Google Index Status Falling Fast - What should I be considering?
-
Hi Folks,
Working on an ecommerce site. I have found a month on month fall in the Index Status continuing since late 2015. This has resulted in around 80% of pages indexed according to Webmaster.
I do not seem to have any bad links or server issues. I am in the early stages of working through, updating content and tags but am yet to see a slowing of the fall.
If anybody has tips on where to look for to issues or insight to resolve this I would really appreciate it.
Thanks everybody!
Tim
-
Hi dude, thank you so much for taking time to look at this site. It is really kind of you. I will be taking a look at all the points raised over the next week to see what we can achieve. Thanks, Tim
-
Thank you for taking so much time to look at our site. I really appreciate it. I will dig in to the points to see what we can achieve. Thanks again, Tim
-
Thanks dude, I will take a look at this. Really appreciate you taking time to respond.
-
Hi Tim,
I agree with Laura on the canonical tags. I've worked on several large Magento sites and I've never seen any issue with the way Magento handles it - by canonicalizing product URLs to the root directory.
In fact, I actually prefer this was over assigning a product to a 'primary' category and using that as the canonical.
As Laura said, a reduction in the total number of indexed pages might actually be a really big positive here! More pages indexed does not mean it's better. If they are low quality/duplicate pages that have been removed from index, that's a really good thing.
I did find some issues with your robots.txt file:
- Disallow: /media/ - should be removed because it's blocking images from being crawled (this is a default Magento thing and they should remove it!)
- Disallow: /? - this basically means that any URLs containing a ? will not be crawled and with the way pagination is setup on the site, this means that any pages after 1 are not being crawled.
This could be impacting how many product pages you have indexed - which would definitely be a bad thing! You would obviously want your product pages to be crawled and indexed.
Solution: I would leave Disallow: /? in robots.txt because it stops a product filter URLs being crawled, but I would add the following line:
Allow: */?p=
This line will allow your paginated pages to be crawled, which will also allow products linked from those pages to be crawled.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David
-
I would be interested in seeing examples of where this has happened. Were the canonical tags added after the URLs were already indexed or were the canonicals in place when the site launched?
-
However, the canonical is only an advisory tag. I've had few cases where people have relied on their canonical tag when their site has numerous product url types (as above with category in the url and just product url) which has many references to these different urls elsewhere (onsite and offsite) and they are now indexed as both versions, which is not always ideal. It also means that reporting tools such as Screaming Frog only show the true URLs on the site. It's also saving crawl budget as it doesn't have to crawl the category produced url and the canonical url.
Whilst it's not a major issue, it's something I would look at changing.
-
If I understand you correctly, you are referring to the following two URLs:
https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/customer-displays/pole-mounting-kit-94591.html
https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html
Both of these have the same canonical referenced, which is https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html.
It doesn't matter what actually shows in the address box. For the purposes of indexation, what matters is what is referenced in the canonical tag.
.
-
What I've suggested will be avoiding these duplicate urls? Here's some actual examples, going via a tier two category I get the following product url:
https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/customer-displays/pole-mounting-kit-94591.html
With a canonical of:
https://www.symectech.com/pole-mounting-kit-94614.html
Yet when going from https://www.symectech.com/epos-systems/?limit=32&p=2 (a tier 1 category) I get the canonical url.
So if there are products listed in multiple tier two categories then that's multiple urls for the same product. With the suggestion I made, there would only be one variation of this product url (the canonical)
-
A reduction in the number of pages indexed does not necessarily mean something is wrong. In fact, it could mean that something is right, especially if your rankings are improving.
How are you determining that only 80% of pages are indexed? Can you provide a specific URL that is not being indexed?
If you made changes to your canonical tag, robots.txt , or meta robots tag, these could all cause a reduction in the number of pages being indexed.
-
The canonicals appear to be set up correctly, and I would not advise listing the product URLs as their canonicals in the category as suggested above. That will create duplicate URLs with the same content, which is exactly what canonical tags are designed to avoid.
-
Just going through Laura's list as a checklist for ones that are applicable:
- Have you checked your robots.txt file or page-level meta robots tag to see if you are blocking or noindexing anything?
Nothing that I can see, that's causing a major issue.
- Is it a large site? If so, check for issues that may affect crawl budget.
The main thing I can see is that the product urls and canonicals are different, is there anyway of listing the product urls as their canonical versions in the category?
-
<a name="_GoBack"></a>Sorry for the delay in response. Website is symectech.com
We have fixed various issues including a noindex issue earlier this year but our index status is continuing to fall. However, the ranking seems to be improving week on week according to MOZ. Thanks.
Tim
-
Just to echo what Laura has said, if you can share a URL that would be great so we can help you get to the source of the problem.
Try running a tool like screamingfrog (https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/) to check the issues above that Laura has mentioned, as doing a lot of those by hand can be quite time consuming.
Also, do you have a drop in rankings with your pages falling out the index?
