Page Count in Webmaster Tools Index Status Versus Page Count in Webmaster Tools Sitemap
-
Greeting MOZ Community:
I run www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a real estate website in New York City.
The page count in Google Webmaster Tools Index status for our site is 850. The page count in our Webmaster Tools Sitemap is 637. Why is there a discrepancy between the two?
What does the Google Webmaster Tools Index represent? If we filed a removal request for pages we did not want indexed, will these pages still show in the Google Webmaster Tools page count despite the fact that they no longer display in search results? The number of pages displayed in our Google Webmaster Tools Index remains at about 850 despite the removal request. Before a site upgrade in June the number of URLs in the Google Webmaster Tools Index and Google Webmaster Site Map were almost the same.
I am concerned that page bloat has something to do with a recent drop in ranking.
Thanks everyone!!
Alan
-
Using the noindex,follow combination is a form of advanced page sculpting, which is not truly an SEO best practice.
Here's why:
If you deem a page not worthy of being in the Google index, attempting to say "it's not worthy of indexing, but the links on it are worthy" is a mixed message.
Links to those other pages should already exist from pages you do want indexed.
By doing noindex,follow, you increase the internal link counts in artificial ways.
-
Hi Alan:
That is very clear, thanks!!
For pages with thin content, why the "no-follow" in addition to the "no-index"? My SEO firm was also of the opinion that the thin content pages be "no-indexed" however they did not suggest a "no-follow" also.
So I think I will work on improving site speed, enhancing content and no-indexing (and no following?) thin pages. If that does not induce an improvement I guess I will have to consider alternatives.
Thanks,
Alan -
As I already communicated, these are issues that MAY be causing your problems. Without direct access to Google's algorithms, there is zero guarantee that anyone could absolutely say with 100% certainty exactly what impact they are having. And without a full audit, there is no way to know what other problems you have.
Having said that, proper SEO best practices always dictates that any major SEO flaws that you know exist should be cleaned up / fixed. So - if two thirds of your listings have thin content, the best suggestion would be to work to add much more content to each of those (unique, highly relevant, trustworthy and helpful), or to consider a "noindex,nofollow" on those specific pages.
The problem then being if you noindex,nofollow that many pages, what do you have left in terms of overall site scale that Google would find worthy of high rankings? How big are your competitors? Taking away very thin pages helps reduce "low quality" signals, yet if there isn't other "high quality" volume of content you still don't solve all your problems most of the time.
200-250 words is NOT considered a strong volume of content in most cases. Typically these days it's around the 600 words + range. However that also depends on the majority of the competition for that unique type of content in that specific market.
And site speed is also something that best practices dictates needs to be as efficient as possible so if it's slow even intermittently, that would be another thing to definitely work on.
-
Hi Alan:
About maybe 220 pages of the 305 listings have thin content. Meaning less than 100 words.
Is that likely to have triggered a Panda 4.0 penalty in late May? If I add content to those pages of no-index them could that reverse the penalty if it exists. Also my building pages contain 200-250 words. Is that considered "thin"? They are less geared towards the needs of tenants leasing space and contain historical information. I intend to enhance them and display listings on them. Do you think that could help?
Do you think the site speed could be a major factor impacting performance on my site? If so, I can invest in improving speed.
Thanks, Alan
-
thanks for the GA data - so - there's very little traffic to the site so Google isn't able to get accurate page speed data consistently every day.
Note however, that back around July 6th, the site-wide average was almost 40 seconds a page. That's extremely slow. Then on the 17th, it was up around 16 seconds site-wide. So even though the little bit of data the rest of the month shows much faster speeds, those are definitely not good.
I honestly don't know however, given the very small data set, what impact site speed is having on the site. And there's just no way to know how it's impacting the site compared to other problems.
Next - thin content pages - what percentage of the listings has this problem? When I go to a sample listing such as this one I see almost no content. If a significant number of listings you have are this severely thin, that could well be a major problem.
Again though, I don't believe in randomly looking at one, two or even a few individual things as a valid basis for making a wild guess as to exact causes. SEO is not rocket science, however it is computer science. It's complex and hundreds of main factors are involved.
-
Hi Alan:
Interesting tools, URIValet.com, I never heard of it before.
I reviewed site speed on Google Analytics and its seems that intermittently download speeds seem very slow. According to "Site Speed Timings" (see attached) there has been a drop in download speed.
