Google Index Report
-
Hi,
I have just checked my google webmaster tools account and viewed the index status of my website and it produced the attached graph, which show quite a big spike in indexing during July and August 2012.
Does this look normal or does it reveal anything peculiar?
We did have a new website launched in June 2012 and I re-submitted the sites URL's to google as part of the re-launch and so I am unsure if this may account for the spike.
Any advice appreciated.
Thanks
-
Oh if webmaster tools is showing 404's for those pages that is most likely why Google has removed them from the index. It's hard to dig in without accessing your tools but here's what I would do.
- Find out what urls are returning a 404. It could be an error in the sitemap due to a change in the website?
- Set up 301 redirects for these broken links to point where the content actually is.
-
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I am very grateful.
It is reassuring to know the spike is due to the resubmission. However, I am at a total about how to go about a) identifying if the pages dropped are product pages sowing different content based on string query values and b) how to address this using the URL parameters.
Are you able to provide further guidance or point me in the direction of further information.
I have attached a screenshot of the URL Parameters listed in my webmaster tools account, which is all 'gobble-di-gook' to me
Also, I have discovered that I have 1,054 pages showing in webmasters crawl error reports because they are showing 404 response code if this helps shed any further light on the drop in indexed pages
Thanks
-
Your resubmission of the sitemaps for a new website is a perfect explanation for what you see in the graph.
It looks, however, like Google decided to exclude many pages of that spike soon after. If they are product pages that show different content based on query string values, you should tell Google that using the URL Parameters section of Webmaster Tools. This will help to ensure that Google knows these aren't all the same pages and should all be indexed.
Hope that helps!
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
-
No-index all the posts of a category
Hi everyone! I would like no-indexing all the posts of a specific category of my wordpress site. The problem is that the structure of my URL is composed without /category/: www.site-name.ext/date/post-name/
On-Page Optimization | | salvyy
so without /category-name/ Is possibile to disallow the indexing of all the posts of the category via robots.txt? Using Yoast Plugin I can put the no-index for each post, but I would like to put the no-index (or disallow/) a time for all the post of the category. Thanks in advance for your help and sorry for my english. Mike0 -
Does Widgetised Content Index The Same As A Regular Page
Hi, We have a website that was built in my opinion bizarrely where the bottom half of the page where most of the content is, is a widget. I just wondered if the content being in a widget is indexed any differently. I ask as normal pages seem to index and rank much better than the wordpress template using the widget. Hope someone might be able to clarify this. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | denismilton0 -
How to schedule the on page reports myself
The on page reports are scheduled on mondays, but is there a way to schedule it my self.
On-Page Optimization | | JoostBruining0 -
Does Google index dynamically generated content/headers, etc.?
To avoid dupe content, we are moving away from a model where we have 30,000 pages, each with a separate URL that looks like /prices/<product-name>/<city><state>, often with dupe content because the product overlaps from city to city, and it's hard to keep 30,000 pages unique, where sometimes the only distinction is the price & the city/state.</state></city></product-name> We are moving to a model with around 300 unique pages, where some of the info that used to be in the url will move to the page itself (headers, etc.) to cut down on dupe content on those unique 300 pages. My question is this. If we have 300 unique-content pages with unique URL's, and we then put some dynamic info (year, city, state) into the page itself, will Google index this dynamic content? The question behind this one is, how do we continue to rank for searches for that product in the city-state being searched without having that info in the URL? Any best practices we should know about?
On-Page Optimization | | editabletext0 -
Removing old URLs from Google
Hello, I am sure that this question has been asked many times, but I am still not sure what to do about the following: Our site's URL structure has changed a few times in the past few months. Recenty, we have changed our URLs to become more SEO friendly. However, Google has indexed the old URLs as well. To give an example: The following page in our website shows the following URLs in Google Webmaster Tools: Confúcio e Seus Ensinamentos /artigo/68_38/2/as_religioes_iv_confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/1_14_6132/vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/_14_6132/Vestibular/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos//aula/ensino/confucio_e_seus_ensinamentos/ The correct URL is the last one. What should I do about the other ones? Almost all the pages in our website have this problem. We have redirected the old URLs to the new ones, but is there anything else we should do? We were asking Google to remove them, but Google has informed us that it has reached the limit. Please advise us on waht we should do. We have removed the old sitemap with the old URLs. What else must we do? Thank you very much.
On-Page Optimization | | Tev0 -
Anyone know how long it takes Google to Index new site?
Could anyone let me know how long it takes for a NEW site to be indexed in Google please? Am having some robots.txt issues and am keen to see if it got indexed. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Wallander0 -
Possible Reasons for 40% Drop in Google since January?
Hello: I know this is long - but I kept it as succinct as I could to explain the situation - but everyone of the brilliant people on here insight is so greatly appreciated in advance. There has been more than a 30% decline in traffic mostly from Google on a site with an 11 year presence on the web, 5 page rank (historically 6), fairly good quality backlinks (but they are old). I cannot pinpoint a smoking gun (such as a specific penalty) - if it's just not attrition in demand for the product itself which there is plenty of evidence for. But I practice only white hat, so I don't know what it is. I do not engage right now in link building because my time to work on SEO is very limited. We have a few common keywords that cannot be avoided (because there are no good synonyms) so there is a high density for one word especially all over the site. From some websites (like tidbits) we have in Google Webmaster account tens of thousands of backlinks. How serious is this (FYI - they're not new though) Because of some unflattering reviews from sites with strong authority, the number of click throughs vs. impression in Google Search has dropped dramatically - I think a big part of it is that because the reviews drove down CT ratio. Interestingly, the number of CTs from Adwords has also dropped off significantly, and I was told by Adwords specialist that declining organic traffic does affect the Adwords traffic to - in fact, they're not even using our daily budget for Adwords as they used to. The site also doesn't pick up quality organic backlinks as it used to, and the anchor link text is almost always the same - a product name. Plus, the site was banned in 2008 by Google (from a black hat keyword stuffing that I discovered happened in another dept.) and only after really working hard was it reinstated by reconsideration request. Site traffic from Google has never fully reached it's potential since then. Also, text prices were removed from Buy Now buttons even though the prices were textually part of the buttons for years (could this be some penalty?) **Is it possible that Google is taking the ban history, the poor reviews, the decline in CTs to impressions on the site, the huge decline (75% over four years) in "search volume" or "search interest" (according to Google Trends) for the site's main product name and just using all of this to keep downgrading the site? If true, wouldn't the page rank be diving down to anywhere from 0 to 2 (or is that not relevant at all?) ** There are no messages of a penalty or anything else in the official Webmaster account for this site. Any insight anyone is able to provide is much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | holdtheonion1 -
Strange Keywords Google Webmaster Tools
Hey, I have a website about "coffee machines". Since a few months I added a vBulletin forum with vbSEO installed. The keywords Google found before I added the forum where highly related to the topic of my website (e.g. "coffee", "machine" etc), which I checked through the webmaster tools. However, I recently checked again and noticed that Google finds mostly keywords like "post", "forum", "thread", "share" etc. with high significance. Those "keywords" only appear on the forum. Now I'm a bit worried since Google states "These should reflect the subject matter of your site." Any advice how to solve that issue? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | netminds0