Google slow to index pages
-
Hi
We've recently had a product launch for one of our clients. Historically speaking Google has been quick to respond, i.e when the page for the product goes live it's indexed and performing for branded terms within 10 minutes (without 'Fetch and Render').
This time however, we found that it took Google over an hour to index the pages. we found initially that press coverage ranked until we were indexed. Nothing major had changed in terms of the page structure, content, internal linking etc; these were brand new pages, with new product content.
Has anyone ever experienced Google having an 'off' day or being uncharacteristically slow with indexing? We do have a few ideas what could have caused this, but we were interested to see if anyone else had experienced this sort of change in Google's behaviour, either recently or previously?
Thanks.
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
-
Domain Authority Dropped and Indexed Pages Went Down on Google?
Hi there, We run an e-commerce site on Shopify. Our Domain Authority was 28 at the start of our campaign in May of this year. We also had 610 indexed pages on Google. We did some SEO work which included: Renaming Images for SEO Adding in alt tags Optimizing the meta title to "Product Name - Keyword - Brand Name" for products Optimizing meta descriptions Transition of Hubspot blog to Shopify (it was on a subdomain at Hubspot previously) Fixing some 404s Resubmitting site map after the changes Now it is almost at the 3-month mark and it looks like our Domain Authority has gone down 4 points to 24. The # of indexed pages has gone to down to 555. We made sure all our SEO updates weren't spammy or keyword-stuffed, but took a natural and helpful-sounding approach. We followed guidelines. So there shouldn't be any penalty right? I checked site traffic and it does not coincide with the drop. Our site traffic remains steady. I also looked at "site:" as well as conducted some test searches for the important pages (i.e. main pages, blog pages, and product pages) and they still come up on Google. So could it only be non-important pages being deindexed? My questions are: Why did both the Domain Authority and # of indexed pages go down? Is there any way to see which pages were deindexed? I checked Google Search Console, but couldn't find it. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kindalpaca70 -
Getting Google to index our sitemap
Hi, We have a sitemap on AWS that is retrievable via a url that looks like ours http://sitemap.shipindex.org/sitemap.xml. We have notified Google it exists and it found our 700k urls (we are a database of ship citations with unique urls). However, it will not index them. It has been weeks and nothing. The weird part is that it did do some of them before, it said so, about 26k. Then it said 0. Now that I have redone the sitemap, I can't get google to look at it and I have no idea why. This is really important to us, as we want not just general keywords to find our front page, but we also want specific ship names to show links to us in results. Does anyone have any clues as to how to get Google's attention and index our sitemap? Or even just crawl more of our site? It has done 35k pages crawling, but stopped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shipindex0 -
Does google index the mobile version or the desktop version?
We use different headlines and text on our mobile site vs. the desktop. Our desktop headlines and text is highly optimized for SEO purposes, but because of user experience and space limitations the headlines and text on the mobile version isn't great for SEO. I'm wondering, what will google look at and will it make a difference? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Postable0 -
Organic Listings showing Google Tag Manager + Google Page Title...?
I'm a bit stumped with this. I optimise all my titles etc for Australia - and now the organic liatings are showing something strange. For example ( we sell health supplements ) Meta title = "My Product , Buy Online Australia" If I type "My Product" - the title in the organic listings says "My Product - My Company Limited" - and the only place I can see it getting that from is a combination of Meta Data used in Google Tag Manager + the Name on my Google places page. This is much more obvious for categories.. but it's a pain in the butt. If I type "My Product Australia" Then the original "My Product , Buy Online Australia" comes up. Any ideas on policy etc? I have taken the "Limited" off the Google business page - so hopefully this will change over time - but I can't find any information on why google would do something like this. If you had shed any light on this - would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Google indexing pages from chrome history ?
We have pages that are not linked from site yet they are indexed in Google. It could be possible if Google got these pages from browser. Does Google takes data from chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Why is page still indexing?
Hi all, I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SSFCU
Sarah0 -
My indexed pages count is shrinking in webmaster tools. Is this normal ?
I noticed that our total # of indexed pages dropped recently by a substantial amount (see chart below) Is this normal? http://imgur.com/4GWzkph Also, 3 weeks after this started dropping, we got a message on increased # of crawl errors and found that a site update was causing 300+ new 404s. could this be related ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
How Long Does it Take for Rel Canonical to De-Index / Re-Index a Page?
Hi Mozzers, We have 2 e-commerce websites, Website A and Website B, sharing thousands of pages with duplicate product descriptions. Currently only the product pages on Website B are indexing, and we want Website A indexed instead. We added the rel canonical tag on each of Website B's product pages with a link towards the matching product on Page A. How long until Website B gets de-indexed and Website A gets indexed instead? Did we add the rel canonical tag correctly? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0