Low Index: 72 pages submitted and only 1 Indexed?
-
Hi Mozers,
I'm pretty stuck on this and wondering if anybody else can give me some heads up around what might be causing the issues.
I have 3 top level domains, NZ, AU, and USA. For some od reason I seem to be having a real issue with these pages indexing and also the sitemaps and I'm considering hiring someone to get the issue sorted as myself or my developer can''t seem to find the issues.
I have attached an example of the sitemap_au.xml file. As you can see there is only 1 page that has been indexed and 72 were submitted. Basically because we host all of our domains on the same server, I was told last time our sitemaps were possibly been overwritten hence the reason why we have sitemap_au.xml and its the same for the other sitemap_nz.xml and sitemap_us.xml I also orignially had sitemap.xml for each.
Another issue I am having is the meta tag des for each home page in USA and AU are showing the meta tag for New Zealand but when you look into the com and com.au code meta tag description they are all different as you can see here http://bit.ly/1KTbWg0 and here http://bit.ly/1AU0f5k
Any advice around this would be so much appreciated!
Thanks
Justin
-
Hi,
Yes you've got it spot on, 301s are there to keep old things pointing to the new, but only the new should be in the sitemap.
When you've crawled the live site ready to make your sitemap you can manually right click and remove a URL you would not want in there before generating it.
Kind Regards
Jimmy
-
Hey Jimmy,
Wow thanks so much for your great feedback, much appreciated!
Just want to clarify your answer to the 301. So it is okay to create the 301s for our users to direct them to the new urls, but not good to include in the sitemap? Am I correct in saying this? Or am I totally off track with this?
I think whats happened also is the sitemap from screaming frog has generated old urls and some new urls as well, I'm now seeing a two of our contact pages indexed for the com.au site, one is the older url and the other is the new url.
Let me know your feedback
Cheers again Jimmy
-
Hi Justin,
Yes as long as WMT is specifically watching the HTTPS website then the problem is not in WMT unfortunately.
As hectormainar says, check your sitemap in screaming frog
go to your sitemap.xml and save it to your computer
change the frog to list mode
open your sitemap and runAll the links in the sitemap should report 200
any 301s should be swapped with the direct versionsThe 301 is good to maintain backwards compatibility and allow backlinks and old users to navigate to your new content, but shouldn't be used as major navigation.
Kind Regards
Jimmy
-
Hey Jimmy,
Thanks for the heads up! Yes, I have been watching this via WMT and also I used screaming frog to generate the sitemaps and gave to my developer he then gave me the url to submit to google.
I also used https. I hope that helps?
Let me know if you have any further questions
Cheers Jimmy thanks again
-
Hi Hectormainar,
I understand what your saying, yes we had https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings/psychic-readings before we updated the urls to the following https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings
after doing this we were told to add 301 redirects.. so am a little confused now as to why it should not be done as our visitors would go to the old urls?
I used screaming frog to generate the sitemaps, and from that I think it included the urls? I'm not too sure which exactly it included? Is there a way to check this?
Thanks for your help
Justin
-
Which URLs do you include in your sitemap? Could you check if you try to index
https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings/psychic-readings or https://www.zenory.com.au/psychic-readings ?The first one is the URL you link at menus, but it has a 301 redirect to the second URL format (and the same for the rest of main options). That is quite a bad idea. Please make sure you include the correct address on the sitemap and not the 301 redirect one. That could be causing the problem of Google Webmaster Tools not showing that page in your sitemap as indexed, as although final page is properly indexed in google (as you can check if you look up for site:www.zenory.com.au), GWT is not able to match both addresses.
-
Hi Justin,
It is hard to tell by your screenshot, but what website are you watching in Webamasters Tools? As you are using https, the website to track would have to be the https one as a recent WMT update now classifies these differently.
Having crawled your sites with the screaming frog, I don't see any smoking guns as to why the pages would not be indexed.
