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
-
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Issues with getting a web page indexed
Hello friends, I am finding it difficult to get the following page indexed on search: http://www.niyati.sg/mobile-app-cost.htm It was uploaded over two weeks back. For indexing and trouble shooting, we have already done the following activities: The page is hyperlinked from the site's inner pages and few external websites and Google+ Submitted to Google (through the Submit URL option) Used the 'Fetch and Render' and 'Submit to index' options on Search Console (WMT) Added the URL on both HTML and XML Sitemaps Checked for any crawl errors or Google penalty (page and site level) on Search Console Checked Meta tags, Robots.txt and .htaccess files for any blocking Any idea what may have gone wrong? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | RameshNair
Ramesh Nair0 -
New site: More pages for usability, or fewer more detailed pages for greater domain authority flow?
Ladies and gents! We're building a new site. We have a list of 28 professions, and we're wondering whether or not to include them all on one long and detailed page, or to keep them on their own separate pages. Thinking about the flow of domain authority - I could see 28 pages diluting it quite heavily - but at the same time, I think having the separate pages would be better for the user. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap1 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
My blog homepage deindexed, other pages indexing, still traffic not changed.
Hello! Today when I check my blog site search on Google, I can't see my blog home page. Though all my posts and pages are still on the Google results. Today I published a test post, then it also indexed by the Google less than 3 minutes. Still I can't see any traffic changes. 10th of April (yesterday) when I perform a site search (site:mydomain.com), I saw my site on the Google search result. Today I installed the Ulitmate SEO plug-in and deactivated WordPress SEO plug-in. After a few hours I saw this issue. (I'm not saying this is the issue, I just mentioned it). In addition to that I never used any black hat SEO methods to improve my ranking. my site:- http://goo.gl/6mvQT Any help really appreciate!
Technical SEO | | Godad0 -
SEOMOZ and Webmaster Tools showing Different Page Index Results
I am promoting a jewelry e-commerce website. The website has about 600 pages and the SEOMOZ page index report shows this number. However, webmaster tools shows about 100,000 indexed pages. I have no idea why this is happening and I am sure this is hurting the page rankings in Google. Any ideas? Thanks, Guy
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy1 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
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