Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
-
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us.
Our website is www.skirtinguk.com
And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
-
Hi
Am also having same issue on this category please
https://artistsbloc.org/celebrity-biographies/ -
This is probably more of a ranking authority problem, rather than an indexation problem. If you can force Google to render one of your category URLs within its search results, then it's highly likely the page is indeed indexed (it's just not ranking very well for associated keywords)
Follow this link:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Askirtinguk.com%2Fproduct-category%2Fmdf-skirting-board%2F
As you can see, the category URL which you referenced is indexed. Google can render it within their search results!
Although Google know the page exists and it is in their index, they don't bother to keep a cache of the URL: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skirtinguk.com%2Fproduct-category%2Fmdf-skirting-board%2F
This probably means that they don't think many people use the page or that it is of low value.
What you have to keep in mind is, lower value long-tail terms (like product keywords or part number keywords) are much easier to achieve. Category terms are worth more in terms of search volume, so competition for them is higher. If your site ranks for product terms but not for category terms, it probably means your authority and / or trust metrics (as well as UX metrics) may be lower. Remember: Google don't consider their ranking results to be a space to advertise lots of companies. They want to render the best results possible for the end-user (that way people keep 'Googling' and Google continue to leverage revenue from Google AdWords etc)
Let's look at your site's domain-level metrics and see if they paint a picture of an 'authoritative' site which should be ranking for such terms...
Domain Level Metrics from Moz
Domain Authority: 24 (low)
Total Inbound Links: 1,200+
Total Referring Domains (much more important than total link count!): 123 - This is too many links from too few domains IMO
Ranking keywords: 38
Domain Level Metrics from Ahrefs
Homepage URL Rating: 11 (very low)
Domain Rating: 11 (very low)
Total Inbound Links: 2,110+
Referring Domains: 149 - Again, the disparity here could be causing problems! Not a diverse backlink profile
Ranking Keywords: 374 (Ahrefs usually finds more, go with this figure)
SEO Traffic Insights: Between 250 and 380 visits (from SEO) a day on average, not much traffic at all from SEO before November 2016 when things improved significantly
SEMRush Traffic Insights (to compare against Ahrefs): Estimates between 100 and 150 visits from SEO per day. This is narrowed to UK only though. Seems to tally with what Ahrefs is saying, the Ahrefs data is probably more accurate
Domain Level Metrics from Majestic SEO
Trust Flow: 5 - This is extremely low and really bad! Basically Majestic track the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites, to your site. A low number (it's on a scale of 0 to 100 I think) indicates that trustworthy seed sites aren't linking to you, or that where you are linked - people avoid clicking a link to your site (or visiting it)
Citation Flow: 24 - low but now awful
What do I get from all of this info?
I don't think your site is doing enough digital PR, or making 'enough of a difference to the web' to rank highly for category related terms. Certainly the site looks very drab and 'cookie-cutter' in terms of the template. It doesn't instil a sense of pride in the business behind the website. That can put people off linking to you, which can cause your SEO authority to fall flat on its face leaving you with no ranking power.
A lot of the product images look as if they are fake which probably isn't helping. They actually look at lot like ads which often look a bit cartoony or CGI-generated, with a balance between blue and white (colour deployment). Maybe they're being misinterpreted as spam due to Google PLA (Page Layout Algorithm). Design is not helping you out at all I am afraid!
So who is ranking for MDF skirting board? The top non-PPC (ad-based) result on Google.co.uk is this one:
https://skirtingboardsdirect.com/products/category/mdf-skirting-boards/
Ok so their content is better and deeper than yours (bullet-pointed specs or stats often imply 'granular' content to Google, which Google really likes - your content is just one solid paragraph). Overall though, I'd actually say their design is awful! It's worse than the design of your site (so maybe design isn't such a big factor here after all).
Let's compare some top-line SEO authority metrics on your site against those earned by this competitor
- Domain Authority from Moz: 24
- Referring Domains from Moz: 123
- Ahrefs Homepage URL Rating: 11
- Ahrefs Domain Rating: 11
- Ahrefs Referring Domains: 149
- Majestic SEO Trust Flow: 5
- Majestic SEO Citation Flow: 24
Now the other site...
- Domain Authority from Moz: 33 (+9)
- Referring Domains from Moz: 464 (+341)
- Ahrefs Homepage URL Rating: 31 (+20)
- Ahrefs Domain Rating: 65 (+54)
- Ahrefs Referring Domains: 265 (+116)
- Majestic SEO Trust Flow: 29 (+24)
- Majestic SEO Citation Flow: 30 (+6)
They beat you in all the important areas! That's not good.
Your category-level URLs aren't Meta no indexed, or blocked in the robots.txt file. Since we have found evidence that Google are in fact indexing your category level URLs, it's actually a ranking / authority problem, cleverly disguised as an indexation issue (I can see why you assumed that). These pages aren't **good enough **to be frequently indexed by Google, for keywords which they know hold lucrative financial value. Only the better sites (or the more authoritative ones) will rank there
A main competitor has similar design standards but has slightly deeper content and much more SEO authority than you do. The same is probably true for other competing sites. In SEO, you have to fight to maintain your positions. Sitting back is equivalent to begging your competitors to steal all of your traffic...
Hope this analysis helps!
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
-
Is there a way to get a list of Total Indexed pages from Google Webmaster Tools?
I'm doing a detailed analysis of how Google sees and indexes our website and we have found that there are 240,256 pages in the index which is way too many. It's an e-commerce site that needs some tidying up. I'm working with an SEO specialist to set up URL parameters and put information in to the robots.txt file so the excess pages aren't indexed (we shouldn't have any more than around 3,00 - 4,000 pages) but we're struggling to find a way to get a list of these 240,256 pages as it would be helpful information in deciding what to put in the robots.txt file and which URL's we should ask Google to remove. Is there a way to get a list of the URL's indexed? We can't find it in the Google Webmaster Tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sparrowdog0 -
Dev Subdomain Pages Indexed - How to Remove
I own a website (domain.com) and used the subdomain "dev.domain.com" while adding a new section to the site (as a development link). I forgot to block the dev.domain.com in my robots file, and google indexed all of the dev pages (around 100 of them). I blocked the site (dev.domain.com) in robots, and then proceeded to just delete the entire subdomain altogether. It's been about a week now and I still see the subdomain pages indexed on Google. How do I get these pages removed from Google? Are they causing duplicate content/title issues, or does Google know that it's a development subdomain and it's just taking time for them to recognize that I deleted it already?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Yoast SEO Plugin: To Index or Not to index Categories?
Taking a poll out there......In most cases would you want to index or NOT index your category pages using the Yoast SEO plugin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
[e-commerce] Should I index product variants?
Hi guys, I have e-commerce site, that sells car tires. I was wondering would I benefit from making all Product Variants ( for example each tire size ) as different page, that has link to the main product to provide some affiliation, or should I make each variant noindex, and add rel=canonical to the main product. The benefits from having each variant indexed can be many: greater click through rate more relative results for customers etc. But I'm not sure how to handle the duplicate content issue ( in this case, only the title, URL and H1 can be different ). Regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo220