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.
Number of Indexed Pages are Continuously Going Down
-
I am working on online retail stores. Initially, Google have indexed 10K+ pages of my website. I have checked number of indexed page before one week and pages were 8K+. Today, number of indexed pages are 7680.
I can't understand why should it happen and How can fix it? I want to index maximum pages of my website.
-
Not to speak for Casey, but both those comments are definitely linked together. If Google thinks your content is thin or too similar to other content, it's going to index what it deems worthy or interesting to searchers. Retail sites often have this problem due to the conundrum of "how much can you really write about a table lamp" and that category and product pages often have similar content.
I'd focus on making your content on the pages more robust so Google seems it as awesome and indexs it.
-
My domain is active since 1 year. I want to know more about following two statement.
Most likely, all your pages aren't "worthy" of current indexing by Google
Make sure as well to REMOVE any questionable or thin content.
BTW: Thanks for your wish!
-
How new is the online retail store you are working with? I ask because what you have described is VERY common with new sites. It's normal to see indexed URL fluctuation counts, even large fluctuation counts, occur in the first few months of a site as Google works to index the URLs "appropriately."
It's also worth noting that in a post-Panda world Google has really TIGHTENED UP what they choose to index. If a majority of these URLs lack unique compelling content, are just aggregated content from other sources, or suffer duplicate content issues, that will certainly impact Google's decision to include them accordingly.
Unfortunately, what YOU value as good content doesn't matter much if Google doesn't share that opinion. I'd strongly recommend you review the pages that Google is NOT indexing and note similarities. Most likely, all your pages aren't "worthy" of current indexing by Google and as it slowly shifts down deeper into your pages it's making the determination as to which of your pages deserve listing consideration and which do not.
As to how to combat this...work to create QUALITY content that sets you specifically apart from your retail competitors. Make sure as well to REMOVE any questionable or thin content. This type of content can bring down an entire domain post-Panda.
Sorry I don't have better advice. Good luck with your retail site this holiday season!
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
-
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
Better to 301 or de-index 403 pages
Google WMT recently found and called out a large number of old unpublished pages as access denied errors. The pages are tagged "noindex, follow." These old pages are in Google's index. At this point, would it better to 301 all these pages or submit an index removal request or what? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Do I need to re-index the page after editing URL?
Hi, I had to edit some of the URLs. But, google is still showing my old URL in search results for certain keywords, which ofc get 404. By crawling with ScremingFrog it gets me 301 'page not found' and still giving old URLs. Why is that? And do I need to re-index pages with new URLs? Is 'fetch as Google' enough to do that or any other advice? Thanks a lot, hope the topic will help to someone else too. Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640