Drop in Indexed Page + Organic Traffic
-
Hey Moz Community,
I've been seeing a steady decrease in search console of pages being indexed by Google for our eCommerce site. This is corresponding to lower impressions and traffic in general this year. We started with around a million pages being indexed in Nov of 2015 down to 18,000 pages this Nov. I realized that since we don't have around 3,000 or so products year round this is mostly likely a good thing.
I've checked to make sure our main landing pages are being indexed which they are and our sitemap was updated several times this year, although we're in the process of updating it again to resubmit. I also checked our robots.txt and there's nothing out of the ordinary. In the last month we've recently gotten rid of some duplicate content issues caused by pagination by using canonical tags but that's all we've done to reduce the number of pages crawled. We have seen some soft 404's and some server errors coming up in our crawl error report that we've either fixed or are trying to fix.
Not really sure where to start looking to find a solution to the problem or if it's even a huge issue, but the drop in traffic is also not great. The drop in traffic corresponded to lose in rankings as well so there could be correlation or none.
Any ideas here?
-
Oops, I missed that part. Have you checked Google Search Console to see if someone set any URL parameters?
The first thing I would do is determine how many pages actually should be indexed to see if there's a large discrepancy between that and the number Google shows. A crawler like Screaming Frog can help with this. If you export the crawl to Excel, you can easily remove duplicates in the canonical URL column and filter out the noindexed pages.
If you find there's no real discrepancy, Google may have simply been cleaning house of some really old links in the index that hadn't been crawled in a while.
Beyond that, if you can pinpoint any specific URLs that have been deindexed, use the "Fetch as Google" tool to help diagnose or post it here so the community can take a look.
-
Hi Laura,
Thanks for your response, I know that adding canonical tags can lower our indexed pages count. The only thing I'm worried about is the fact that the drop in indexed pages have been steady since Nov of last year and we just implemented the tags last month.
We have been seeing lower conversions with less traffic some of which has to do with us not ranking as well for a few key-terms as we did last year.
-
I suspect the canonical tag implementation is the culprit for the loss in indexed pages, but that's just a strong suspicion. When you implement a canonical tag, Google will fold together all of the pages pointing to the same canonical URL so that they are treated as one URL for the purposes of indexation. This will naturally cause a reduction in the overall number of pages indexed. You won't see 404 errors as a result of this either.
One important point to remember is that a decrease in indexed pages is not necessarily a bad thing that needs to be fixed. In fact, if you were having problems with duplicate content or crawl issues, canonicalizing those URLs should be beneficial if properly implemented.
As for the loss in traffic, it could be related or not. It may just be an adjustment period from the canonicalization, or it could a separate issue. Have you seen a corresponding loss in conversions?
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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
New Pages in my Shopify website is not indexing
Hi The Service area pages created on my Shopify website is not indexing on google for a long time, Tried indexing the pages manually and also submitted the sitemap but still the pages doesn't seem to get indexed.
Technical SEO | | Bhisshaun
Thanks in Advance.0 -
Our protected pages 302 redirect to a login page if not a member. Is that a problem for SEO?
We have a membership site that has links out in our unprotected pages. If a non-member clicks on these links it sends a 302 redirect to the login / join page. Is this an issue for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rimix1 -
Over 500 thin URLs indexed from dynamically created pages (for lightboxes)
I have a client who has a resources section. This section is primarily devoted to definitions of terms in the industry. These definitions appear in colored boxes that, when you click on them, turn into a lightbox with their own unique URL. Example URL: /resources/?resource=dlna The information for these lightboxes is pulled from a standard page: /resources/dlna. Both are indexed, resulting in over 500 indexed pages that are either a simple lightbox or a full page with very minimal content. My question is this: Should they be de-indexed? Another option I'm knocking around is working with the client to create Skyscraper pages, but this is obviously a massive undertaking given how many they have. Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Home Page Being Indexed / Referral URLs /
I have a few questions related to home page URLs being indexed, canonicalization, and GA reporting... 1. I can view the home page by typing in domain.com , domain.com/ and domain.com/index.htm There are no redirects and it's canonicalized to point to domain.com/index.htm -- how important is it to have redirects? I don't want unnecessary redirects or canonical tags, but I noticed the trailing slash can sometimes be typed in manually on other pages, sometimes not. 2. When I do a site search (site:domain.com), sometimes the HP shows up as "domain.com/", never "domain.com/index.htm" or "domain.com", and sometimes the HP doesn't show up period. This seems to change several times a day, sometimes within 15 minutes. I have no idea what is causing it and I don't know if it has anything to do with #1. In a perfect world, I would ask for the /index.htm to be dropped and redirected to .com/, and the canonical to point to .com/ 3. I've noticed in GA I see / , /index.htm, and a weird Google referral URL (/index.htm?referrer=https://www.google.com/) all showing up as top pages. I think the / and /index.htm is because I haven't setup a default URL in GA, but I'm not sure what would cause the referrer. I tracked back when the referrer URL started to show up in the top pages, and it was right around the time they moved over to https://, so I'm not sure what the best option is to remove that. I know this is a lot - I appreciate any insight anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | DigMS0 -
URL with query string being indexed over it's parent page?
I noticed earlier this week that this page - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/bomb-threats-and-suspicious-packages?channel=care was being indexed instead of this page - https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/bomb-threats-and-suspicious-packages for its various keywords We have rel=canonical tags correctly set up and all internal links to these pages with query strings are nofollow, so why is this page being indexed? Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
Drop in traffic at start of December 2014
Hello! I've noticed a drop in organic Google traffic to our ecommerce site. The drop started on the 1st December 2014. The difference compared with last year is around -25%. I've taken a look at landing pages for the organic Google traffic: Homepage: -40%
Technical SEO | | Bike_Co-op_Webmaster
Product pages: -31%
Category pages: -7%
Blog pages: -7% On the 1st December our site was down for a few hours in the early morning for some scheduled maintenance. I got a couple of emails from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that there was an "Increase in server errors" and "Googlebot can't access your site". Once the site maintenance was complete there haven't been any further emails from Google about this. I doubt the site being down is the cause of the drop in traffic. I suspect it may have been caused by the latest Penguin updates around the end of November 2014. Can anyone advise if this sounds like it is the cause, and why the homepage and products pages have been hit so severely? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!0 -
Listing Categories on each page versus in the drop-down navigation; which is better for SEO
My client, www.warehouse-lighting.com, has all the links to its category pages on a left-side navigation structure. Their competitor, www.prolighting.com has all of its category-page links listed under the drop-down menu of the top-level navigation. I’m wondering if one way is better than the other for SEO and why?
Technical SEO | | TopFloor1