When does Google index a fetched page?
-
I have seen where it will index on of my pages within 5 minutes of fetching, but have also read that it can take a day. I'm on day #2 and it appears that it has still not re-indexed 15 pages that I fetched. I changed the meta-description in all of them, and added content to nearly all of them, but none of those changes are showing when I do a site:www.site/page
I'm trying to test changes in this manner, so it is important for me to know WHEN a fetched page has been indexed, or at least IF it has. How can I tell what is going on?
-
For those following, see this link where Ryan has provided some interesting answers regarding the cache and the site:www.. command
-
I'm going to post a question about the non-cached as upon digging I'm not finding an answer.
And, I'm reading where it seems to take a couple of days before indexing, but seeing something strange that makes it confusing:,
This page was cached a few days ago: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/wildwood/mo/all
The paragraphs wording content that starts with 'The Wildwood coupons page' was added as a test just 3 days ago and then I ran a fetch. When I do a Google search for phrases in it, it does show up in google results (like qjamba wildwood buried by the large national chains). So, it looks like it indexed the new content.
But if you search for wildwood qjamba restaurants cafes the result Google shows includes the word diners that is gone from the cached content (it was previously in the meta description tag)! But if you then search wildwood qjamba restaurants diners it doesn't come up! So, this seems to indicate that the algorithm was applied to the cached file, but that the DISPLAY by Google when the user does a search is still of older content that isn't even in the new cached file! Very odd.
I was thinking I could put changes on pages and test the effect on search results 1 or 2 days after fetching, but maybe it isn't that simple. Or maybe it is but is just hard to tell because of the timing of what Google is displaying.
I appreciate your feedback. I have H2 first on some pages because H1 was pretty big. I thought I read once that the main thing isn't if you start with H1 or H2 but that you never want to put an H1 after an H2.
I'm blocking the cut and paste just to make it harder for a copycat to pull the info. Maybe overkill though.
Thanks again, Ted
-
That's interesting because according to google own words:
Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the "Cached" link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.
Source: http://www.google.com.au/help/features.html
If I look for that page using a fragment of the <title>(site:http://www.qjamba.com/ "Ferguson, MO Restaurant") I can find it, so it's in the index.</p> <p>Or maybe not, because if you search for this query <strong>"Ferguson, MO Restaurant" 19 coupons</strong> (bold part quotes included) you are not among the results. So it seems (I didn't know) that using site: is showing results which are not in the index... But I would ask in <a href="https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/websearch">google search product forum</a>.</p> <p>As far as I know you can use meta tag to avoid archiving in google cache but your page doesn't have a googlebot meta tag. So <strong>I have no idea why is not showing</strong>.</p> <p>But if I was you I would dig further. By the way the html of these pages is quite weird, I didn't spend much time looking at it, but there's no H1, you are blocking cut&paste with js... Accessibility is a factor in google algo.</p></title>
-
Thanks.. That does help..
<<if 404="" you="" have="" a="" for="" the="" cache:="" command="" that="" page="" is="" not="" indexed,="" if="" searching="" content="" of="" using="" site:="" find="" different="" page,="" it="" means="" other="" indexed="" (and="" one="" possible="" explanation="" duplicate="" issue)="">></if>
THIS page gives a 404:
but site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all
Give ONLY that exact same page. How can that be?
-
I am not sure I understood your doubt but I will try to answer.
site://foo.com
is giving you a number of indexed page, is presumably the number of pages from that site in the index, it normally differs from page indexed count in GWT, so both are probably not all that accurate
site://foo.com "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
searches among the indexed pages for that site the ones containing that precise sentence
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://foo.com/bar
check the last indexed version of a specific page
if you have a 404 for the cache: command that page is not indexed, if searching for the content of that page using site: you find a different page, it means that other page is indexed for that content (and one possible explanation for that is a duplicate content issue)
-
Thanks Massimiliano. I'll give you a 'good' answer here, and cross fingers that this next round will work. I still don't understand the timing on site:www , nor what page+features is all about. I thought site:www was supposed to be the method people use to see what is currently indexed.
