Drastic increase of indexed pages correlated to rankings loss?
-
Our ecommerce website has had a drastic increase in indexed pages, and equal loss of Google organic traffic. After 10/1 the number of indexed pages jumped from 240k to 5.7 million by the end of the year, according to GWT. Coincidentally, the sitemap tops at 14,192 pages, with 13,324 indexed. Organic traffic on some top keyphrases began declining by half after 10/26 and ranking (previously placing in the top 5 spots) has dropped to the fifth page of results.
This website does produce session id's (/c=) so we been blocking /c=/ in the robots.txt file. We also have a rel=canonical on all pages pointing at the correct url. With all of this in place, traffic hasn't recovered.
Is there a correlation between this spike of indexed pages and the lost keyword ranking? Any advice to investigate and correct this further would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
-
Thanks for your response Irving Weiss. Our webmaster made a couple of changes since this post, which I'll list at the end. First
a) Prior, the robots.txt file was..
User-agent: *
Robot-version: 2.0.0
Crawl-delay: 2
Request-rate: 1/4*
Sitemap: http://www.888knivesrus.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /c=/b) No and unfortunately the edit/add button is missing from the parameters section in our account.
c) not that we've found
d) It dropped from 5.7 to 5 million on 1/1, and has remained there.Some updates:
Our webmaster made a couple of changes yesterday to address this issue. Some of research we found said blocking the session id parameter in robots.txt file was preventing Googlebot from seeing the rel=canonical in place and it should be removed. They made an update to the robots.txt removing it. An x-robots tags of noindex and nosnippet was also added to the pagesThe webaddress is www.888knivesrus.com
Thanks again!
-
Yes they are absolutely related. you want from 240k pages to 5,700,000 pages of empty or dupe content, so Google thinks you're spamming them.
a) are you sure you correctly blocked everything
b) have you added the session IDs to WMT in the parameter handling section?
c) are there any technical issues such as incorrect pagination of pages, or pages not 404'ing when they should?
Finally, Have you seen the pages indexed number begin to drop yet?
If we had the URL we could poke around a bit for you
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
-
Page missing from Google index
Hi all, One of our most important pages seems to be missing from the Google index. A number of our collections pages (e.g., http://perfectlinens.com/collections/size-king) are thin, so we've included a canonical reference in all of them to the main collection page (http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all). However, I don't see the main collection page in any Google search result. When I search using "info:http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all", the page displayed is our homepage. Why is this happening? The main collection page has a rel=canonical reference to itself (auto-generated by Shopify so I can't control that). Thanks! WUKeBVB
Technical SEO | | leo920 -
How do I get my pages to go from "Submitted" to "Indexed" in Google Webmaster Tools?
Background: I recently launched a new site and it's performing much better than the old site in terms of bounce rate, page view, pages per session, session duration, and conversions. As suspected, sessions, users, and % new sessions are all down. Which I'm okay with because the the old site had a lot of low quality traffic going to it. The traffic we have now is much more engaged and targeted. Lastly, the site was built using Squarespace and was launched the middle of August. **Question: **When reviewing Google Webmaster Tools' Sitemaps section, I noticed it says 57 web pages Submitted, but only 5 Indexed! The sitemap that's submitted seems to be all there. I'm not sure if this is a Squarespace thing or what. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | Nate_D0 -
What is the best practice to re-index the de-indexed pages due to a bad migration
Dear Mozers, We have a Drupal site with more than 200K indexed URLs. Before 6 months a bad website migration happened without proper SEO guidelines. All the high authority URLs got rewritten by the client. Most of them are kept 404 and 302, for last 6 months. Due to this site traffic dropped more than 80%. I found today that around 40K old URLs with good PR and authority are de-indexed from Google (Most of them are 404 and 302). I need to pass all the value from old URLs to new URLs. Example URL Structure
Technical SEO | | riyas_
Before Migration (Old)
http://www.domain.com/2536987
(Page Authority: 65, HTTP Status:404, De-indexed from Google) After Migration (Current)
http://www.domain.com/new-indexed-and-live-url-version Does creating mass 301 redirects helps here without re-indexing the old URLS? Please share your thoughts. Riyas0 -
.co.uk/index.html or just .co.uk - my on-page reports are different for both - why?
It looks like the same thing, yet it has a different on-page report for each version - why is this. Please share your ideas with me on this. The original url is http://bath.waspkilluk.co.uk/index.html. Many Thanks - Simon.
Technical SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Is it bad to have your pages as .php pages?
Hello everyone, Is it bad to have your website pages indexed as .php? For example, the contact page is site.com/contact.php and not /contact. Does this affect your SEO rankings in any way? Is it better to have your pages without the extension? Also, if I'm working with a news site and the urls are dynamic for every article (ie site.com/articleid=2323.) Should I change all of those dynamic urls to static? Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Will Google Continue to Index the Page with NoIndex Tag Upon Google +1 Button Impression or Click?
The FAQs for Google +1 button suggests as follows: "+1 is a public action, so you should add the button only to public, crawlable pages on your site. Once you add the button, Google may crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click." If my page has NoIndex tag, while at the same time inserted with Google +1 button on the page, will Google recognise the NoIndex Tag on the page (and will not index the page) despite the +1 button's impression or clicks send signals to Google spiders?
Technical SEO | | globalsources.com0 -
If you only want your home page to rank, can you use rel="canonical" on all your other pages?
If you have a lot of pages with 1 or 2 inbound links, what would be the effect of using rel="canonical" to point all those pages to the home page? Would it boost the rankings of the home page? As I understand it, your long-tail keyword traffic would start landing on the home page instead of finding what they were looking for. That would be bad, but might be worth it.
Technical SEO | | watchcases0 -
Rel canonical or 301 the Index Page?
Still a bit confused on best practice for /index.php showing up as duplicate for www.mysite.com. What do I need to do and How?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110
