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
-
Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
I have this problem for the site's blog
Technical SEO | | seomozplan196
There is no problem when I check the yoast plugin setting , but some of my blog content is not on the map site but indexed. Did you have such a problem? What is the cause? my website name is missomister1 -
X-robots tag causing no index issues
I have an interesting problem with a site which has an x-robot tag blocking the site from being indexed, the site is in Wordpress, there are no issues with the robots.txt or at the page level, I cant find the noindex anywhere. I removed the SEO plug-in which was there and installed Yoast but it made no difference. this is the url: https://www.cotswoldflatroofing.com/ Its coming up with a HTTP error: x-robots tag noindex, nofollow, noarchive
Technical SEO | | Donsimong0 -
Website is not indexing
Hi All, My website URL is https://thepeopeople.com and it is neither caching nor indexing in Google. Earlier the URL was https://peopeople.com. I have redirected it to https://thepeopeople.com by using 301 redirections. I have checked the redirection and everything else is fine and I have submitted all the URLs in search console also, still the website is not indexing. Its been more than 5 months now. Please suggest a solution for this. Thanks in Advance.
Technical SEO | | ResultfirstGA0 -
Pagination and Canonocal Issue
Hi, I have a site which have city wise pages and in a given city we have categories. The listed products can be listed in different categories which have separate URL. The site have different URL, meta, title for each category. We want to Rank these pages based on category also... What is best way to avoid duplicate and canonical issue.. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | dsingh1079
Darshan..0 -
Website being crawled but not indexed any thoughts?
Hi Everyone,
Technical SEO | | Ant71
I created a new website a few weeks ago www.drivingseaford.co.uk , did a little link citation, links from Google+, submitted to webmaster tools etc but its still not getting indexed. Webmaster tools crawl stats page is showing pages being crawled, no errors. But 0 indexed. http://www.drivingseaford.co.uk/robots.txt is showing User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Im a bit stumped as never had this before!!! Any ideas from you lovely people?? Antony0 -
Update index date
If I update the content of a page without changing the initial url and google crawls my new page, will the index date (that appears in the SERP) change to the latest update? In positive case how many change should I do to consider an update? tks
Technical SEO | | fabrico230 -
Duplicate Page Issue
Dear All, I am facing stupid duplicate page issue, My whole site is in dynamic script and all the URLs were in dynamic, So i 've asked my programmer make the URLs user friendly using URL Rewrite, but he converted aspx pages to htm. And the whole mess begun. Now we have 3 different URLs for single page. Such as: http://www.site.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=Multi-Day+City+Tours http://www.tsite.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=multi-day-city-tours http://www.site.com/city-tour/multi-day-city-tours/page4-0.htm I think my programmer messed up the URL Rewrite in ASP.net(Nginx) or even didn't use it. So how do i overcome this problem? Should i add canonical tag in both dynamic URLs with pointing to pag4-0.htm. Will it help? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Sitemaps - Format Issue
Hi, I have a little issue with a client site whose programmer seems kind of unwilling to change things that he has been doing a long time. So, he has had this dynamic site set up for a few years and active in google webmaster tools and others, but is not happy with the traffic it is getting. When I looked at webmaster tools I see that he has a sitemap registered, but it is /sitemap.php When I said that we should be offering the SE's /sitemap.xml his response is that sitemap.php checks the site every day and generates /sitemap.xml, but there is no /sitemap.xml registered in webmaster tools. My gut is telling me that he should just register /sitemap.xml in webmaster tools, but it is a hard sell 🙂 Anyone have any definitive experience of people doing this before and whether it is an issue? My feeling is that it doesn't need to be rocket science... Any input appreciated, Sha
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0