-
"cache:" is the most update version in google index
if you fix the duplicate content next re-indexing will fix the duplicate content issue
-
I have a bigger problem than I realized:
I accidentally put duplicate content in my subcategory pages that was just meant for category pages. It's about 100-150 pages, and many of them have been crawled in the last few days. I have already changed the program so those pages don't have that content. Will I get penalized by Google-- de-indexed? Or should I be ok going forward because the next time they crawl it will be gone?
I'm going to start over with the fetching since I made that mistake but can you address the following just so when I get back to this spot I maybe understand better?:
1. When I type into the google searchbar lemay mo restaurant coupons smoothies qjamba
the description it gives is <cite class="_Rm">www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/lemay/mo/smoothies</cite>The Lemay coupons page features both national franchise printable restaurant coupons for companies such as KFC, Long John Silver's, and O'Charlies and ...
BUT when I do a site:<cite class="_Rm">www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/lemay/mo/smoothies</cite>it gives the description found in the meta description tag: www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/.../smoothie...Traduci questa pagina Find Lemay all-free printable and mobile coupons for Smoothies, and more.
It looks like site:www does NOT always give the most recent indexed content since 'The Lemay coupons page...' is the content I added 2 days ago for testing! Maybe that's because Lemay was one of the urls that I inadvertently created duplicate content for.
2. Are ANY of the cache command, page+features command, or site:www supposed to be the most recent indexed content?
-
I am assuming it's duplicate, it can be de-indexed for other reasons and the other page is returned because has the same paragraphs in it. But if you ran a couple of crawling reports like moz/semrush etc.. And they signal these pages as duplicates it may be the issue.
-
thanks.
That's weird because doing the site: command separately for that first page for the /smoothies gives different content than for /all :
site:www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/lemay/mo/smoothies
site:www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/lemay/mo/all
But why would that 'page+features' command show the same description when the description in reality is different? This seems like a different issue than my op, but maybe it is related somehow--even if not I prob should still understand it.
-
Yes, one more idea, if you take the content of the page and you query your site for that content specifically like this:
You find a different page. Looks like those pages are duplicate.
Sorry for missing a w.
-
you are missing a w there. site:www and you have site:ww
That's why I'm so confused--it appears to be indexed from the past, they are in my dbase table with the date and time crawled -- right after the fetch --, and there is no manual penalty in webmaster tools.
Yet there is no sign it re-indexed after crawling 2 days ago now. I could resubmit (there are 15 pages I fetched), but I'm not expecting a different response and need to understand what is happening in order to use this approach to test SEO changes.
thanks for sticking with this. Any more ideas on what is happening?
-
Well, that's a http 404 status code, which means the page was not found, in other words it's not in google index.
Please note if you type site:ww.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/lemay/mo/all you find nothing see image below.
Again I would doubt your logs. You can also check GWT for any manual penalty you may have there.
-
Hi, thanks again.
this gives an error:
but the page exists, AND site:www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/lemay/mo/all
has a result, so I'm not sure what a missing cache means in this case..
The log shows that it was crawled right after it was fetched but the result for site:... doesn't reflect the changes on the page. so it appears not to have been re-indexed yet, but why not in the cache?
-
You evidently mistyped the url to check, this is a working example:
If your new content is not there, it have not been indexed yet, if your logs says it was crawled two days ago I would start doubting the logs.
-
HI Massimiliano,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm getting an error in both FF and Chrome with this in the address bar. Have I misunderstood?
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.mysite.com/mypage
Is the command (assuming I can get it to work) supposed to show when the page was indexed, or last crawled?
I am storing when it crawls, but am wondering about the couple of days part, since it has been 2 days now and when I first did it it was re-indexing within 5 minutes a few days ago.
-
Open this url on any browser:
You can reasonably take that as the date when the page was last indexed.
You could also programmatically store the last google bot visit per page, just checking user-agent of page request. Or just analyze your web server logs to get that info out on a per page basis. And add a couple of days just to have a buffer (even google need a little processing time to generate its index).
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
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
Is Google able to see child pages in our AJAX pagination?
