I've hit a wall. What's next?
-
I've been working on creating content and optimizing my website for the past 18 months, and have seen decent gains in organic traffic. Recently my keyword ranking increases have slowed dramatically, despite adding additional content. I'm hoping a fresh set of eyes can spot something that may be holding me back. I appreciate any feedback the MOZ community is able to provide.
One area of concern/confusion is the number of pages indexed according to GSC. The number tends to go up and down, and I can't figure out why. Of the roughly 8,000 pages that are submitted through the sitemap, it says only around 1,100 are indexed (sitemap page). The index status page says I've got 7,500 pages indexed. Kind of confused on that one.
Anyway, my website is MetroAtlantaHome dot com. Thanks everyone!
-
Matt,
Thank you for taking a look at my site. I really appreciate the feedback.
I had noticed the search results with parameter tags being indexed as well. I tried limiting Google's crawler to non-parameter pages about 8 months ago, but didn't seem to do much. I was afraid one of my settings was messing things up so I deleted it and selected let GoogleBot decide for all of them. Not sure why the paginated pages are being indexed too. I thought I'd read where the paginate tag was similar to the canonical tag and Google would treat it as a signal not to index. I would think if GoogleBot can crawl and index the paginated search pages, it could also crawl the listing results on all those pages. I do have a large portion of listing pages on my site no-indexed since they don't fall within my service area and I used to get a ton of calls about them. Maybe that is causing issues for all the listing results pages to not be indexed.
In regards to Screaming Frog, which settings did you use? I use the preset user agent GoogleBot Regular and have thousands of pages that it crawls. Wish I could replicate your scan to see what might be holding things up.
Regarding the Wistia sitemap, I put it in the robots.txt file to try and get the videos embedded on my site indexed. I didn't realize this was hurting more than helping.
Thanks again for your feedback and taking the time to review my site.
-
As far as the discrepancy in numbers, Google is indexing a lot of ?search= parameter results (as well as /listing/ results) but the search ones are not in your sitemap. Your site doesn't crawl all the way very well - I put it in ScreamingFrog twice and only came up with about 400 pages - some listings pages but not the thousands Google has in the index.
You have a number of paginated pages:
- http://www.metroatlantahome.com/contemporary-style-homes/300000-400000/?p=5
- http://www.metroatlantahome.com/contemporary-style-homes/300000-400000/?p=3
Your canonicals take care of this issue for the search index but your search page results seem to be "indexed" even though they aren't in your sitemap. See the attachment.
So I think you're gaining indexed pages from the search parameter but losing them from /listings/ that aren't indexed and harder to crawl. I would suggest submitting sitemap_0.xml directly to Search Console as a start. Then trying to figure out why those pages don't crawl very well.
The Wistia sitemap in your robots.txt is also NOT something I'd want Google to ever see but having it in robots.txt ensures they do. I'd try to remove that from robots.txt
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
-
Can't see backlinks in Search Console
Hello, We have 7 sites and have noticed that for one site, we don't see any backlink info in Search Console even if it's been linked for over 8 months. Other tools show thousands of backlinks, but Search Console is still pending. I also see very little info in regards to Performance even if we are getting thousands of hits a day. Could this be a sign of a bigger problem? In summary, the site is up and running, getting hits, getting backlinks, but Search Console still looks like it's a new site with no activity several months after being installed.
Reporting & Analytics | | CJolicoeur0 -
How do I create a segment that shows me all pages using a certain keyword? But nothing that doesn't have that keyword?
