I've hit a wall. What's next?
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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!
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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.
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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
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