Google Webmaster Tools - spike in 'not selected' under Index Status

[Chammy]

Hi fellow mozzers

Has anyone seen a huge shift in the number of pages 'Not Selected' under Index Status in Google WMT, and been able to identify what the problem has been?

My new client recently moved their site to wordpress - and in doing so the number of pages 'not selected' rose from ~200 to ~1100, It was high before but is ridiculous now.

I am thinking there must be a new duplicate content issue which should be cleaned up in my quest to improve their SEO.

Could it be the good old WP tag/category issue? In which case I won't worry as Joost is doing its job of keeping stuff out of the index.

There are loads of image pages which could well appear as dupe as have no content on them (i do need to fix this), but Google is already indexing these so doesn't explain the ones 'not selected'.

I've tried checking dupe title tags but there are very few of them so that doesn't help

Any other ideas of how to identify what these problem pages maybe?

Thanks very much!

Wendy

[KeriMorgret]

Nice to see another ham on here! 33s and 73s from N6TME.

[Chammy]

Thanks n1ar

There are only 54 crawl errors and 1133 not selected so unfortunately that's not the problem

I thought it must be a dupe content issue but cannot find a tool that will help me identify what the pages actually are! I wondered whether they are pages blocked by robots.txt, as that shows as 0 but I know a load of WP pages are blocked. How did you manage to identify the pages when it happened to you?

And thanks for that article Keri - always good to know you are not alone!

[n1ar]

Hi Wendy,

I have seen that same thing happening on several sites. In one case, it was an abundance of pages sneaking through that were not part of the site, but had somehow been linked to thus the crawlers were infesting them. Robots entries have done a lot to improve the "not selected" pages in that case.

In another case it was a lot of dupe content, but not a Wordpress site, I'm not familar with the tag/category issue.

What I would do is download the list of all crawl errors from WMT and do whatever needs doing to correct as many of those as you possibly can.

[KeriMorgret]

I don't have an answer for you, but you're not the only one seeing this. Barry writes about it on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-not-selected-16007.html