We upgraded our site to a new platform the first week of August. The product listing pages have a canonical issue. Page 2 of the paginated series has a canonical pointing to page 1 of the series. Google lists this as a "mistake" and we're planning on implementing best practice (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html) We want to implement rel=next,prev. The URLs are constructed using a hashtag and a string of query parameters. You'll notice that these parameters are ¶meter:value vs ¶meter=value. /products#facet:&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:&pageView:grid&minPrice:&maxPrice:&pageSize:& None of the URLs are included in any indexed URLs because the canonical is the page URL without the AJAX parameters. So these results are expected. Screamingfrog only finds the product links on page 1 and doesn't move to page 2. The link to page 2 is AJAX. ScreamingFrog only crawls AJAX if its in Google's deprecated recommendations as far as I know. The "facet" parameter is noted in search console, but the example URLs are for an unrelated URL that uses the "?facet=" format. None of the other parameters have been added by Google to the console. Other unrelated parameters from the new site are in the console. When using the fetch as Google tool, Google ignores everything after the "#" and shows only the main URL. I tested to see if it was just pulling the canonical of the page for the test, but that was not the case. None of the "#facet" strings appear in the Moz crawl I don't think Google is reading the "productBeginIndex" to specify the start of a page 2 and so on. One thought is to add the parameter in search console, remove the canonical, and test one category to see how Google treats the pages. Making the URLs SEO friendly (/page2.../page3) is a heavy lift. Any ideas how to diagnose/solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason.Capshaw0 -
Why are some pages indexed but not cached by Google?
The question is simple but I don't understand the answer. I found a webpage that was linking to my personal site. The page was indexed in Google. However, there was no cache option and I received a 404 from Google when I tried using cache:www.thewebpage.com/link/. What exactly does this mean? Also, does it have any negative implication on the SEO value of the link that points to my personal website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mRELEVANCE0 -
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results. Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination? I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB1 -
Why is this page not being delivered for Google search result?
Hey folks, Figured I would try to get an experts insight on this. On google search result for BLACK TITANIUM RINGS + TITANIUM-JEWELRY.COM the page that I "think" should show up is this one: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/black-titanium-rings.html However, it does not. Imho, this page is highly relevant. I used Rank Tracker here on seomoz.org and the page is not even in top 50 of search engine results for google. Our 'About Black Titanium Rings' page ranks #2 (http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/about-black-titanium.html) but the /black-titanium-rings.html page doesn't even rank. Any suggestions on what I could look at to figure out why this page is being penalized? We are not under a manual penalty (anymore!). Thanks! Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
How to remove wrong crawled domain from Google index
Hello, I'm running a Wordpress multisite. When I create a new site for a client, we do the preparation using the multisite domain address (ex: cameleor.cobea.be). To keep the site protected we use the "multisite privacy" plugin which allows us to restrict the site to admin only. When site is ready we a domain mapping plugin to redirect the client domain to the multisite (ex: cameleor.com). Unfortunately, recently we switched our domain mappin plugin by another one and 2 sites got crawled by Google on their multsite address as well. So now when you type "cameleor" in Google you get the 2 domains in SERPS (see here http://screencast.com/t/0wzdrYSR). It's been 2 weeks or so that we fixed the plugin issue and now cameleor.cobea.be is redirected to the correct address cameleor.com. My question: how can I get rid of those wrong urls ? I can't remove it in Google Webmaster Tools as they belong to another domain (cf. cameleor.cobea.be for which I can't get authenticated) and I wonder if will ever get removed from index as they still redirect to something (no error to the eyes of Google)..? Does anybody has an idea or a solution for me please ? Thank you very much for your help Regards Jean-Louis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeanlouisSEO0 -
Volusion store product pages will not index
Hello, I have moved over to Volusion and was wondering if you guys know of any SEO practices that are Volusion specific. i have been working on this site now for 2 months and my impressions and rankings have dropped substantially My 301 redirects where in place before I flipped over and my keywords / titles/ tags etc.. are in place. However i am still not making any progress in the engines. I have noticed that my products are not being indexed per Webmaster tools. I have heard that volusion has something set up to where you must purchase their SEO package in order to rank. I am really at my wits end and currently I thinking about taking a loss and reverting back to my old Shoppe Pro site. Any help would be very appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kerry0217
.0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0