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.
Inurl: search shows results without keyword in URL
-
Hi there,
While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this.
The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created.
Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).
-
Hi Theo,
We encountered something similar when we migrated a site. We properly redirected all the old url's to the new one, however, in the weeks after the migration, we saw a huge increase of 404 in the webmastertools.
When we took a closer look to these url's, we noticed that these where using an url structure we had abandoned several years ago. On the "old" site, these were redirected, but we didn't implement these old redirections after migration as we assumed that these very old url's wouldn't be in the index anymore. We proved wrong. We could delete them manually from the index using webmaster tools, because they used folders we are not using any longer, this is not probably not possible in your case.
While it is a bit annoying, I don't think that having these "phantom" url's in the index is doing you any harm in terms of SEO. They will probably never pop-up for normal search queries, only when you do in-depth queries, limiting the results to only your site.
rgds,
Dirk
-
A few days plus ~100,000 decade's old pages in Google is usuallynot enough time to see a change. You can spot check the 301s and run a fetch / render from GWT to see if the changes should be working though. Other than that, you'll probably have to wait a bit longer.
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
-
Google Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
Hide sitelinks from Google search results
Does anyone have any recommendations on how you can tell Google (hopefully via a URL) not to index that page of a website? I have tried through SEO Yoast to hide certain sitemaps (which has worked to a degree) but certain functionalities of Wordpress websites show links without them actually being part of a "sitemap" so those links are harder to hide. I'm having an issue with one of my websites - the sitelinks that Google is suggesting are nowhere near the most popular pages and I know that you can't make recommendations through Google not to show certain pages through Search Console. anymore. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Does an Apostrophe affect searches?
Does Google differentiate between keyphrase structures such as Mens Sunglasses & Men**'**s Sunglasses? I.e. does the inclusion/exclusion of an apostrophe make any difference when optimising your main keyword/phrase for a page? Keyword explorer appears to give different results..... I.e. no data for Men's Sunglasses, but data appears for Mens sunglasses. So if I optimise my page to include the apostrophe, will it screw the potential success for that page? Thanks 🙂 Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK1 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
Omitted results
Hello We are facing a loss in ranking and organic traffic from 3 months on our ecommerce website. Mostly we have lost our ranking on our product pages. These pages are gone in the "omitted results" of google. It all started 3 months ago, when we had to face a duplicate content issue due to a technical priblems with our servers: 2 other domains that we own have been pushed online on google, while they shouldn't have. They have created millions of links to our main domain in a few days, and duplicate version / redirection to our main website. We have fixed this a long time ago now. But in GWT we still see that these domains are bringing links to our main ecommerce. It has dowgraded from 36 millions links to 3 millions.... Even if today there is no link ! We have done a lot of optimizations on site like adding specific content to our most important page, rebuilding the navigation, adding microdatas, adding canonical urls on products pages that we found were very similar (we sell very technical products, and we have products that are very similar. Now we have choosen 1 product to put in canonical each time it was necessary) Bt still our products pages don't rank in google. They stay in the "omitted results". Before they were ranking very well on 1st page of google's results. And we have noticed that some adswe put on ads listing websites are now well ranked in the google's results!... Like if the ads were having more authority on the subject than our own webpages... We started to delete some of these ads. But it's not always possible. And 2-3 of them are still online. Any advice to get our most important webpages at the top on the google's results back? Regards
Technical SEO | | Poptafic0 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0 -
Should me URLs be uppercase or lowercase
I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)? Any other tips? EX: http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html OR http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html
Technical SEO | | JustinStupid0 -
How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?
I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result. See attached for an example. How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png
Technical SEO | | Carlito-2569610