Anyone managed to decrease the "not selected" graph in WMT?
-
Hi Mozzers.
I am working with a very large E-com site that has a big issue with duplicate or near duplicate content. The site actually received a message in WMT listing out pages that Google deemed it should not be crawling. Many of these were the usual pagination / category sorting option URL issues etc.
We have since fixed the issue with a combination of site changes, robots.txt, parameter handling and URL removals, however I was expecting the "not selected" graph in WMT to start dropping.
The number of roboted pages has increased by around 1 million pages (which was expected) and indexed pages has actually increased despite removing hundreds of thousands of pages. I assume this is due to releasing some crawl bandwidth for more important pages like products.
I guess my question is two-fold;
1. Is the "not selected" graph cumulative, as this would explain why it isn't dropping?
2. Has anyone managed to get this figure to significantly drop? Should I even care? I am relating this to Panda by the way.
Important to note that the changes were made around 3 weeks ago and I am aware not everything will be re-crawled yet.
Thanks,
Chris -
Very interesting. I'm also convinced the "not selected" graph is a big clue towards a Panda penalty. I guess I will have to wait another couple of weeks to see if our changes have affected the graph. Maybe this time lag is why it can take upwards of 6 months to get recover from Panda!
-
Hi Chris
Here is the nice information about the "Not Selected" data in WMT. I hope this post will help you more to understand about the Not Selected Graph : http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366
-
The "Not Selected" isn't cumulative. The "Ever Crawled" is though.
I have a large Wordpress content site. It was hit by Panda on a very same day that my "not selected" multiplied by 8. I don't think it was a coincidence, and I didn't make any large changes to the site besides the regular addition of about 10 posts per week.
I've been able to effect a downward movement on the not selected count by removing/redirecting things like "replytocom" variable URLs in the comments section;reworking print and email versions of each article, etc. It very slow though, only reducing by an average of 100 per week.
Needless to say, I think the not selected metric means quite alot.
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
-
Can anyone recommend an SEO workflow?
I've been seeing great results with my efforts in the last few months. But I think my workflow is a mess is non-existent! Does anyone have a specific workflow that I could use as a base?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Madstrategist1 -
Is it good practice to use "SAVE $1000's" in SEO titles and Meta Descriptions?
Our company sells a product system that will permanently waterproof almost anything. We market it as a DIY system. I am working on SEO titles and descriptions. This topic came up for discussion, if using "SAVE $1000's.." would help or hurt. We are trying to create an effective call to action, but we are wondering if search engines see it as click bait. Can you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tyler.louth0 -
Data highlighter in WMT displays old version of page
I want to mark up a business address for Google Local, so I thought I would use the data highlighter in WMT. However I only just added the address to the the bottom of the home page and when using data highlighter iit is giving me the old version of page to mark up without the address on. Rather frustrating, does any body have any experience on the time frame until Google updates the page in the data highlighter? According to this thread it's not even related to the page re caching: Data Highlighter: Start link is pulling an old version of page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian0 -
Alternative Markup Challenge. Can anyone help?
I have a challenge around alternative markup. We currently operate a single domain with geo-targeted folders and alternative markup implemented. We are now now looking to expand this out to non-English content. Current Implementation; All generic English language content hosted on the main domain, with x5 English language content variations (locales) available under a folder structure (.com/en-us/ etc.). Alternative markup is in place for all locales within the HTML, implemented automatically by developers via the CMS. Locale folders geo-targeted via GWT and Bing WT. Planned Launch; Introduction of 5 new non-English locale folders (e.g. /de-de/ etc.), targeted to their respective country and language. Content language will be mixed, with around 1/10 of pages translated and the other 9/10 of pages (business listings) having their body content remain in English, with headers / footers translated. Locale folders will be geo-targeted via GWT and Bing WT. Folder and markup usage TBC. Options; Folders; Implement folder structure /de/, attempting to indicate country but not language (issue; usually a single identifier indicates language, not country?). Implement /de-de/ folder structure to match the English locales and maintain correct country targeting (issue; some content is not in language). Alternative markup; Do not make use of markup at all. Implement CMS based automated markup on all English and non-English content throughout the locale (e.g. /de-de/), but exclude English language versions (e.g. /en-gb/). Attempt manually implementing markup to bridge the English and non-English locales, potentially creating future issues with new content going live and content being removed. A heavy risk. Current approach is webmaster tools targeting, a /de-de/ folder structure and automated implementation of markup. This means English language URLs will have markup and non-English language URLs will have markup, but they will not match up (e.g. English pages will never have markup for non-English language content). If you minds haven't melted, what's your thoughts? Any help is much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HelloAlba0 -
Help with setting up 301 redirects from /default.aspx to the "/" in ASP.NET using MasterPages?
Hi SEOMoz Moderators and Staff, My web developer and I are having a world of trouble setting up the best way to 301 redirect from www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to the www.tisbest.org since we're using session very heavily for our ASP.NET using MasterPages. We're hoping for some help since our homepage has dropped 50+ positions for all of our search terms since our first attempt at setting this up 10 days ago. = ( A very bad result. We've rolled back the redirects after realizing that our session system was redirecting www.tisbest.org back to www.tisbest.org/default.aspx?AutoDetectCookieSupport=1 which would redirect to a URL with the session ID like this one: http://www.tisbest.org/(S(whukyd45tf5atk55dmcqae45))/Default.aspx which would then redirect again and throw the spider into an unending redirect loop. The Google gods got angry, stopped indexing the page, and we are now missing from our previous rankings though, thankfully, several of our other pages do still exist on Google. So, has anyone dealt with this issue? Could this be solved by simply resetting up the 301 redirects and also configuring ASP.NET to recognize Google's spider as supporting cookies and thus not serving it the Session ID that has caused issue for us in the past? Any help (even just commiserating!) would be great. Thanks! Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TisBest0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0 -
No longer to be found for "certain" keywords.
I'd like to see if anyone could potentially shade a light on this rather strange scenario: Basically yesterday I noticed that we are no longer to be found for 'certain' keywords that we had page 2-3 ranking. Yet, for other keywords we still appear on page 2-3. These keywords are very competitive and our rankings has constantly improved in the course of 5-6 months. Now my question is that what could or may have contributed to the fact that for only some keywords we are no longer to be found? Another question is, can Google remove you from their SERPs for certain keywords 'only'? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micfo
Maximilian.0