt file has been downloaded, but the blocked pages count has been rising in spite of it. 2. I understand that even if a page is blocked by robots.txt, it still shows up in the index, but does anyone know how the blocked page affects the ranking? i.e. while it might still show up even though it has been blocked will google show it at a lower rank because it was blocked by robots.txt? Our current robots.txt just says: User-agent: *
Reporting & Analytics | | TheCraig
Disallow: Sitemap: oursitemap Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig0 -
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 | | JMagary0 -
What is s.ytimg.com in google analytics?
My clients GA reports 273 visits from s.ytimg.com. I go to the site, it doesn't exist. I googled it, there were some code with s.ytimg.com in it, but nothing I could understand. Anybody have an idea where this comes from?
Reporting & Analytics | | endlessrange0 -
X2 Google Analytics affect page rank ?
Hi there, If you had 2 Google Analytics Accounts one to the main site and another to the blog, could this affect the page position in Google? We've suddenly noticed a drop in our KWs and it was shortly after we added another Google Analytics Account. The blog has 68% Bounce rate and the main site has always been about 48%. Any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks Paul
Reporting & Analytics | | webdesigncwd0 -
Cookie tracking in Google Analytics
Hi How do I remove the "/?__utma=...." at the end of my URLs?We have a site http://www.jetonline.co.za/, if you click on one of the menu navigation links i.e. "fashion". A long "/?__utma=...." url appears. I understand this is for tracking as we have separate domains for each page but is there a way to remove this dynamic url and keep it hidden from users?Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | NeilPursey0