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.
Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed
-
Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research!
My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website.
Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now.
My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed.
I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed!
I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google.
Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!
-
You need more unique content. Your site is great I like it much btter then the other lyic sites.
but I can't see any content at all you have written yourself.
-
I agree with Stephen. Tons of lyrics websites out there.
If you want to get your site more visible write a couple to a few hundred words about each song and post it on the pages above or beside the lyrics. Then you will have something unique.
Try that on a couple dozen pages to see what happens. Give it a few months.
-
You have exactly the same content as a million other lyrics websites, so why should Google be interested in your PR0, PA18, DA2 website?
I think your doing pretty good with 15000 pages indexed via site:http://lyricstatus.com
I think what you need is a USP, not technical seo responses
-
Do you have any organization to your site? I can see where some visitors would desire to find lyrics by year, singer, music style (jazz, rock, etc), music type (love songs, happy songs, etc) and so forth.
Even if users found songs by searching, crawlers move through your site through links. Unless your site is extremely well linked and has a great navigation system, you are only going to see a relatively small percentage of your site indexed.
-
Wow, that was a quick response, thanks so much Ryan!
With regards to Google WMT, yep done that as soon as I went live, and I did try and make a sitemap using xml-sitemaps.org's tool, but where I have 700,000+ songs, the XML sitemap generator kept stalling due to lack of RAM. I did upload a partial sitemap though, but to date the "URLs in web index" is stuck at 363... out of 700,000+!!
You're right, I don't have a nav as I believe users will just use the search, but there is a "Browse" link in the footer which appears on every page, and this is effectively my Site Map: http://www.lyricstatus.com/browse
So as far as I'm concerned there is a static link path to every page in my website, correct me if I'm wrong?
Good point in your last para about a unique couple hundred words on each page - tall order for 700k pages, but could definitely do that for key songs that I want to get ranked for. Thanks again Ryan!
-
Hi Ed.
A few things you can do to help get your pages indexed:
1. If you have not done so already, register with Google and go to the Google Webmaster Tools page http://www.google.com/webmasters
2. If you have not already done so, create a XML sitemap. Ideally it should be located at http://www.lyricstatus.com/sitemap
3. If you want to locate the sitemap anywhere else, you will need to create a robots.txt file and place the sitemap URL in the file. I noticed you didn't have a robots.txt file. You can learn more about them at robotstxt.org.
4. In Google WMT, go ahead and upload your sitemap (Site Configuration > Sitemap). Then check back a day later. What you want to look at is two fields: URLs submitted and URLs in index. Your goal would be to have all your URLs in the index, but that isn't realistic without a lot of work.
5. Another thing you can do is create a HTML sitemap and place a link in the footer of your home page. You don't offer site navigation so a HTML sitemap can help visitors navigate your site.
Take these steps for now and then you will have a much better idea where your site stands. You can then match up your URLs in the sitemap with the URLs in Google's index. The urls without a match are the pages you need to get into the index.
You can try link building or even placing links to these buried pages on your home page to help get them indexed.
One last note concerning duplicate content. You really should consider adding original content to the pages to help them not be considered duplicate content. Keep in mind the page is viewed as a whole so if you have a song, you probably need to write at least a couple hundred words to differentiate your pages from all the other similar pages on the web.
Good luck.
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
-
Redirecting an Entire Website?
Is it best to redirect an old website to a new website page by page to like pages or just the entire site all at once to the home page of the new site? I do have about 10 good pages on the site that are worth directing to corresponding pages on the new site. Just trying to figure out what is going to preserve the most link juice. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
My website is constantly decreasing
For few weeks ago my website is constantly decreasing in search position. I lost keywords and is gooooing down.
Technical SEO | | Dan_Tala
Although it is well rated on several on page and off page seo verification software that I have tried.
I checked Google search console and Analytics and found no major problems. However… from one day to another it keeps going down.
I also checked what the main competitors are doing and they are not doing well, at all.
The main competitor actually has a creepy website. Totally devoid of onpage or offpage SEO but with an enormous number of backlinks. And of a very bad quality, which should disqualify it, still…
Few weeks ago I changed something.
In the pages I had H1, 4xH2, no H3 and an H4 without content.
An unnatural H tag structure.
Now I have H1, H2, H3, 3xH4, with the coherent information.
Theoretically, Google should have been “happy” or I’m missing something. I use a SAAS platform.
I just found out that they made changes to the keywords (tags).
I am selling toner cartridges for printers.
So…
The tags are printer models and generate a url in which they have the products.
Ex. https://www.sertit.ro/cartus-imprimanta-cilindru-color-hp-laserjet-pro-m-177fw goes to the products for that printer model.
The question is… should I make tag canonical?
Is it possible for products to loose so much in Google search?0 -
How To Cleanup the Google Index After a Website Has Been HACKED
We have a client whose website was hacked, and some troll created thousands of viagra pages, which were all indexed by Google. See the screenshot for an example. The site has been cleaned up completely, but I wanted to know if anyone can weigh in on how we can cleanup the Google index. Are there extra steps we should take? So far we have gone into webmaster tools and submitted a new site map. ^802D799E5372F02797BE19290D8987F3E248DCA6656F8D9BF6^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr.png
Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam0 -
Sitemap indexed pages dropping
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
Technical SEO | | zenstorageunits0 -
No index on subdomains
Hi, We have a subdomain that is appearing in the search results - I want to hide this as it looks really bad. If I were to add the no index tag to the sub domain would URL would this affect the whole domain or just that sub domain? The main domain is vitally important - it is just that sub domain I need to hide. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
How to change noindex to index?
Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
Technical SEO | | markgreggs0 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury0 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0