Why are new pages not being indexed, and old pages (now in robots.txt) remain in the index?
-
I currently have a site that was recently restructured, causing much of its content to be reposted, creating new URL's for each page.
To avoid duplicates, all of the existing pages were added to the robots file. That said, it has now been over a week - I know Google has recrawled the site - and when I search for term X, it is stil the old page that is ranking, with the new one nowhere to be seen. I'm assuming it's a cached version, but why are so many of the old pages still appearing in the index?
Furthermore, all "tags" pages (it's a Q&A site, like this one) were also added to the robots a few months ago, yet I think they are all still appearing in the index. Anyone got any ideas about why this is happening, and how I can get my new pages indexed?
-
Is there a way for the search engines to find the new content? If you're blocking the old content from being crawled, even if there are redirects, it makes it that much harder for the new URLs to be found. Also, do you have a sitemap with the new URLs?
-
SE's dont take notive first crawl, they need to see resulst a few times before they take notive, this i think is make sure thet you mean what the see, and not just a mistake.
I would not exclude any pages with robots, this is a very crude way of doing things. if the page does not exists then it will drop out of index, if it does exist, then you would lose link juice thought all the links that point to those pages. If you have to no-index a page, use the meta tag "no-index,follow" so that links are still flollowed back out of the page.
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
-
Site moved. Unable to index page : Noindex detected in robots meta tag?!
Hope someone can shed some light on this: We moved our smaller site (into the main site ( different domains) . The smaller site that was moved ( https://www.bluegreenrentals.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
Directory where the site was moved (https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals) Each page from the old site was 301 redirected to the appropriate page under .com/rentals. But we are seeing a significant drop in rankings and traffic., as I am unable to request a change of address in Google search console (a separate issue that I can elaborate on). Lots of (301 redirect) new destination pages are not indexed. When Inspected, I got a message : Indexing allowed? No: 'index' detected in 'robots' meta tagAll pages are set as Index/follow and there are no restrictions in robots.txtHere is an example URL :https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen/Can someone take a look and share an opinion on this issue?Thank you!0 -
Old product URLs still indexed and maybe causing problems?
Hi all, Need some expertise here: We recently (3 months ago) launched a newly updated site with the same domain. We also added an SSL and dropped the www (with proper redirects). We went from http://www.mysite.com to https://mysite.com. I joined the company about a week after launch of the new site. All pages I want indexed are indexed, on the sitemap and submitted (submitted in July but processes regularly). When I check site:mysite.com everything is there, but so are pages from the old site that are not on the sitemap. These do have 301 redirects. I am finding our non-product pages are ranking with no problem (including category pages) but our product pages are not, unless I type in the title almost exactly. We 301 redirected all old urls to new comparable product, or if the product is not available anymore to the home page. For better or worse, as it turns out and prior to my arrival, in building the new site the team copied much of the content (descriptions, reviews, etc) from the old site to create the new product pages. After some frustration and research I am finding the old pages are still indexed and possibly causing a duplicate content issue. Now, I gather there is supposedly no "penalty", per se, for duplicate content but a page or site will simply not show in the SERPs. Understandable and this seems to be the case. We also sell a lot of product wholesale and it turns out many dealers are using the same descriptions we have (and have had) on our site. Some are much larger than us so I'd expect to be pushed down a bit but we don't even show in the top 10 pages...for our own product. How long will it take for Google to drop the old and rank the new as unique? I have re-written some pages but much is technical specifications and tough to paraphrase or re-write. I know I could do this in Search Console but I don't have access to the old site any longer. Should I remove the 301s a few at a time and see if the old get dropped faster? Maybe just re-write ALL the content? Wait? As a site note, I'm also on a Drupal CMS with a Shopify ecommerce module so maybe the shop.mysite.com vs mysite.com is throwing it off with the products(?) - (again the Drupal non-product AND category pages rank fine). Thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thx so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mcampanaro0 -
How long should it take for indexed pages to update
Google has crawled and indexed my new site, but my old URLS appear in the search results. Is there a typical amount of time that it takes for Google to update the URL's displayed in search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
How to speed indexing of web pages after website overhaul.
We have recently overhauled our website and that has meant new urls as we moved from asp to php. we also moved from http to https. The website (https://) has 694 urls submitted through site map with 679 indexed in sitemap of google search console. As we look through the google search console analytics we notice that google index section / index status it says: https://www.xyz.com version - index status 2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Direct_Ram
www.xyz.com version - index status 37
xyz.com version - index status 8 how can we get more pages to be indexed or found by google sooner rather than later as we have lost major traffic. thanks for your help in advance0 -
My indexed pages count is shrinking in webmaster tools. Is this normal ?
I noticed that our total # of indexed pages dropped recently by a substantial amount (see chart below) Is this normal? http://imgur.com/4GWzkph Also, 3 weeks after this started dropping, we got a message on increased # of crawl errors and found that a site update was causing 300+ new 404s. could this be related ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
What may cause a page not to be indexed (be de-indexed)?
Hi All, I have a main category page, a landing page, that does not appear in the SERPS at all (even if I serach for a whole sentence from it). This page once ranked high. What may cause such a punishment for a specific page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
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 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0