Is download speed a potentially more significant problem than the unknown 175 URLs?
Also, the listing do not appear elsewhere on the web. But many of them have light content. The call to action at the end of the listing is somewhat repetitive. I plan on either no-indexing listings with less than 100 words or adding to the content. The total number of listing URLs is 310. There are also 150 short building write ups URLs (like: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/metropolitan-life-tower). These don't have more than 150 content. Could they be contributing to the issue?
Is the load time for the URLs on this site so slow that it could be affecting ranking?
Thanks,
Alan -
It would require a developer to examine the structure of the site, how pages are generated - to do an inventory audit related to pages generated, then to match that to the sitemap file. If there are a large number of pages that are duplicate content, or very thin on content, that could be a contributing factor. Since there's less than 1,000 pages indexed in Google, I don't think 175 would be enough by itself as a single factor.
There are many reasons that could be causing your problem. Overall quality is another possible factor. In a test I ran just now at URIValet.com, the page processing speed for the home page in the 1.5 mbps emulator was 13 seconds. Since Google has an ideal of under 3 seconds, if you have serious site-wide processing issues, that could also be a contributing factor. A test of a different page came back at 6 seconds, so this isn't necessarily a site-wide problem, and it may even be intermittent.
Yet if there are intermittent times when speeds are even slower, then yes, that could well be a problem that needs fixing.
So many other possible issues exist. Are the property listings anywhere else on the web, or is the content you have on them exclusive to your site?
What about your link profile? Is it questionable?
Without a full blown audit it's a guess as to what the cause of your visibility drop problems are.
-
Hi Alan:
Your hypothesis regarding the URL structure is interesting. But in this case two the URLs represent buildings and the one with "/listings/" represents a listings. SO that seems ok.
Now you mention the possibility that there may be URLs that do not appear in the site map and are getting indexed by Google. That there is a site map issue with the site. How could I determine this?
Could the additional 175 URLs that have appeared in the last two months contribute to a drop in ranking?
I am complete stumped on thus issue and have been harassing the MOZ community for two months. If you could help get the bottom of this I would be most grateful.
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Keri:
OK. I will keep that in mind moving forward. I did not realize the duplication.
If a question does not get answered are users allowed to repost?
Thanks,
Alan
-
Hi Alan:
Thanks for your response. Actually the 1st and 3rd URL are for buildings rather than listings, so they are actually formatted correctly. All listings contain "/listings/". So I think, but I am not an expert, that the URL structure is OK.
Thanks,
Alan -
There are many reasons this can be happening.
One cause is where more URLs exist than your sitemap might even include. So the question then is whether the sitemap file is accurate and includes all the pages you want indexed.
Sometimes it's a coding or Information Architecture flaw. where content is found multiple ways.
Doing a random check, I found you have listings showing up in three different ways
- http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/38-broad-street-between-beaver--manhattan-new-york
- http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/113-133-west-18th-street
- http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/inquire-about-the-ladders-137-varick-street-to-rent-office-space-in-ny
See those? One has the address as a sub-page beneath "/listings/" the 2nd version does not, and the 3rd URL is entirely different altogether. There should only be one URL structure for all property listings so this would cause me to wonder whether you have properties showing up with two different URLs.
I didn't find duplication, yet it's a flawed URL issue that leaves me wondering if it's a contributing factor.
This is just a scratching on the surface of possibilities. I did check about blog tags and blog date archives, however none of those are indexed, so they're not a cause based on my preliminary evaluation.
-
Noindexed pages should not appear in your "Index Status". I could be wrong but it doesn't make sense to appear there if the page is noindexed.
Doing a site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, I get 849 results. Seems normal to me. Again you would probably have to scrutinize your sitemap instead, sitemaps don't always pull all the URLs depending how on you get them.
Based on Screaming Frog, you got about 860 pages and ~200 noindexed pages. Your index status may update eventually.
Its working as is anyway, http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/tag/manhattan-office-space
Does not show up in SERPs. I wouldn't use Index Status as definitive but more as directional.
-
Thanks for your response.
I am very suspicious that something is amiss. The number of URLs in MOZ's crawl of our site is about 850, almost exactly the same as is on the crawl of our site. This 850 includes no index pages.
Is it normal for Google to show the total number of pages, even if they are no-index in The Webmaster Tools Index?