-
Any chance you can share the URL? That would make it much easier for someone to help in this forum. Without the URL, I can offer a few diagnostic questions.
- Have the number of pages on the site remained the same and pages are being removed from the index? Or have you added more content, but the percentage in the index has decreased?
- Have you checked your robots.txt file or page-level meta robots tag to see if you are blocking or noindexing anything?
- Have you submitted an XML sitemap? If so, check the XML sitemap to make sure what's being submitted should be indexed. It's possible to submit a sitemap that includes noindexed pages, especially with some automated tools.
- Is it a large site? If so, check for issues that may affect crawl budget.
- Have you changed any canonical tags?
- Have you used the Fetch as Google tool to diagnose a specific URL?
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
-
Why Is this page de-indexed?
I have dropped out for all my first page KWDs for this page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/dollies-load-movers-door-skates Can anyone see an issue? I am trying to find one.... We did just migrate to HTTPS but other areas have no problem
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Google News error in Google Search Console
My google search console states some errors as below: 1. Article fragmented Some of the urls in this error are the category urls. How to make google bot understand it is a category not an article? 2. Article too short In fact the article is quite long. I do not know why this is happen... 3. No sentence found In fact, there are a lot of sentences Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Is there a way to contact Google besides the google product forum?
Our traffic from google has dropped more than 35% and continues to fall. We have been on this forum and google's webmaster forum trying to get help. We received great advice, have waited months, but instead of our traffic improving, it has worsened. We are being penalized by google for many keywords such as trophies, trophies and awards and countless others - we were on page one previously. We filed two reconsideration requests and were told both times that there were no manual penalties. Some of our pages continue to rank well, so it is not across the board (but all of our listings went down a bit). We have made countless changes (please see below). Our busy season was from March to May and we got clobbered. Google, as most people know, is a monopoly when it comes to traffic, so we are getting killed. At first we thought it was Penquin, but it looks like we started getting killed late last year. Lots of unusual things happened - we had a large spike in traffic for two days, then lost our branded keywords, then our main keywords. Our branded keywords came back pretty quickly, but nothing else did. We have received wonderful advice and made most of the changes. We are a very reputable company and have a feeling we are being penalized for something other than spamming. For example, we have a mobile site we added late last year and a wholesale system was added around the same time. Since the date does not coincide with Penquin, we think there is some major technical driver, but have no idea what to do at this point. The webmasters have all been helpful, but nothing is working. We are trying to find out what one does in a situation as we are trying to avoid closing our business. Thank you! Changes Made: 1. We had many crawl errors so we reduced them significantly 2. We had introduced a mobile website in January which we
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
thought may have been the cause (splitting traffic, duplicate content, etc.),
so we had our mobile provider add the site to their robots.txt file. 3. We were told by a webmaster that their were too many
links from our search provider, so we have them put the search pages in a
robots.txt file. 4. We were told that we had too much duplicate content. This was / is true, as we have hundred of legitate products that are similar:
example trophies and certificates that are virtually the same but are
for different sports or have different colors and sizes. Still, we added more content and added no index tags to many products. We compared our % of dups to competitors and it is far less. 5. At the recommendation of another webmaster, we changed
many pages that might have been splitting traffic. 6. Another webmaster told us that too many people were
linking into our site with the same text, namely Trophy Central and that it
might have appeared we were trying to game the system somehow. We have never bought links and don't even have a webmaster although over the last 10 years have worked with programmers and seo companies (but we don't think any have done anything unusual). 7. At the suggestion of another webmaster, we have tried to
improve our link profile. For example,
we found Yahoo was not linking to our url. 8. We were told to setup a 404 page, so we did 9. We were told to ensure that all of the similar domains
were pointing to www.trophycentral.com/ so we setup redirects 10. We were told that a site that we have linking to us from too many places so we reduced it to 1. Our key pages have A rankings from SEOMOZ for the selected keywords. We have made countless other changes recommended by experts
but have seen no improvements (actually got worse). I am the
president of the company and have made most of the above recent changes myself. Our website is trophycentral.com0 -
Ajax Content Indexed
I used the following guide to implement the endless scroll https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started crawlers and correctly reads all URLs the command "site:" show me all indexed Url with #!key=value I want it to be indexed only the first URL, for the other Urls I would be scanned but not indexed like if there were the robots meta tag "noindex, follow" how I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wwmind1 -
Do you bother cleaning duplicate content from Googles Index?
Hi, I'm in the process of instructing developers to stop producing duplicate content, however a lot of duplicate content is already in Google's Index and I'm wondering if I should bother getting it removed... I'd appreciate it if you could let me know what you'd do... For example one 'type' of page is being crawled thousands of times, but it only has 7 instances in the index which don't rank for anything. For this example I'm thinking of just stopping Google from accessing that page 'type'. Do you think this is right? Do you normally meta NoIndex,follow the page, wait for the pages to be removed from Google's Index, and then stop the duplicate content from being crawled? Or do you just stop the pages from being crawled and let Google sort out its own Index in its own time? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?
What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stats440