More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
-
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site.
I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration.
Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K).
Anyone got any ideas?
-
Hi David,
Its tough to say without some more digging and information, it certainly looks like you have most of the common problem areas covered from what I can see. I will throw out an idea: I see you have a few 301 redirects in place switching from .html to non html versions. If this was done on a massive scale then possibly you have a google index with both versions of the pages in the index? If so it might not really be a big issue and over the next weeks/months the old .html versions will fall out of the index and your numbers will begin to look more normal again, Just a thought.
-
Thanks Lynn. The 31,000 was a bit of a legacy of issue and something we have solved. The robots file was changed a couple of weeks ago. So fingers crossed Google will deindex them soon. We get the same result when using inurl: where.
Any idea where the rest have come from?
-
Hi Irving
We checked everything obvious and cannot explain what is going on. I cannot see any major duplicate content issues and we do not have any subdomains active. The Moz crawler also doesn't highlight any major duplicate content issues.
-
Hi David,
Not sure why they started showing up now (some recent changes to the site?) but I suspect your problem is indexed urls that you are trying to block with robots.txt but are finding their way into the index somehow.
If you do a search for: site:nicontrols.com inurl:/manufacturer/ and then click on the show omitted results you will see a whole bunch (31000!) of 'content blocked by robots.txt' notices but the urls are still in the index. If you do a couple more similar searches looking for other likely url paths you will likely find some more.
If you can get a no-index meta tag into these pages I think it will be more effective in keeping them out of the index. If you have in mind some recent changes you have done to the site that might have introduced internal links to these pages then it would be worth looking to see if you can get the links removed or replaced with the 'proper' link format.
Hope that helps!
-
Can you see in the search the pages which are indexed and look for duplicates or technical issues causing improper indexing? Do you have other sites like subdomains Google might be counting as pages.
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
-
Site moved. Unable to index page : Noindex detected in robots meta tag?!
Hope someone can shed some light on this: We moved our smaller site (into the main site ( different domains) . The smaller site that was moved ( https://www.bluegreenrentals.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
Directory where the site was moved (https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals) Each page from the old site was 301 redirected to the appropriate page under .com/rentals. But we are seeing a significant drop in rankings and traffic., as I am unable to request a change of address in Google search console (a separate issue that I can elaborate on). Lots of (301 redirect) new destination pages are not indexed. When Inspected, I got a message : Indexing allowed? No: 'index' detected in 'robots' meta tagAll pages are set as Index/follow and there are no restrictions in robots.txtHere is an example URL :https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen/Can someone take a look and share an opinion on this issue?Thank you!0 -
Pages getting into Google Index, blocked by Robots.txt??
Hi all, So yesterday we set up to Remove URL's that got into the Google index that were not supposed to be there, due to faceted navigation... We searched for the URL's by using this in Google Search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:price=
site:www.sekretza.com inurl:artists= So it brings up a list of "duplicate" pages, and they have the usual: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." So we removed them all, and google removed them all, every single one. This morning I do a check, and I find that more are creeping in - If i take one of the suspecting dupes to the Robots.txt tester, Google tells me it's Blocked. - and yet it's appearing in their index?? I'm confused as to why a path that is blocked is able to get into the index?? I'm thinking of lifting the Robots block so that Google can see that these pages also have a Meta NOINDEX,FOLLOW tag on - but surely that will waste my crawl budget on unnecessary pages? Any ideas? thanks.0 -
Will Canonical tag on parameter URLs remove those URL's from Index, and preserve link juice?
My website has 43,000 pages indexed by Google. Almost all of these pages are URLs that have parameters in them, creating duplicate content. I have external links pointing to those URLs that have parameters in them. If I add the canonical tag to these parameter URLs, will that remove those pages from the Google index, or do I need to do something more to remove those pages from the index? Ex: www.website.com/boats/show/tuna-fishing/?TID=shkfsvdi_dc%ficol (has link pointing here)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf
www.website.com/boats/show/tuna-fishing/ (canonical URL) Thanks for your help. Rob0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo
Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up. The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase. Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed? Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Volusion store product pages will not index
Hello, I have moved over to Volusion and was wondering if you guys know of any SEO practices that are Volusion specific. i have been working on this site now for 2 months and my impressions and rankings have dropped substantially My 301 redirects where in place before I flipped over and my keywords / titles/ tags etc.. are in place. However i am still not making any progress in the engines. I have noticed that my products are not being indexed per Webmaster tools. I have heard that volusion has something set up to where you must purchase their SEO package in order to rank. I am really at my wits end and currently I thinking about taking a loss and reverting back to my old Shoppe Pro site. Any help would be very appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kerry0217
.0 -
Indexing an e-commerce site
Hi all, My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category. The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress. In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress? More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jenga110 -
Best practice to change the URL of all my site pages
Hi, I need to change all my site pages URL as a result of moving the site into another CMS platform that has its own URL structure: Currently the site is highly ranked for all relevant KWs I am targeting. All pages have backlinks Content and meta data should remain exactly the same. The domain should stay the same The plan is as follow: Set up the new site using a temporary domain name Copy over all content and meta data Set up all redirects (301) Update the domain name and point the live domain to the new one Watch closely for 404 errors and add any missing redirects Questions: Any comments on the plan? Is there a way (the above plan or any other) to make sure ranking will not be hurt What entries should I add to the sitemap.xml: new pages only or new pages and the pages from the old site? Thanks, Guy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jid1