Google indexing wrong pages
-
We have a variety of issues at the moment, and need some advice.
First off, we have a HUGE indexing issue across our entire website.
Website in question: http://www.localsearch.com.au/
Firstly
In Google.com.au, if you search for 'plumbers gosford' (https://www.google.com.au/#q=plumbers+gosford), the wrong page appears - in this instance, the page ranking should be http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/PlumbersI can see this across the board, across multiple locations.
Secondly
Recently I've seen Google reporting in 'Crawl Errors' in webmaster tools URLs such as:
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Saunders-Beach,QLD/Electronic-Equipment-Sales-Repairs&Sa=U&Ei=xs-XVJzAA9T_YQSMgIHQCw&Ved=0CIMBEBYwEg&Usg=AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OAThis is an invalid URL, and more specifically, those query strings seem to be referrer queries from Google themselves: &Sa=U&Ei=xs-XVJzAA9T_YQSMgIHQCw&Ved=0CIMBEBYwEg&Usg=AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA
Here's the above example indexed in Google: https://www.google.com.au/#q="AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA"
Does anyone have any advice on those 2 errors?
-
Issue 1:
I think your intended ranking page is not indexed.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:http:%2F%2Fwww.localsearch.com.au
It's probably because, as Donna indicated, you have so many pages. This happens when you have what are essentially search pages that are indexed. Stuff happens like having a page for plumbing and plumbers in the same city, for example.
In the short term, you can make sure that non-indexed pages are linked to across the site. Long-term you're going to want to think of a way to organize your site to make sure Google and users can find the most important pages. For example, add breadcrumbs back to the city page, and have the city page linking to your most important types of pages (even if they're still searches) for the city. Right now your city pages are just more search pages, which is a big wasted opportunity to layout which pages you most want people to find. Also make sure you figure out what's going on between these two "types" of the exact same page. There should only be one for the same results where possible:
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Search?where=Gosford,NSW
Issue 2:
Look at the "linked from" and figure out where these bad pages are linked to on the site. Google wouldn't make up a URL if someone wasn't linking to them, and my guess is your site is causing them. With a highly-dynamic site like yours it's usually either a crawl trap or a combination of dynamic URLs through a particular path that the server wasn't expecting.
Alternatively, and maybe more likely, Google has been trying to parse Javascript lately, and doing a rather poor job of it. I've seen Google try to find links in Javascript that were never intended to be links. You can either ignore these errors and wait for Google to get better, or you can dig into the JS with a dev and see what's causing Google to interpret something as a link. There's usually another way to put the code together where Google understands.
-
Issue #1:
I think what you're doing is fine with canonicals. The problem (I think) might be all the duplicates. The page you're asking about (http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Plumbers) isn't indexed, yet ~5 million others are. Google is probably abandoning the site before all the relevant pages get indexed. You should look into removing duplicates like in the following examples:
-
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Australia
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Australia/ -
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Atherton,QLD
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Atherton,QLD/ -
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Albion-Park,NSW/Body-Ear-Piercing
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Albion-Park-Rail,NSW/Body-Ear-Piercing -
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Airlie-Beach,QLD/Breeze-Bar/profile/tSdO
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Airlie-Beach,QLD/Breeze-Bar/profile/tSdO.vcf
Issue #2:
Sounds like issue #1 and 2 are closely related. I think you're on the right path though. If it doesn't fix it, come back and ask again. You'll have eliminated some possibilities and can get a different perspective 2nd time round.
Good luck!
-
-
Issue #1
I'm not sure how else we would use them. The example given above (Gosford, NSW) is about 40KM (or around 20miles) from the page that is ranking (Wyong, NSW). In our business model, these are 2 separate markets. We wouldn't be able to canonical 1 to the other as they are completely separate.Issue #2
I believe the issue could be because we're displaying "search results" as static pages - this is something that I have my team working towards fixing by having "static" proximity based business listing pages (such as root.com/find/plumbers/state/city/suburb/) and having no-indexed search result pages (such as root.com/search?what=plumbers&where=suburb,state).The above may even fix issue #1, but I wanted to get some more information from a community as 2 minds are better than 1..
-
Issue #1
Neither of the results that Google has indexed when executing the site operator are duplicated pages - we also have canonical URLs setup on all pages to avoid duplicated URLs.You might not be using canonical tags to your advantage though. From what I can see, the canonical tags on pages just point to themselves as opposed to one master page that should be the catch-all for incoming links and social mentions.
With regards to the Title tags; unless there's a crowd of people agreeing with this, nearly everything I have found to try to prove this has fallen through - it seems having slightly similar title tags with brand name / locales included doesn't affect search results.
Some of the title tags you are using on pages are identical to one another, not "slightly similar". That's why I raised it.
Issue #2
_I don't believe this is the issue either as the actual pages still exist. _
Hm. I see. Those pages appear to be dynamically created, indexed, and canonicalized to themselves. Can you tag them as no-index?
-
Hi Donna, thanks for your reply.
Issue #1
Neither of the results that Google has indexed when executing the site operator are duplicated pages - we also have canonical URLs setup on all pages to avoid duplicated URLs.With regards to the Title tags; unless there's a crowd of people agreeing with this, nearly everything I have found to try to prove this has fallen through - it seems having slightly similar title tags with brand name / locales included doesn't affect search results.
Issue #2
I don't believe this is the issue either as the actual pages still exist.Thanks for your help though! Anything else you come up with, I'm open ears.
-
Issue #1:
You're right, you do seem to have a "variety of issues at the moment". The thing that stands out the most to me is duplicate content.
