Index bloating issue
-
Hello,
In the last month, I noticed a huge spike in the number of pages indexed on my site, which I think is impacting my SEO quality score.
While I've only have about 90 pages on my site map, the number of pages indexed jumped to 446, with about 536 pages being blocked by robots. At first we thought this might be due to duplicate product pages showing up in different categories on my site, but we added something to our robot.txt file to not index those pages. But the number has not gone down. I've tried to consult with our hosting vendor, but no one seems to be concerned or have any idea why there was such a big jump in the last month.
Any insights or pointers would be so greatly appreciated, so that I can fix/improve my SEO as quickly as possible!
Thanks!
-
in order to determine if your website is hacked this is one of the best tools I know of both to find out and to remove the malware.
In order to determine rather not you have on-site SEO problems on a very technical and granular scale I would use
https://www.deepcrawl.com/ $80 a month you cannot go wrong
another amazing tool and it's free for the first 500 pages and if you want the added features which you do or more pages only about $150 a year is
-
Thank you. These are helpful suggestions.
-
A couple of things to note:
- As Robert mentioned, I would definitely make sure there is no longer an issue on your wordpress site relating to your previous hack.
- Robots.txt disallow does not stop pages from being indexed. It merely tells search engines to stop crawling that page from here out. The meta noindex tag is more applicable for noindexing pages that are already out there.
- I would check your search console crawl errors to see if there's a hefty spike in 404 errors as well, as it may be old spam pages you removed from the site.
- If these pages that are bloating your index are all still old spam filled pages from when you were hacked, you could start by using the search console's "remove url's" tool, which will remove all these url's from the index temporarily. For a more long term approach, instead of them giving off a 404 if they have been removed, making the server give off a "410" response would tell google they are gone forever, and thus they will be removed from the index as time goes on.
-
When I do the search for my main url - the results are clean. Just the pages to my site show up. And the index results for this site still bloated. However, for my wordpress site, which is a subdomain and on a different platform to my main site, there are some issues (it was hacked as Rob noted below). But we have since cleaned up the pages etc, reuploaded the site maps, etc. So I'm a little stumped on my main site (which wasn't hacked - that I'm aware of).
-
What do you see if you do a search for site:yoursite.com ?
-
Hello Julie,
This sounds like you might have a hacking issue on your website. You probably need someone to conduct a full code audit of your site to determine whether any files you have uploaded (plugins, for example) were contaminated. If a site is hacked, new pages can be added that are hidden from view and difficult to detect unless handled by a security specialist.
We recently brought on a new client who had this issue and discovered that his site had 1000's of pages dedicated to testosterone pills, etc. We had to go through GWT and the site logs to determine what new pages were created and it was a complete hack job.
In terms of fixing your SEO, the first step is to determine where/if the hack exists. Once that is decided, you have to clean up the site and restore the site's security.
I would be happy to help you with the next steps if you would like. I am always available!
Thanks and best of luck,
Rob
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
Indexed, but not shown in search result
Hi all We face this problem for www.residentiebosrand.be, which is well programmed, added to Google Search Console and indexed. Web pages are shown in Google for site:www.residentiebosrand.be. Website has been online for 7 weeks, but still no search results. Could you guys look at the update below? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Do you Index your Image Repository?
On our backend system, when an image is uploaded it is saved to a repository. For example: If you upload a picture of a shark it will go to - oursite.com/uploads as shark.png When you use a picture of this shark on a blog post it will show the source as oursite.com/uploads/shark.png This repository (/uploads) is currently being indexed. Is it a good idea to index our repository? Will Google not be able to see the images if it can't crawl the repository link (we're in the process of adding alt text to all of our images ). Thanks
Technical SEO | | SteveDBSEO0 -
Sitelinks Issue - Different Languages
Hey folks, We run different ccTLD's for revolveclothing.com (revolveclothing.es, revolveclothing.com.br, etc. etc.) and they all have their own WMT/Google Console with their own href lang tags etc. The problem is this. https://www.google.fr/#q=revolve+clothing When you look at the sitelinks, you'll see that one of them (sales page) happens to be in Portuguese on the French site. Can anyone investigate and see why?
