Sitemap indexed pages dropping
-
About a month ago I noticed my pages indexed from my sitemap are dropping.There are 134 pages in my sitemap and only 11 are indexed. It used to be 117 pages and just died off quickly. I still seem to be getting consistant search traffic but I'm just not sure whats causing this. There are no warnings or manual actions required in GWT that I can find.
-
Just wanted to update this, it took a month but since I decided to completely remove canonical tags and try and handle duplicate content with url rewrites and 301 redirects and I now have 114 out of 149 indexed from my sitemap which is much better. it ended up to dropping to 5 out of 149 at one point.
-
Hi Stephen,
Great that you've probably found the cause - this will absolutely cause mass de-indexation. I had a client a year ago canonicalise their entire site (two sites, actually) to the home page. All their rankings and indexed pages dropped off over a matter of about six days (we spotted the tag immediately but the fix went into a "queue" - ugh!).
The bad news is that it took them a long time to get properly re-indexed and regain their rankings (I am talking months, not weeks). Having said this, the sites were nearly brand new - they had very few backlinks and were both less than six months old. I do not believe that an older site would have had as much problem regaining rankings, but I can't be sure and I have only seen that situation take place first-hand once.
-
I may have found the issue today. Most of the articles are pulled from a database and I think I placed a wrong canonical tag on the page which screwed up everything. Does anyone know how long it takes before a fix like this will show?
-
Thats a good catch, I fixed that. I do use that in WMT and it has been fine for the longest time. I guess its not that big of an issue, my main concern was the pages being indexed. Was reading another Q&A thing and used the info: qualifer to check some of the pages and all the ones I checked are indexed and its more then the 11. I just don't understand why its dropped all a sudden, and if that number really means anything.
-
How are the indexed numbers looking in WMT today? I see 3,370 results for a site: search on the domain, but those can be iffy in terms of up to date accuracy: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Agoautohub.com&oq=site%3Agoautohub.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.798j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8
Not that this should matter too much if you are submitting a sitemap through WMT but your robots.txt file specifies sitemap.xml. There is a duplciate sitemap on that URL (http://goautohub.com/sitemap.xml) - are you using sitemap.php, which you mention here, in WMT? .php can be used for sitemaps, but I would update the robots.txt file to reflect the correct URL - http://i.imgur.com/uSB1P1g.png, whichever is meant to be right. I am not aware of problems with having duplicate sitemaps, as long as they are identical, but I'd use just one if it were me.
-
Thanks for checking, I haven't found anything yet.The site is goautohub.com. it's a custom site and the site map file is auto generated. It's goautohub.com/sitemap.php. I've done it like that for over a year. I did start seeing an error message about high response times and I've been working on improving that. It makes since because we have been advertising more to get the site seen. In regards to the rest of Williams points I have checked those but no improvement yet. Thank you
-
Hi Stephen,
Checking in to see if you had checked the points William has raised above. Do you see anything that could have resulted in the drop? Also, are you comfortable sharing the site here? We might be able to have a look too (feel free to PM if you are not comfortable sharing publicly).
Cheers,
Jane
-
Try to determine when the drop off started, and try to remember what kinds of changes the website was going through during that time. That could help point to the reason for the drop in indexing.
There are plenty of reasons why Google may choose not to index pages, so this will take some digging. Here are some places to start the search:
-
Check your robots.txt to ensure those pages are still crawlable
-
Check to make sure the content on those pages isn't duplicated somewhere else on the Web.
-
Check to see if there was any updates to canonical changes on the site around when the drop started
-
Check to make sure the sitemap currently on the site matches the one you submitted to Webmasters, and that your CMS didn't auto-generate a new one
-
Make sure the quality of the pages is worth indexing. You said your traffic didn't really take a hit, so it's not de-indexing your quality stuff.
-
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 Indexing without content
Hello. I have a problem of page indexing without content. I have website in 3 different languages and 2 of the pages are indexing just fine, but one language page (the most important one) is indexing without content. When searching using site: page comes up, but when searching unique keywords for which I should rank 100% nothing comes up. This page was indexing just fine and the problem arose couple of days ago after google update finished. Looking further, the problem is language related and every page in the given language that is newly indexed has this problem, while pages that were last crawled around one week ago are just fine. Has anyone ran into this type of problem?
Technical SEO | | AtuliSulava1 -
Escort directory page indexing issues
Re; escortdirectory-uk.com, escortdirectory-usa.com, escortdirectory-oz.com.au,
Technical SEO | | ZuricoDrexia
Hi, We are an escort directory with 10 years history. We have multiple locations within the following countries, UK, USA, AUS. Although many of our locations (towns and cities) index on page one of Google, just as many do not. Can anyone give us a clue as to why this may be?0 -
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?
Hi guys, any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'. The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets'). So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there. If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | davo230 -
Page titles in browser not matching WP page title
I have an issue with a few page titles not matching the title I have In WordPress. I have 2 pages, blog & creative gallery, that show the homepage title, which is causing duplicate title errors. This has been going on for 5 weeks, so its not an a crawl issue. Any ideas what could cause this? To clarify, I have the page title set in WP, and I checked "Disable PSP title format on this page/post:"...but this page is still showing the homepage title. Is there an additional title setting for a page in WP?
Technical SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Targeting multiple keywords with index page
Quick keyword question.... I just started working with a client that is ranking fairly well for a number of keywords with his index page. Right now he has a bunch of duplicate titles, descriptions, etc across the entire site. There are 5 different keywords in the title of the index page alone. I am wondering if it OK to target 3 different keywords with the index page? Or, if I should cut it down to 1. Think blue widget, red widget, and widget making machines. I want each of the individual keywords to improve but don't want to lose what I have either. Any ideas? THANKS!!!!
Technical SEO | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Is it bad to have same page listed twice in sitemap?
Hello, I have found that from an HTML (not xml) sitemap of a website, a page has been listed twice. Is it okay or will it be considered duplicate content? Both the links use same anchor text, but different urls that redirect to another (final) page. I thought ideal way is to use final page in sitemap (and in all internal linking), not the intermediate pages. Am I right?
Technical SEO | | StickyRiceSEO1 -
Google dropping pages from SERPS
The website for my London based plumbing company has thousands of specifically tailored pages for the various services we provide to all the areas in London. It equates to approximately 6000 pages in total. When google has all these pages indexed, we tend to get a fair bit of traffic - as they cater pretty well for long tail searches. However, every once in a while Google will drop the vast majority of our indexed pages from SERPs for a few days or weeks at a time - for example at the moment Google is only indexing 613 whereas last week it was back at the normal ~6000. Why does this happen? We of course lose a lot of organic traffic when these pages don't displayed - what are we doing wrong? Website: www.pgs-plumbers.co.uk
Technical SEO | | guy_andrews0