When I did a site search (site:http://www.localsearch.com.au/", Google indicates it has more than 5 million pages indexed on the site. When I did a site search for the specific URL in your example (site:http://www.localsearch.com.au/gosford,NSW/Plumbers), it found 2 results, neither of which the page in question. Yet your keywords were replicated in the page URLs, content, meta tags, and internal links. Google is probably having a heck of time figuring out which page to rank for what.
It also looks like you have your entire site replicated because URLs are indexed with and without a trailing "/".
Many of the title tags for Gosford pages are replicated containing "Gosford, NSW - LocalSearch" for example, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Carriers-Light-Transport, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford.../Radio-Communication-Equipment, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Hair-Treatment-Replacement, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Hobbies-Models-Accessories, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Stone-Masons-Monumental, and so on. Can you see why Google might be confused.
That's probably the first thing you need to fix, duplicate content.
Issue #2:
This is a guess. These might be errors caused by pages that have been renamed or removed from the site and not properly redirected. Google can't find them. I'll be interested to hear if anyone else has any ideas.
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
-
Google Is Indexing my 301 Redirects to Other sites
Long story but now i have a few links from my site 301 redirecting to youtube videos or eCommerce stores. They carry a considerable amount of traffic that i benefit from so i can't take them down, and that traffic is people from other websites, so basically i have backlinks from places that i don't own, to my redirect urls (Ex. http://example.com/redirect) My problem is that google is indexing them and doesn't let them go, i have tried blocking that url from robots.txt but google is still indexing it uncrawled, i have also tried allowing google to crawl it and adding noindex from robots.txt, i have tried removing it from GWT but it pops back again after a few days. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cuarto7150 -
Why Is this page de-indexed?
I have dropped out for all my first page KWDs for this page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/dollies-load-movers-door-skates Can anyone see an issue? I am trying to find one.... We did just migrate to HTTPS but other areas have no problem
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
Our 1,300 page site conversion from static html to Wordpress platform went flawlessly with the exception of 1 significant issue....an old, important, highly ranking page was 301 redirected to the wrong corresponding new page. The page it was redirected to is about a similar product, but not the same. This was an oversight that slipped through. It was brought to my attention when I noticed this new page was still holding the old page's rankings but the bounce rate skyrocketed (clearly because the content on the wrong new page was not relevant). Once identified, we cleaned up the redirect. My fear is that all the juice built up on the old .html page that ranked well has now permanently been passed to an irrelevant, insignificant page. -Is there any way to clean up this mistake? -Is there anything I can do to assist Google in associating the correct 'new' page with correct 'old' page after the wrong redirect was initially set-up? -Am I going to have to start from scratch with the new page in terms of trust, backlinks, etc. since google already noted the redirect? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
HTTPS pages - To meta no-index or not to meta no-index?
I am working on a client's site at the moment and I noticed that both HTTP and HTTPS versions of certain pages are indexed by Google and both show in the SERPS when you search for the content of these pages. I just wanted to get various opinions on whether HTTPS pages should have a meta no-index tag through an htaccess rule or whether they should be left as is.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamie.Stevens0 -
Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
(Sorry for my english!) A quick background: I had a website at thewebhostinghero.com which had been slapped left and right by Google (both Panda & Penguin). It also had a manual penalty for unnatural links which had been lifted in late april / early may this year. I also had another domain, webhostinghero.com, which was redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. When I realized I would be better off starting a new website than trying to salvage thewebhostinghero.com, I removed the redirection from webhostinghero.com and started building a new website. I waited about 5 or 6 weeks before putting any content on webhostinghero.com so Google had time to notice that the domain wasn't redirecting anymore. So about a month ago, I launched http://www.webhostinghero.com with 100% new content but I left thewebhostinghero.com online because it still brings a little (necessary) income. There are no links between the websites except on one page (www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/) which is set to "noindex,nofollow" and is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt. I made sure the web page was deindexed before adding a "nofollow" link from thewebhostinghero.com/speed => webhostinghero.com/speed Since the new website launch, I've been publishing new content (from 2 to 5 posts) daily. It's getting some traction from social networks but it gets barely any clicks from Google search. It seems to take at least a week before Google indexes new posts and not all posts are indexed. The cached copy of the homepage is 12 days old. In Google Webmaster Tools, it looks like Google isn't getting the latest sitemap version unless I resubmit it manually. It's always 4 or 5 days old. So is my website just too young or could it have some kind of penalty related to the old website? The domain has 4 or 5 really old spammy links from the previous domain owner which I couldn't get rid of but otherwise I don't think there's anything tragic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Google Sitemap only indexing 50% Is that a problem?
We have about 18,000 pages submitted on our Google Sitemap and only about 9000 of them are indexed. Is this a problem? We have a script that creates a sitemap on a daily basis and it is submitted on a daily basis. Am I better off only doing it once a week? Is this why I never get to the full 18,000 indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Amount of pages indexed for classified (number of pages for the same query)
I've notice that classified usually has a lots of pages indexed and that's because for each query/kw they index the first 100 results pages, normally they have 10 results per page. As an example imagine the site www.classified.com, for the query/kw "house for rent new york" there is the page www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york and the "index" is set for the first 100 SERP pages, so www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-1 www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-2 ...and so on. Wouldn't it better to index only the 1st result page? I mean in the first 100 pages lots of ads are very similar so why should Google be happy by indexing lots of similar pages? Could Google penalyze this behaviour? What's your suggestions? Many tahnks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuroa-2467120 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10