Problems with to many indexed pages
-
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links.
Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out.
Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories.
I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index?
The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
-
Great! Please let us know how it goes so we can all learn more about it.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for that! What you are saying makes sense, so I'm going to go ahead and give it a try.
-
"Google: Do Not No Index Pages With Rel Canonical Tags"
https://www.seroundtable.com/noindex-canonical-google-18274.htmlThis is still being debated by people and I'm not saying it is "definitely" your problem. But if you're trying to figure out why those noindexed pages aren't coming out of the index this could be one thing to look into.
John Mueller (see screenshot below) is a Webmaster Trends Analyst for Google.
Good luck.
-
Isn't the whole point of using canonical to give Google a pointer of what page it is originally meant to be?
So if you have a category on shop.com/sub..
Using filter and/or pagenation you then get:
shop.com/sub?p=1
shop.com/sub?color=blue.. and so on! Both those pages then need canonical and neither do we want them index, so we by using both canonical and noindex tell Google to "don't index this page (noindex), here is the original version of it (canonical)".
Or did I misunderstand something?
-
Hello Inevo,
Most of the time when this happens it's just because Google hasn't gotten around to recrawling the pages and updating their index after seeing the new robots meta tag. It can take several months for this to happen on a large site. Submit an XML sitemap and/or create an HTML sitemap that makes it easy for them to get to these pages if you need it to go faster.
I had a look and see some conflicting instructions that Google could possibly be having a problem with.
The paginated version ( e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft?p=2 ) of the page has a rel canonical tag pointing to the first page (e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft/ ). Yet it also has a noindex tag while the canonical page has an index tag. And each page has its own unique title (Side 2 ... Side 3 | ...) . I would remove the rel canonical tag on the paginated pages since they probably don't have any pagerank worth giving to the canonical page. This way it is even more clear to Google that the canonical page is to be indexed, and the others are not to be - instead of saying they are the same page. The same is true of filter pages: http://www.vita.no/gavesett/herre/filter/price-400-/ .
I don't know if that has anything to do with your issue of index bloat, but it's worth a try. I did find some paginated pages in the index.
There also appears to be about 520 blog tag pages indexed. I typically set those to be noindex,follow.
Also remove all paginated pages and any other page that you don't want indexed from your XML sitemaps if you haven't already.
At least for the filter pages, since /filter/ is its own directory, you can use the URL removal tool in GWT. It does have a directory-level removal feature. Of course there are only 75 of these indexed at this moment.
-
My advice would be to include a fresh sitemap and upload it Google Webmaster tool. Not sure about time but I will second Donna, this will take time for the pages to get out of the Google Index.
There is one hack that I used for one page on my website but not sure if it will work for 1000+ pages.
I actually removed a page on my website using Google’s temporary removal request. It kicked the page out of the index for 90 days and in the mean time I added the link in the robots.txt file so it gone quickly and never returned back in the Google listing.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi lnevo,
I had a similar situation last year and am not aware of a faster way to get pages deindexed. You're feeding WMT an updated sitemap right?
It took 8 months for the excess pages to get dropped off my client's site. I'll be listening to hear if anyone knows a faster way.
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
-
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Pages not being indexed
Hi Moz community! We have a client for whom some of their pages are not ranking at all, although they do seem to be indexed by Google. They are in the real estate sector and this is an example of one: http://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/102-iveagh-gardens-crumlin-dublin-12/2289087 In the example above if you search for "102 iveagh gardens crumlin" on Google then they do not rank for that exact URL above - it's a similar one. And this page has been live for quite some time. Anyone got any thoughts on what might be at play here? Kind regards. Gavin
Technical SEO | | IrishTimes0 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
How to remove the 4XX Client error,Too many links in a single page Warning and Cannonical Notices.
Firstly,I am getting around 12 Errors in the category 4xx Client error. The description says that this is either bad or a broken link.How can I repair this ? Secondly, I am getting lots of warnings related to too many page links of a single page.I want to know how to tackle this ? Finally, I don't understand the basics of Cannonical notices.I have around 12 notices of this kind which I want to remove too. Please help me out in this regard. Thank you beforehand. Amit Ganguly http://aamthoughts.blogspot.com - Sustainable Sphere
Technical SEO | | amit.ganguly0 -
If a page isn't linked to or directly sumitted to a search engine can it get indexed?
Hey Guys, I'm curious if there are ways a page can get indexed even if the page isn't linked to or hasn't been submitted to a search engine. To my knowledge the following page on our website is not linked to and we definitely didn't submit it to Google - but it's currently indexed: <cite>takelessons.com/admin.php/adminJobPosition/corp</cite> Anyone have any ideas as to why or how this could have happened? Hopefully I'm missing something obvious 🙂 Thanks, Jon
Technical SEO | | TakeLessons0