Technical SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
I Lost Index Status of My Sitemap
We have a simple WordPress website for our law firm, with an English version and a Spanish version. I have created a sitemap (with appropriate language markup in the XML file) and submitted it to Webmaster Tools. Google crawled the site and accepted the sitemap last week, 24/24 pages indexed, 12 English and 12 Spanish. This week, Google decided to remove one of the pages from the index, showing 23/24 pages indexed. So, my questions are as follows: How can I find out which page was dropped from the index? If the pages are the same content, but different language, why did only one version of the page get dropped, while the other version remains? Why did the Big G drop one of my pages from the index? How can I reindex the dropped page? I know this is a fairly basic issue, and I'm embarrassed for asking, but I sure do appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | RLG0 -
Index or Noindex Wordpress Categories?
I've read a few different opinions on this, but I'm still unclear as to the best practice. I use my categories more like tags. Let's say I write a post about about seo, local marketing, and indexing. I would use the categories "seo"+"marketing"+"indexing". Therefore, that same post will show up in all three category pages. If these category pages are all set to be indexed, what impact does that have on my post being indexed? Should I noindex all of the categories except for the main ones to avoid too much duplicate content? Or do you recommend noindexing all of the categories? I know some seo plugins make this easy to do (I'm using Yoast). The only reason I'm hesitant to noindex all categories is because some of them rank well for their subject. I also already tried noindexing about a month ago and lost a lot of blog traffic, so I reversed it. Now some of my category pages have overtaken my post rankings, which makes it harder for the reader to find the content, but my overall blog traffic is back up. With my situation, what is the best thing to do long term? I just started using my blog a lot more so I want to know that I have it setup correctly. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
Image Sitemap Indexing Issue
Hello Folks, I've been running into some strange issues with our XML Sitemaps. The XML Sitemaps won't open on a browser and it throws the following error instead of opening the XML Sitemap. Sample XML Sitemap - www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xml.gzError - "XML Parsing Error: no element foundLocation: http://www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xmlLine Number 1, Column 1:"2) Image files are not getting indexed. For instance, the sitemap - www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xml.gz has 6,000 URLs and 6,000 Images. However, only 3,481 URLs and 25 images are getting indexed. The sitemap formatting seems good, but I can't figure out why Google's de-indexing the images and only 50-60% of the URLs are getting indexed. Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | CorbisVeer0 -
Domain restructure, sitemaps and indexing
I've got a handcoded site with around 1500 unique articles and a handcoded sitemap. Very old school. The url structure is a bit of a mess, so to make things easier for a developer who'll be making the site database-driven, I thought I'd recategorise the content. Same content, but with new url structure (I thought I'd juice up the urls for SEO purposes while I was at it) To this end, I took categories like: /body/amazing-big-shoes/
Technical SEO | | magdaknight
/style/red-boots/
/technology/cyber-boots/ And rehoused all the content like so, doing it all manually with ftp: /boots/amazing-boots/
/boots/red-boots/
/boots/cyber-boots/ I placed 301 redirects in the .htaccess file like so: redirect 301 /body/amazing-boots/ http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/ (not doing redirects for each article, just for categories which seemed to make the articles redirect nicely.) Then I went into sitemap.xml and manually overwrote all the entries to reflect the new url structure, but keeping the old dates of the original entries, like so: <url><loc>http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url> And resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmasters. This was done 4 days ago. Webmaster said that the 1400 of 1500 articles indexed had dropped to 860, and today it's climbed to 939. Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely? I appreciate I've made a lot of changes in one fell swoop which could be a bit of a no-no... ? PS Apologies if this question appears twice on Q&A - hopefully I haven't double-posted0