There must be an easy answer to this, but I can't seem to find it. All I want to do is create a segment in Google Analytics that shows all pages and search strings with "orthopaedics" in the title, with pageviews, uniques etc. If I simply navigate to "All Pages" in Google Analytics and then click Advanced Filters and do an Include Page Contains "orthopaedics" it works just fine. (See attached Screen Shot) But when I try to recreate this as a segment, it pulls in all other pages the users visited before arriving on the orthopaedics page I want to include, which I don't want. I can manually exclude each URL I don't want, but this is tedious and I feel there must be a simpler method I'm just missing. At the end of the day, I'm trying to create a list of every page and dynamically created query string that includes the word "orthopaedics" to say doctor X, your orthopaedics section generated X views, and here's a list of the pages. Mm6YTKa
Reporting & Analytics | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine0 -
Directory Listings the DO's and Dont's
Hi guys, We are currently working on increasing our online marketing presence and with a new website on the cards I am turning to all of our B2B business directories to update, and being tracking referrals etc to see ones that may be worth premium listings. I have a list of 200 business directories to scope and check, some are relevant some are not, obviously i dont want to sign up to them all and risk a dodgy link profile so im going to be selective, but im not sure how many to aim for etc. So im looking for some general advice and guidance at this early stage so I can properly plan my approach. What advice would you give and are there any major DO's and DONT's of sorting through these directories to look for some new ways to source customers. EDIT: We are UK based Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ATP0 -
Webmaster Tools vs. Google Trends data doesn't add up
I am investigating a two-month 25% drop in organic traffic from Google to a client's site. When I turned to the Webmaster Tools data for the site, there is a clear, gradual drop over the course of a couple months both in impressions and clicks. In general, the drop occurred across many pages and for a large number of queries; there wasn't a core group of keywords or pages that saw the drop...it was more sitewide. Yet, the average rankings reported by WMT were, for the top 100 or so landing pages, not significantly different. The site hosts information about medical conditions, and I wouldn't expect any time-related variations in search volume, and this was confirmed by looking at Google Trends data for a number of the top keywords. I started to look at the data by query for all the top keywords (all ranked in the top 10), and saw the following general trend: impressions were down, rankings stayed in the top 10, and Google Trends showed either flat or rising volumes. So I am trying to make sense of that. If the search volume trend did not decline and rankings held inside the top 10, then how could the number of impressions drop significantly? Am I trusting the WMT data too much? But the reality is that the volume of traffic measured by Google Analytics from Google organic did indeed drop the way Webmaster Tools show it.
Reporting & Analytics | | WillW0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - spike in 'not selected' under Index Status
Hi fellow mozzers Has anyone seen a huge shift in the number of pages 'Not Selected' under Index Status in Google WMT, and been able to identify what the problem has been? My new client recently moved their site to wordpress - and in doing so the number of pages 'not selected' rose from ~200 to ~1100, It was high before but is ridiculous now. I am thinking there must be a new duplicate content issue which should be cleaned up in my quest to improve their SEO. Could it be the good old WP tag/category issue? In which case I won't worry as Joost is doing its job of keeping stuff out of the index. There are loads of image pages which could well appear as dupe as have no content on them (i do need to fix this), but Google is already indexing these so doesn't explain the ones 'not selected'. I've tried checking dupe title tags but there are very few of them so that doesn't help Any other ideas of how to identify what these problem pages maybe? Thanks very much! Wendy
Reporting & Analytics | | Chammy0 -
Trackbacks vs Links: What's the Difference?
Our Google Analytics social pages report isn't showing several of our links. And several links are from high quality sources, such as about.com. Does anyone know why this may be?
Reporting & Analytics | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google News traffic spike mystery; referring URLs all blank, Omniture tags didn't fire.
Our content is occasionally featured in Google News. We recently have had two episodes where this happened, but (a) nearly all the referring URLs were blank, and (b) our backend logs show 3-4x more requests for the article in question than Omniture does. In other words, hundreds of thousands of visitors requested a URL from our site (as proven by the traffic logs), but don't seem to have come from Google News (because HTTP_REFERER was blank), and didn't execute the onpage javascript tag to notify Omniture of the pageview. Perhaps this has nothing to do with Google News, but it is too strong a coincidence that the two times we were on there recently, the same thing happened: big backend traffic spike that is not seen by Omniture. It is as if Google News causes browsers to pre-fetch our article without executing the javascript on the page. And without sending a referring URL. Has anyone else seen anything like this before? Stats from the recent episode:
Reporting & Analytics | | mcglynn
- 835,000 HTTP requests for the article URL (logged by our servers) - these requests came from 280,000 distinct IP addresses (70% US) - the #1 referring URL is blank. This accounts for 99.4% of requests. Which, in itself, is hard to believe. These people had to come from somewhere. I believe browsers don't pass HTTP_REFERER when you click from an SSL page to a non-SSL page, but I think Google News doesn't bounce users to SSL by default.That said, we do see other content pages with 70-90% blank referring URLs. Rarely 99+% though.0 -
222.mydomain.com... I'm stumped....
Hi, I'm stumped by this one and am hoping I can get some advice/guidance. I've seen this pop up in my stats where the www.mydomain.com/page is appearing as 222.mydomain.com/page. I have no clue what's going on... This google return displays the same page 2 ways (see first image). And when I click on the 222. link I get a prompt (see 2nd image). Any idea what's going on? Thanks! Peter ipHKt.png o0ZeB.png
Reporting & Analytics | | peterdbaron0