Google Search Console Site Map Anomalies (HTTP vs HTTPS)
-
Hi
I've just done my usual Monday morning review of clients Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) dashboard and disturbed to see that for 1 client the Site Map section is reporting 95 pages submitted yet only 2 indexed (last time i looked last week it was reporting an expected level of indexed pages) here. It says the sitemap was submitted on the 10th March and processed yesterday. However in the 'Index Status' its showing a graph of growing indexed pages up to & including yesterday where they numbered 112 (so looks like all pages are indexed after all). Also the 'Crawl Stats' section is showing 186 pages crawled on the 26th.
Then its listing sub site-maps all of which are non HTTPS (http) which seems very strange since the site is HTTPS and has been for a few months now and the main sitemap index url is an HTTPS: https://www.domain.com/sitemap_index.xml The sub sitemaps are:http://www.domain.com/marketing-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlhttp://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlThere are no 'Sitemap Errors' reported but there are 'Index Error' warnings for the above post-sitemap, copied below:_"When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some of the URLs were unreachable. Please check your webserver for possible misconfiguration, as these errors may be caused by a server error (such as a 5xx error) or a network error between Googlebot and your server. All reachable URLs will still be submitted." _
Also for the below site map URL's: "Some URLs listed in this Sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page" for:http://domain.com/en/post-sitemap.xmlANDhttps://www.domain.com/page-sitemap.xmlAND https://www.domain.com/post-sitemap.xmlI take it from all the above that the HTTPS sitemap is mainly fine and despite the reported 0 pages indexed in GSC sitemap section that they are in fact indexed as per the main 'Index Status' graph and that somehow some HTTP sitemap elements have been accidentally attached to the main HTTPS sitemap and the are causing these problems.What's best way forward to clean up this mess ? Resubmitting the HTTPS site map sounds like right option but seeing as the master url indexed is an https url cant see it making any difference until the http aspects are deleted/removed but how do you do that or even check that's what's needed ? Or should Google just sort this out eventually ? I see the graph in 'Crawl > Sitemaps > WebPages' is showing a consistent blue line of submitted pages but the red line of indexed pages drops to 0 for 3 - 5 days every 5 days or so. So fully indexed pages being reported for 5 day stretches then zero for a few days then indexed for another 5 days and so on ! ? Many ThanksDan -
Just in case anyone's reading this or generally interested since may have encountered same issues, for the account in question this now seems to be resolved
-
Just found out this a known issue !
C'mon Google pull your finger out you should have notices over Search Console where its a known issue so we don't spend so much time trying to try and fix something that's not broken!!!
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
-
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
Stop Google indexing entire website based on search location
OK - bear with me... We have a .co.uk website. However, we only want it indexing in the US Google and NOT the UK Google. Is there a way of configuring this in Search Console /Webmaster tools?
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Targetting bad bounce-rate pages in search console
We are seeing a sharp increase in Bounce Rate on the website via Google Search Console. Is it possible to drill down and find out which pages are causing this? And if so, is it possible to find out why?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
Http urls on a new https website
Hi, If a site is quite new and setup as https from the beginning why would http variations exist? There are 301 redirects in place from the http to the https variation and also canonical tags pointing back to the http variation? This seems contradictory to me. I'm not sure why the http variations exist at all but they have gone to the trouble of redirecting these to the https variation indicating that it is the variation of choice but at the same time using a canonical tag that indicates the http variation is the original/main url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MVIreland0 -
How could you make a URL/Breadcrumb structure appear different in Google than when you click into site?
I'm seeing a competitor be able to make their URL/Breadcrumb stucture appear different in Google than on the site. Google shows a 3-4 category silo for the page but once clicked the page is off root. How could you do this?
Technical SEO | | TicketCity0 -
Http to Https Backlink Value
We updated our website from http to https and I wanted to know how backlinks were affected by this. The new site redirects all old http links to the https home page. How does this affect more specific backlinks like http://www.mysite.com/about ? The old http://www.mysite.com/about is now being directed to https://www.mysite.com . Do I need to set up redirects to pass value to my new pages?
Technical SEO | | nat88han0 -
Https vs http two different domains?
If i visit mywebsite.com.au, www.mywebsite.com.au and http://www.mywebsite.com.au - i get one website BUT if I visit https://www.mywebsite.com.au I get a different website - I also get a untrusted website warning The logo in the bottom right of the https: website is the name of the webdesigner where the website is hosted. Is this a normal practice?
Technical SEO | | GardenBeet0 -
Mobile site is not ranking in the mobile search results
I posted last month about problems with a mobile site, which is served from a separate URL (m.mydomain.com) as currently responsive design is not an option. The problem was that the mobile site was being returned in the desktop index along with the desktop site, and the desktop site was being returned in the mobile index instead of the mobile site. I have therefore implemented rel=canonical and rel=alternate as is advised by Google, but this has stopped the desktop site from appearing in the mobile index, but hasn't caused the mobile site to rank instead. What should I do now? One idea I have is to remove the rel=canonical and rel=alternate links so that the desktop site ranks in the mobile index again. There is a redirect in place anyway so when people click on a desktop link from a mobile search, they will still be redirected to the mobile equivalent. I could then set the m.mydomain.com to noindex to stop it from being returned in the desktop results and potentially causing duplicate content issues? What do you think about this as a work around?
Technical SEO | | pugh0