Drop in Indexed Page + Organic Traffic
-
Hey Moz Community,
I've been seeing a steady decrease in search console of pages being indexed by Google for our eCommerce site. This is corresponding to lower impressions and traffic in general this year. We started with around a million pages being indexed in Nov of 2015 down to 18,000 pages this Nov. I realized that since we don't have around 3,000 or so products year round this is mostly likely a good thing.
I've checked to make sure our main landing pages are being indexed which they are and our sitemap was updated several times this year, although we're in the process of updating it again to resubmit. I also checked our robots.txt and there's nothing out of the ordinary. In the last month we've recently gotten rid of some duplicate content issues caused by pagination by using canonical tags but that's all we've done to reduce the number of pages crawled. We have seen some soft 404's and some server errors coming up in our crawl error report that we've either fixed or are trying to fix.
Not really sure where to start looking to find a solution to the problem or if it's even a huge issue, but the drop in traffic is also not great. The drop in traffic corresponded to lose in rankings as well so there could be correlation or none.
Any ideas here?
-
Oops, I missed that part. Have you checked Google Search Console to see if someone set any URL parameters?
The first thing I would do is determine how many pages actually should be indexed to see if there's a large discrepancy between that and the number Google shows. A crawler like Screaming Frog can help with this. If you export the crawl to Excel, you can easily remove duplicates in the canonical URL column and filter out the noindexed pages.
If you find there's no real discrepancy, Google may have simply been cleaning house of some really old links in the index that hadn't been crawled in a while.
Beyond that, if you can pinpoint any specific URLs that have been deindexed, use the "Fetch as Google" tool to help diagnose or post it here so the community can take a look.
-
Hi Laura,
Thanks for your response, I know that adding canonical tags can lower our indexed pages count. The only thing I'm worried about is the fact that the drop in indexed pages have been steady since Nov of last year and we just implemented the tags last month.
We have been seeing lower conversions with less traffic some of which has to do with us not ranking as well for a few key-terms as we did last year.
-
I suspect the canonical tag implementation is the culprit for the loss in indexed pages, but that's just a strong suspicion. When you implement a canonical tag, Google will fold together all of the pages pointing to the same canonical URL so that they are treated as one URL for the purposes of indexation. This will naturally cause a reduction in the overall number of pages indexed. You won't see 404 errors as a result of this either.
One important point to remember is that a decrease in indexed pages is not necessarily a bad thing that needs to be fixed. In fact, if you were having problems with duplicate content or crawl issues, canonicalizing those URLs should be beneficial if properly implemented.
As for the loss in traffic, it could be related or not. It may just be an adjustment period from the canonicalization, or it could a separate issue. Have you seen a corresponding loss in conversions?
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
-
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
Dropped out of Bing index!! (and Yahoo too)
When I search for my site via site:domain.com or url:domain.com the are ZERO results except for this Some results have been removed which goes to http://help.bing.microsoft.com/#apex/18/en-US/10016/0 We are a total white hat website. What should I do? Is there someone at Bing I can contact? I dont see anyway via Bing Webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | corlin0 -
What would cause a sudden drop in indexed sitemap pages?
I have made no changes to my site for awhile and on 7/14 I had a 20% drop in indexed pages from the sitemap. However my total indexed pages has stayed the same. What would cause that?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic. Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages. We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website. F or Example: If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38" You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm) That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38") We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways. What are we doing wrong??? Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmaccom0 -
Why would GWT say 0 pages indexed ?
Hi Looking in GWT > Google Index > Index Status says 0 pages indexed Yes if i search manually on google for brand site is listed, and i see organic traffic from Google in analytics I take it this is likely an error in GWT and nothing to worry about ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Getting Pages Indexed That Are Not In The Main Navigation
Hi All, Hoping you can help me out with a couple of questions I have. I am looking to create SEO friendly landing pages optimized for long tail keywords to increase site traffic and conversions. These pages will not live on the main navigation. I am wondering what the best way to get these pages indexed is? Internal text linking, adding to the sitemap? What have you done in this situation? I know that these pages cannot be orphaned pages and they need to be linked to somewhere. Looking for some tips to do this properly and to ensure that they can become indexed. Thanks! Pat
Technical SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
Some site pages are removed from Google Index
Hello, Some pages of my clients website are removed from Google Index. We were in top 10 position for some keywords but now I cannot find those pages neither in top 1000. Any idea what to do in order to get these pages back? thank you
Technical SEO | | besartbajrami0