Which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
-
Hi,
I hope anyone can help me with this issue. Our french domain experienced a huge drop of indexed URLs in 2012. More than 50k URLs were indexed, after the drop less than 10k were counted.
I would like to check what happened here and which URLs were thrown out of the index. So I was thinking about a comparison between todays data and the data of 2012. Unfortunately we don't have any data on the indexed pages in 2012 beside the number of indexed pages.
Is there any way to check, which URLs were indexed 2 years ago?
-
Sandra,
There's no outright way to compare google's cache of today with its cache of a date in the past that I know of. If you had google analytics installed at that time, you could go about getting useful info from that source. Since the primary matter is really which pages were bringing in search traffic then that are not bringing in search traffic now, you could compare landing page stats from today vs. two years ago to see which pages are not bringing in traffic any longer.
Any chance your website was redesigned in the mean time? Sometimes change of navigation, architecture, or URLs can be the culprit.
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
-
Indexing is live what about rankings ?
I noticed that when I request indexing in the webmaster tool my new content is live within minutes. Does it take longer to update the ranking or is the ranking updated as soon as the new page has been indexed. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
301 vs Canonical - With A Side of Partial URL Rewrite and Google URL Parameters-OH MY
Hi Everyone, I am in the middle of an SEO contract with a site that is partially HTML pages and the rest are PHP and part of an ecommerce system for digital delivery of college classes. I am working with a web developer that has worked with this site for many years. In the php pages, there are also 6 different parameters that are currently filtered by Google URL parameters in the old Google Search Console. When I came on board, part of the site was https and the remainder was not. Our first project was to move completely to https and it went well. 301 redirects were already in place from a few legacy sites they owned so the developer expanded the 301 redirects to move everything to https. Among those legacy sites is an old site that we don't want visible, but it is extensively linked to the new site and some of our top keywords are branded keywords that originated with that site. Developer says old site can go away, but people searching for it are still prevalent in search. Biggest part of this project is now to rewrite the dynamic urls of the product pages and the entry pages to the class pages. We attempted to use 301 redirects to redirect to the new url and prevent the draining of link juice. In the end, according to the developer, it just isn't going to be possible without losing all the existing link juice. So its lose all the link juice at once (a scary thought) or try canonicals. I am told canonicals would work - and we can switch to that. My questions are the following: 1. Does anyone know of a way that might make the 301's work with the URL rewrite? 2. With canonicals and Google parameters, are we safe to delete the parameters after we have ensures everything has a canonical url (parameter pages included)? 3. If we continue forward with 301's and lose all the existing links, since this only half of the pages in the site (if you don't count the parameter pages) and there are only a few links per page if that, how much of an impact would it have on the site and how can I avoid that impact? 4. Canonicals seem to be recommended heavily these days, would the canonical urls be a better way to go than sticking with 301's. Thank you all in advance for helping! I sincerely appreciate any insight you might have. Sue (aka Trudy)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TStorm1 -
Sitemap indexing
Hi everyone, Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants. Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and: Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D). So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not? In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply1 -
Expired urls
For a large jobs site, what would be the best way to handle job adverts that are no longer available? Ideas that I have include: Keep the url live with the original content and display current similar job vacancies below - this has the advantage of continually growing the number of indexed pages. 301 redirect old pages to parent categories - this has the advantage of concentrating any acquired link juice where it is most needed. Your thoughts much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
To index search results or not?
In its webmaster guidelines, Google says not to index search results " that don't add much value for users coming from search engines." I've noticed several big brands index search results, and am wondering if it is generally OK to index search results with high engagement metrics (high PVPV, time on site, etc). We have an database of content, and it seems one of the best ways to get this content in search engines would be to allow indexing of search results (to capture the long tail) rather than build thousands of static URLs. Have any smaller brands had success with allowing indexing of search results? Any best practices or recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Indexing issue or just time?
Hey guys, When I publish a post on our blog, I notice that it barely shows up in SERPs even if I copy and paste the title verbatim into Google. All my settings in Yoast are correct from what I've seen. Is this just Google slowly getting around to crawling our site? Or is something else wrong here? We recently shut down and relaunched our site about 3 weeks ago. Here is the site URL: The Tech Block
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180 -
Automatic redirect to external urls
Hi, there is a way to create a "bridge page" with automatic url redirect ( 302 ) without google penalization? In this moment, my bridge pages are indexed on google with title and description of the redirected page.. Thanks in advance. Mauro.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raulo790