How Google Carwler Cached Orphan pages and directory?
-
I have website www.test.com
I have made some changes in live website and upload it to "demo" directory (which is recently created) for client approval.
Now, my demo link will be www.test.com/demo/
I am not doing any type of link building or any activity which pass referral link to www.test.com/demo/
Then how Google crawler find it and cached some pages or entire directory?
Thanks
-
Try putting the URL into Google and see if you find any pages linking to it.
I knew a company that created a test site that was a copy of a live site (made with a specific hosted CMS). Didn't exclude the test site in robots because "we all know we won't link to it so it'll be ok". Site got indexed, and it was because a person at the company was having problems with the implementation of the test site, went to the help forum (which person didn't think would be indexed) and posted the URL to the test site.
I found the above by just putting in the URL of the test site into Google, and I saw the post in the help desk. You might try the same to see if somehow there is a rogue link.
-
Is google crawling our mails?
Is it possible?
-
Yup, correct.
I was certain I'd replied to this
Anyway, you ever notice how the ads in gmail are always relevant to the content of your emails? Google are totally reading them
-
The <conspiracy hat="">side of things was him commenting that Google is sometimes accused of processing everything in Gmail and could have possibly pulled your link to the demo directory from that.</conspiracy>
-
Hi Barry,
Yes, We were used Gmail for reporting.
Is it make any sense??
-
<conspiracy-hat></conspiracy-hat>
Did either you or your client use gmail when you sent him the demo link?
Regardless, Dan's advice to noindex and block the directory from spiders is the future when doing development work.
-
Hi JoelHit,
NO, There is not any single refferal link to "Demo" directory from entire website and also from third party websites.
I am aware about Google Crawling and Indexing Systems.
Thanks.
-
Hi Thetjo,
I know about it.
My question is that how Google Crawl it without any referral link?
Thanks.
-
Hi Dan,
No, i am not exclude "demo" directory from robots.txt for any search engine.
I am not using wordpress its simple stattic HTML website (Not using any type of CMS).
-
Did this actually happen or are we talking about a hypothetical situation here? It could be that there is a link to the demo directory you've overlooked? Has the /demo folder perhaps been used in the past and there were still old links to it?
As a meta-solution to this problem: prevent crawlers and nosy people from accessing the content by adding a .htpasswd login to the area used for client approval.
-
Did you block the /demo/ directory in your robots.txt file? This is step number one to try and ensure they don't get crawled. Also, are you using wordpress? If so, wordpress automatically pings search engines when you add a post and if you use the common sitemap plugin, when it creates the sitemap it submits it automatically to Google, so that's another way Google could have found it.
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 spending majority of time on NAV bar vs. most important pages
Google is spending 37% of its time crawling the NAV bar which is on every page. Google is spending very little time 1% on the most important pages -- product pages (https://www.skinsafeproducts.com/tatcha-violet-c-brightening-serum-20-vitamin-c-10-aha) on www.skinsafeproducts.com . Does anyone know what is going on and how I can change the behavior?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | akih0 -
Does Google understand misspellings in terms of what keywords I should optimize a page for
Hey there! This is sort of an oddball question. We do a lot of hospital websites. One client that we have spells "Orthopedics" as "Orthopaedics" which is another spelling. When I did initial keyword research the volume for Orthopedics as I expected is much higher. However when I do a test search for "Orthopaedics" it looks like I'm getting the same results and Google is highlighting in the content "orthopaedics" even though my search query was "orthopedics". What I'm wondering - is it the same thing to optimize for "orthopaedics" or is it a recommendation I should make to the client to change to "orthopedics" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CentreTEK0 -
Google suddenly indexing 1,000 fewer pages. Why?
We have a site, blog.example.org, and another site, www.example.org. The most visited pages on www.example.org were redesigned; the redesign landed May 8. I would expect this change to have some effect on organic rank and conversions. But what I see is surprising; I can't believe it's related, but I mention this just in case. Between April 30 and May 7, Google stopped indexing roughly 1,000 pages on www.example.org, and roughly 3,000 pages on blog.example.org. In both cases the number of pages that fell out of the index represents appx. 15% of the overall number of pages. What would cause Google to suddenly stop indexing thousands of pages on two different subdomains? I'm just looking for ideas to dig into; no suggestion would be too basic. FWIW, the site is localized into dozens of languages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Why is Google no longer Indexing and Ranking my state pages with Dynamic Content?
Hi, We have some state specific pages that display dynamic content based on the state that is selected here. For example this page displays new york based content. But for some reason google is no longer ranking these pages. Instead it's defaulting to the page where you select the state here. But last year the individual state dynamic pages were ranking. The only change we made was move these pages from http to https. But now google isn't seeing these individual dynamically generated state based pages. When I do a site: url search it doesn't find any of these state pages. Any thoughts on why this is happening and how to fix it. Thanks in advance for any insight. Eddy By the way when I check these pages in google search console fetch as google, google is able to see these pages fine and they're not being blocked by any robot.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap0 -
Can we talk a bit more about cannibalisation? Will Google pick one page and disregard others.
Hi all. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries and we've been building some landing pages recently. Our most generic page was for '2017 Diaries'. Take a look here. Initial results are encouraging as this page is ranking top page for a lot of 'long tail' search queries, e.g) '2017 diaries a4', '2017 diaries a5', '2017 diaries week to view' etc. Interesting it doesn't even rank top 50 for the 'head term'... '2017 diaries'. **And our home page outranks it for this search term. **Yet it seems clear that this page is considered relevant and quality by Google it ranks just fine for the long tails. Question: Does this mean Google 'chosen' our home page over the 2017-page landing page? And that's why the 2017-page effectively doesn't rank for it's 'head term'? (I can't see this as many times a website will rank multiple times such as amazon) But any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Also, what would you do in this scenario? Work on home-page to try to push it up for that term and not worry about the landing page? Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Hope that makes sense. Do shout if not. Thanks in advance. Isaac.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac6630 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0 -
Page Indexed but not Cached
A section of pages on my site are indexed (I know because they appear in SERPs if I copy and paste a sentence from the content), however according to the text-only cached version of the page they are not being read by Google.Why are they indexed event hough it seems like Google is not reading them..... or is Google in fact reading this text even though it seems like they should not be?Thanks for your assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0