Does page speed affect what pages are in the index?
-
We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds. Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them.
I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages. Am I correct? Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?
-
An SEO who thinks adding thousands of useless pages will do a website good? Get rid of them, or (preferably) get them re-educated!
-
I cant say that it is down to the panda update because im not 100% sure but from what your saying about the spun content and what you can see the panda update is all about then its likely to be.
Although the update is in July it does not mean your be hit straight away, but its only been a month from the update to you loosing results in the index and it just so happens the update is to combat duplicate and spun content.
Have your load times decreased?
-
I thought Panda was in July, this appears to be around mid Aug that the drop occurred.
-
Its the content.
Google launched an update to its algo called the panda update which basically hammered duplicate/spun content websites this year.
If you Google 'Google panda update' have a little read your find loads of ammo to throw back.
-
Yes, we have 1.2m pages with content generated from spintext like algorithms. I'm not in charge of our SEO strategy I'm the one that has to develop it but when i hear them blaming load times(my problem) instead of content(their problem) it really makes me question how well they're really doing. I've been trying to tell our "expert" load times are not the issue but yet he keeps coming back to us with that instead of changes to the content.
-
Well I just checked our webmaster tools and on average 1-2 seconds is a fast load time, so im 99% here your correct that its not load times.
When you say 'spun up' do you mean you have 1.2m pages which are basically spun content? If so thats most likely the problem.
-
I'm pretty sure they indexed about double of that at one point and then the pages that appeared in their index cut in half one day. Again our SEO guy told us this was normal and that we need to speed up the pages and release more pages.
-
It could be the structure,
You might find Google is struggling to find those pages that you want crawled.
If those pages are 5 clicks away from the homepage Google will need to follow down those links as well to find it.
So you could have homepage - category - sub category - paging number 9 - page you want found.
Just a thought!
-
With such fast load speeds there is no way you're running into trouble on that front. It's far more likely that it's a quality issue, especially if you believe there are a number of poorly generated pages.
Are there any discrepancies between the number of pages you're seeing on Google and Bing via the site:domain.com query, and the number of pages in the index as shown in Webmaster Tools? It's always possible that some other form of indexing issue is at play.
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
-
Why are only PDFs on my client's site being indexed, and not actual pages?
My client has recently built a new site (we did not build this), which is a subdomain of their main site. The new site is: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/uk/en/. (Their main domain is: http://itelligencegroup.com/uk/) This new Addstore site has recently gone live (in the past week or so) and so far, Google appears to have indexed 56 pdf files that are on the site, but it hasn't indexed any of the actual web pages yet. I can't figure out why though. I've checked the robots.txt file for the site which appears to be fine: https://addstore.itelligencegroup.com/robots.txt. Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti0 -
3,511 Pages Indexed and 3,331 Pages Blocked by Robots
Morning, So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries: Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed? As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted? Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help? I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked? Thanks in advance! Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Delete indexed spam pages
Hi everyone, I'm hoping someone had this same situation, or may know of a solution. One of our sites was recently pharmahacked 😞 We found an entire pharmaceutical site in one of the folder of our site. We were able to delete it, but now Google is showing us on not found error for those pages we deleted. First, I guess the question is will this harm us? If so, anyway we can fix this? Obliviously we don't want to do a 303 redirect for spam pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bridge_Education_Group0 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
Page titles in browser not matching WP page title
I have an issue with a few page titles not matching the title I have In WordPress. I have 2 pages, blog & creative gallery, that show the homepage title, which is causing duplicate title errors. This has been going on for 5 weeks, so its not an a crawl issue. Any ideas what could cause this? To clarify, I have the page title set in WP, and I checked "Disable PSP title format on this page/post:"...but this page is still showing the homepage title. Is there an additional title setting for a page in WP?
Technical SEO | | Branden_S0 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0 -
SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic indicates duplicate page content for home page?
My first SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic report for my website indicates duplicate page content for my home page. It lists the home page URL Page Title and URL twice. How do I go about diagnosing this? Is the problem related to the following code that is in my .htaccess file? (The purpose of the code was to redirect any non "www" backlink referrals to the "www" version of the domain.) RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^whatever.com [NC]
Technical SEO | | Linesides
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.whatever.com/$1 [L,R=301] Should I get rid of the "http" reference in the second line? Related to this is a notice in the "Crawl Notices Found" -- "301 Permanent redirect" which shows my home page title as "http://whatever.com" and shows the redirect address as http://http://www.whatever.com/ I'm guessing this problem is again related to the redirect code I'm using. Also... The report indicates duplicate content for those links that have different parameters added to the URL i.e. http://www.whatever.com?marker=Blah Blah&markerzoom=13 If I set up a canonical reference for the page, will this fix this? Thank you.0 -
301 redirecting some pages directly, and the rest to a single page
I've read through the Redirect guide here already but can't get this down in my .htaccess I want to redirect some pages specifically (/contactinfo.html to the new /contact.php) And I want all other pages (not all have equivalent pages on the new site) to redirect to my new (index.php) homepage. How can I set it up so that some specific pages redirect directly, and all others go to one page? I already have the specific oldpage.html -> newpage.php redirects in place, just need to figure out the broad one for everything else.
Technical SEO | | RyanWhitney150