Let me know about the WMT account
Kind Regards
Jimmy
-
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your response! I have also done site:yourdomain and this is also showing up quiet low compared to the amount of pages submitted. usa is showing 10 pages indexed. AU slightly more and NZ alot more.
-
Webmaster Tools is not a current accurate reflection of what is actually indexed.
A search in Google for site:yourdomain.com will show the accurate information.
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
-
International Targeting: What Does Google Consider an Equivalent Page?
Hi All, We are working with an international brand that owns several domains across the EU and in North America. Our team is in the process of setting up international targeting using sitemaps to indicate alternate language pages. This is being done to prevent North American pages from being served in the UK, Spain pages from being served in Portugal, or any other combination of possibilities... Currently we are mapping duplicate or “equivalent” pages and defining them as rel="alternate" on their respective sitemaps. The problem is, it’s not always explicitly clear what Google considers “equivalent.” 1. In this instance, URL structures vary by domain,
International SEO | | MetaPaul
2. in most cases the content is similar (but unique),
3. the landing page templates vary is design and functionality,
4. and lastly, services often contain nuances that make them slightly different from one another (Professional Liability Insurance vs Professional Indemnity Insurance). All things considered, these pages are offering the same service, but are vastly different (see above). Q: Is it appropriate to use these attributes to serve the correct language / regional URL to searchers? Q: Is there a rule of thumb on what should be considered an "equivalent" page? Thanks All, Paul3 -
Why Google is not indexing each country/language subfolder on the ranks?
Hi folks, We use Magento 2 for the multi-country shops (its a multistore). The URL: www.avarcas.com The first days Google indexed the proper url in each country: avarcas.com/uk avarcas.com/de ... Some days later, all the countries are just indexing / (the root). I correctly set the subfolders in Webmaster tools. What's happening? Thanks
International SEO | | administratorwibee0 -
Will hreflang with a language and region allow Google to show the page to all users of that language regardless of region?
I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?
International SEO | | Brando160 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
DMoz, can I submit 3 top level domains?
Hi Guys, I have 3 top level domains, does anyone know if it is okay to submit all 3 domains? they all cover different countries, NZ, AUS, USA - The NZ one has been submitted, but our main site is the .com (USA) after running a few adwords campaign we decided to work the .com instead! Does anyone know the terms or guidelines around this?
International SEO | | edward-may0 -
Google is still indexing with https,i removed ssl for my website
My website is claydip.com. I removed ssl for my website, but when i type claydip in google search it is still displaying with https and saying no description available..i lost visitors from search..kindly help me. I moved from bluehost to deamhost. I had a ssl at bluehost, when i move to dreamhost i am not using it.
International SEO | | knextweb8190 -
How can I rank couple of pages to a specific geography ?
Hi guys, I have a pretty good success in many of my keyword on google US. We are a multi-country company and would like to get better ranking on all these countries. I know it's a long run and we need to by patient to get the rank desired. We are getting the slowly, bu surely. In the next couple of months, we will be attending a conference where we will have a booth and we would like to conduct a campaign to invite customers to join us. My question is : Is there an efficient way to have just couple of pages on our web site that could potentially rank fast on a specific geography ? Europe is my target audience ( France an UK ). If you have any advice, I would appreciate. Best regards,
International SEO | | processia1 -
Duplicated 404 Pages (Travel Industry)
Our website has creating numberous "future pages" with no alt tag or class tag that are showing up as 404 pages, To make matters worst, they are causing duplicate 404 pages because we have different languages. The visitors cant find the 404s but the searchbots can. Would it better to remove or add the links to robot.txt or add nofollow/noindex tag? This is an example. http://www.solmelia.com/nGeneral.LINK_FAQ http://www.solmelia.com/nGeneral.LINK_HOTELESDESTINOS_BODAS http://www.solmelia.com/nGeneral.LINK_CONDICIONES http://www.solmelia.com/nGeneral.LINK_MAPSITE http://www.solmelia.com/nGeneral.LINK_HOTELESDESTINOS_EMPRESA
International SEO | | Melia0