Why are only a few of our pages being indexed
-
Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact.
Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages.
Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated.
-
Thanks for this. The /item-details/ are linked to from the Auction pages (e.g: https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auction-items/?id=13)
We've looked into the canonical issue and sorted that out, so fingers crossed on that being the issue. I'm only really familiar with canonical being a pain with ecommerce sites, but I know to keep an eye on it for others sites we have using parameters/custom pages.
-
Hi,
I took a quick look at your site, sitemap and index status and only 25 urls in Google, but very many more in the sitemap.
What I couldn't work out is where your /item-details/ urls in the sitemap are linked to from your website? I can't get to them through buying -> catalogue. It won't help indexing status if they aren't being linked to from anywhere.
The biggest issue you have however is the way canonicals are set up on the problem pages. If you go to this page:
https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/item-details/?ID=2710
It has the following canonical (without the id):
rel='canonical' href='https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/item-details/' />
If you search on Google, that canonical URL is indexed, so if you fix this by adding the id to the canonical they should start to appear in SERPS.
You have exactly the same problem on your auctions pages. e.g. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auction-items/?id=13&pagenum=51
Another point that will help you rank is to use friendlier / more descriptive URLs for the items.
Hope that helps
George
-
Has the site recently moved to HTTPS:// and have you also reincluded the https:// version in webmaster tools. This may throw up a few errors.
I have also noticed that if you type in http://www you can still get to the site, might be worth a redirect in your htaccess file.
Maybe also add the following to your wordpress header -
Also check any settings in wordpress are not causing a no index issue.
Hope this helps
Tim
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
-
How to index e-commerce marketplace product pages
Hello! We are an online marketplace that submitted our sitemap through Google Search Console 2 weeks ago. Although the sitemap has been submitted successfully, out of ~10000 links (we have ~10000 product pages), we only have 25 that have been indexed. I've attached images of the reasons given for not indexing the platform. gsc-dashboard-1 gsc-dashboard-2 How would we go about fixing this?
Technical SEO | | fbcosta0 -
Google indexes page elements
Hello We face this problem that Google indexes page elements from WordPress as single pages. How can we prevent these elements from being indexed separately and being displayed in the search results? For example this project: www.rovana.be When scrolling down the search results, there are a lot of elements that are indexed separately. When clicking on the link, this is wat we see (see attachements) Does anyone have experience with this way of indexing and how can we solve this problem? Thanks! LlAWG4w.png C7XDDYS.png gVroomx.png
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages
Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia
http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks0 -
Is site: a reliable method for getting full list of indexed pages?
The site:domain.com search seems to show less pages than it used to (Google and Bing). It doesn't relate to a specific site but all sites. For example, I will get "page 1 of about 3,000 results" but by the time I've paged through the results it will end and change to "page 24 of 201 results". In that example If I look in GSC it shows 1,932 indexed. Should I now accept the "pages" listed in site: is an unreliable metric?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20112 -
Problems with to many indexed pages
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links. Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out. Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories. I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index? The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Do pages that are in Googles supplemental index pass link juice?
I was just wondering if a page has been booted into the supplemental index for being a duplicate for example (or for any other reason), does this page pass link juice or not?
Technical SEO | | FishEyeSEO0 -
Bing indexing
Hello, people~ I want to discuss about Bing indexation. I have a new web site which opened about 3 months ago. Google has no problem to index my site and all pages within the site indexed by Google. However, Bing and Yahoo is different story. I used manual submission, Bing webmaster tool to let Bing know about the site. However, Bing is not indexing my site yet. I researched about it and found that my site should have some external links before I get index by Bing. I check external links of my site with Google webmaster tool, SEOmoz tool and "link:" on Google. All tools show different number as below. Google webmaster Tool : more than 50 SEMoz site explorer : 5 link: on Google: none Why all method of checking links are different and which on should most depend on? Also how many links should I have in order to get index by Bing? Could you people please share your opinion?
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
How do https pages affect indexing?
Our site involves e-commerce transactions that we want users to be able to complete via javascript popup/overlay boxes. in order to make the credit card form secure, we need the referring page to be secure, so we are considering making the entire site secure so all of our site links wiould be https. (PayPal works this way.) Do you think this will negatively impact whether Google and other search engines are able to index our pages?
Technical SEO | | seozeelot0