I would upload the Excel file of the MOZ crawl but I don't know how to do so.
Thanks,
Alan
-
It's best to just ask the same question once, and clarify if needed in the question itself. This seems real similar to the question you asked at http://moz.com/community/q/difference-in-number-of-urls-in-crawl-sitemaps-index-status-in-webmaster-tools-normal, unless I'm missing something.
-
Index status is how many pages Google has indexed of your site.
Sitemap is different, incase your site has pages that are too deep for Google to find, sitemaps are created as a way to direct Googlebot to crawl pages that they won't necessarily find.
In your case Google indexed more pages than the amount of pages in your sitemap, which is absolutely normal.
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
-
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Difference in Number of URLS in "Crawl, Sitemaps" & "Index Status" in Webmaster Tools, NORMAL?
Greetings MOZ Community: Webmaster Tools under "Index Status" shows 850 URLs indexed for our website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). The number of URLs indexed jumped by around 175 around June 10th, shortly after we launched a new version of our website. No new URLs were added to the site upgrade. Under Webmaster Tools under "Crawl, Site maps", it shows 637 pages submitted and 599 indexed. Prior to June 6th there was not a significant difference in the number of pages shown between the "Index Status" and "Crawl. Site Maps". Now there is a differential of 175. The 850 URLs in "Index Status" is equal to the number of URLs in the MOZ domain crawl report I ran yesterday. Since this differential developed, ranking has declined sharply. Perhaps I am hit by the new version of Panda, but Google indexing junk pages (if that is in fact happening) could have something to do with it. Is this differential between the number of URLs shown in "Index Status" and "Crawl, Sitemaps" normal? I am attaching Images of the two screens from Webmaster Tools as well as the MOZ crawl to illustrate what has occurred. My developer seems stumped by this. He has submitted a removal request for the 175 URLs to Google, but they remain in the index. Any suggestions? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Is 301 redirecting your index page to the root '/' safe to do or do you end up in an endless loop?
Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue. Many thanks in advance David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Www vs. non-www differences in crawl errors in Webmaster tools...
Hey All, I have been working on an eCommerce site for a while that to no avail, continues to make me want to hang myself. To make things worth the developers just do not understand SEO and it seems every change they make just messes up work we've already done. Job security I guess. Anywho,most recently we realized they had some major sitemap issues as almost 3000 pages were submitted by only 20 or so were indexed. Well, they updated the sitemap and although all the pages are properly indexing, I now have 5000+ "not found" crawl errors in the non-www version of WMT and almost none in the www version of the WMT account. Anyone have insight as to why this would be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin0 -
How long for Google Webmaster tools to update/reflect link changes
Hi all, Does anyone know or have experience of how long GWMT takes to update its data?, we did some work on our link profile back in October/November but are still seeing old links (removed) showing in GWMT. Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | righty0 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Problem with 404 and 500 Status code pages
Dear SeoMozzers, I have a question related to one of the sites I have recently changed the URL, going from http:example.com to http://www.example.com I did 301 redirects, as I was recommended to do. In the past month I have noticed an incredible drop in Google's rankings for many keywords and checking the crawling errors appearing in the SEO Crawling Report I have witnessed mayhem with Canonical/301 redirect types of errors. Now, things seem a little better. I have noticed a reduction in the number of 301 and Canonical type or errors (by the way, I still do not get the Canonical issue :-)). My little questions are the following: Will I ever go back to the positions I used to occupy before I redesigned the site's URL structure? I have now noticed that the SeoMoz Crawling report show "404 Staus" errors and one "505 Status" error. Can somebody please tell me how to fix the 404 Status Errors? Can I fix them by myself, or maybe I can ask the guys at the web hosting company, since I am really bad at taking care of technical issues? Thank you for the time you took to clarify my doubts. Ad maiora, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Sudden Change In Indexed Pages
Every week I check the number of pages indexed by google using the "site:" function. I have set up a permanent redirect from all the non-www pages to www pages. When I used to run the function for the: non-www pages (i.e site:mysite.com), would have 12K results www pages (i.e site:www.mysite.com) would have about 36K The past few days, this has reversed! I get 12K for www pages, and 36K for non-www pages. Things I have changed: I have added canonical URL links in the header, all have www in the URL. My questions: Is this cause for concern? Can anyone explain this to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0