Is Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Completely Correct?
-
So I was thrilled when Webmaster tools released the little graph telling you how many pages are indexed. However, I noticed with one of my sites, that it was actually going down over the past year. I've only been doing the SEO on the site for a few months, so it wasn't anything I did.
The chart is attached to this post.
Now here's the funny part. I haven't really noticed anything out of the ordinary for keyword ranking dropping off. I also tested my most recent page that I put up. 3 days after I posted it, I could find it in a Google search. Shouldn't this mean that's it's indexed? I can also find any other page I've posted in the last few months.
Another oddity is that I submitted a sitemap a while ago when the site was only 22 pages. The sitemap index count says 20 of those pages are indexed.
The chart only says that there are 3 indexed pages right now. However, I can clearly find dozens of pages in Google searches. Is there something I'm missing? Is my chart for this website broken? Should I report this to Google? Has anyone had a similar issue?
-
Thanks for letting me know that I'm not the only one seeing this. In Analytics, I've got a nice upward line of traffic, so as you said, I'm not too worried about it. Maybe someone else will have more knowledge about the graph itself.
-
Hey Andrew,
Yeah, I've seen the same kinds of issues where that seems to be somewhat inexact. So far, I've not been able to find an explanation. In terms of the large drop off, I did see a similar drop off on one of my sites shortly after correcting a duplicate content issue.
However, like you said, you need to watch for things out of the ordinary. For now, I'm not worrying too much about the graph. It is interesting, but I'll pay more attention to the graph in Google Analytics telling me how much traffic I have from Google. If I see a large drop there, then I'll worry.
Matthew
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
-
Buffer Link and Google Impressions
Afternoon, I noticed a spike in impressions over a couple of days in April, so I investigated Analytics to see where these were coming from. It appears these impressions were split between two URLs; one was a blog post, the other was the Buffer link to the blog post that we used on Twitter and Facebook. According to Analytics, this Buffer URL received 1000 impressions over two days, with an average SERP position of 16. This surely can't be right, can it? Is this just another Analytics quirk? After two days of a decent amount of impressions to this Buffer link, the amount of impressions dropped to pretty much zero. I know Tweets are now starting to rank, but this would be the Twitter URL, not the Buffer link to our blog post? Any ideas, Cheers, Lewis
Reporting & Analytics | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Visits from Google with ccTLD are showing as referrals
Hi!I was seeing on of my clients Analytics report and it shows that some of the main sites that send visits and get tagged as referral traffic are google.com.br, google.cl, google.com.ar, among others. Do you know why is this happening? Shouldn't they get tagged by default as organic?
Reporting & Analytics | | arielbortz0 -
Google Analytics Real Time Not Working! :(
Hello Everyone, Today, the real time feature in my google analytics stopped working. I am able to see that traffic is visiting my site, but not in real time. The real time count is usually at 0. But, there are some instances where real time will come back online, but there will be only 1 unique visitor. At any given time, our website usually has 20 visitors or so..Has anyone encountered this issue? Where should i start looking for fixes? What are the possible problems? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | KarlMarxTheBear0 -
Sudden Increase In Number of Pages Indexed By Google Webmaster When No New Pages Added
Greetings MOZ Community: On June 14th Google Webmaster tools indicated an increase in the number of indexed pages, going from 676 to 851 pages. New pages had been added to the domain in the previous month. The number of pages blocked by robots increased at that time from 332 (June 1st) to 551 June 22nd), yet the number of indexed pages still increased to 851. The following changes occurred between June 5th and June 15th: -A new redesigned version of the site was launched on June 4th, with some links to social media and blog removed on some pages, but with no new URLs added. The design platform was and is Wordpress. -Google GTM code was added to the site. -An exception was made by our hosting company to ModSecurity on our server (for i-frames) to allow GTM to function. In the last ten days my web traffic has decline about 15%, however the quality of traffic has declined enormously and the number of new inquiries we get is off by around 65%. Click through rates have declined from about 2.55 pages to about 2 pages. Obviously this is not a good situation. My SEO provider, a reputable firm endorsed by MOZ, believes the extra 175 pages indexed by Google, pages that do not offer much content, may be causing the ranking decline. My developer is examining the issue. They think there may be some tie in with the installation of GTM. They are noticing an additional issue, the sites Contact Us form will not work if the GTM script is enabled. They find it curious that both issues occurred around the same time. Our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader. Does anyone have any idea why these extra pages are appearing and how they can be removed? Anyone have experience with GTM causing issues with this? Thanks everyone!!!
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Verifying Site Ownership & Setting Up Webmaster tools for clients who use Hubspot
We are a Hubspot partner agency. I'm trying to find the best route for managing Google's tools as an extra resource for insight, not the primary basis for marketing effort. I also want to explore adwords in more depth. Finding a lot of our clients don't have one or the other or both Analytics/Webmaster tools in place. Can I verify site ownership to set up webmaster tools simply by having admin access to their analytics account or will that require ownership of the analytics account? With Google merging things together these days I'm not sure of the best approach to take. Usually clients have their site hosted somewhere and built on some platform and ADD a Hubspot blog and the landing pages/cta's, Hubspot tools on a subdomain hosted by Hubspot. Hubspot has tools in it's website settings for adding google analytics (actually it's just a field to add code to the header area). If a client has universal analytics on their primary domain do I still need to go and add a separate analytics property for the subdomain and go through Hubspot's tools to install it on the subdomain? Or just use the same code from their primary domain and add it to the Hubspot header? What is the best route? Any additional thoughts on this subject are welcome - with so much updating and changing coming from Google (and Hubspot as we implement 3.0 - COS) I'm trying to avoid wasted effort, outdated methods, etc. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | rhgraves651 -
Google Analytics tracking code for completely new website
Hello! I use Google Analytics to monitor our company's websites. In the coming weeks we will roll out a brand new website for one of our brands to replace its current site. The domain name will remain the same. My question is, should I use the same tracking code that's been used on the existing site for the new site, or is there a benefit to creating a new tracking code? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO
Erik0 -
Cookie tracking in Google Analytics
Hi How do I remove the "/?__utma=...." at the end of my URLs?We have a site http://www.jetonline.co.za/, if you click on one of the menu navigation links i.e. "fashion". A long "/?__utma=...." url appears. I understand this is for tracking as we have separate domains for each page but is there a way to remove this dynamic url and keep it hidden from users?Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | NeilPursey0 -
How to combine several subdomain in google Analytics
Good afternoon. I have a question.
Reporting & Analytics | | meteorr
I have a main site site.com + many subdomains example1.site.com, example2.site.com, example3.site.com, example4.site.com .... I need to combine google Analytics reports into one. Information from: example2.site.com, example3.site.com
showed in example1.site.com Yk64j0