Google has discovered a URL but won't index it?
-
Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed.
I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not.
So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed.
But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out.
Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?
-
Good luck!
-
Thanks Will, appreciate the insight. I'm going to get the Bing and Google wordpress plugins on there to see if that helps, build up a few more links and give it some time to wait and see. Thanks!
-
You're not the only person reporting odd indexation happenings here on Q&A (see for example this question). And, just like I found for that question, your site appears to have more pages indexed in Bing than in Google - which at least seems to point to us not having missed something obvious like meta noindex or similar.
I did also read Google saying that they had issues with the site: command (link) but I don't think that can have anything to do with your situation as they say they have now fixed that issue, and I couldn't find any other pages on your site even with non-site: searches (i.e. it does genuinely appear as though those pages are missing from the index).
While I am loathe to point just at links these days, I do wonder if in this case it is just a case of needing some more authority for the whole site before it is seen as big enough and important enough to justify more pages in the index.
-
Thanks, I've actually submitted request to be indexed multiple times over the last 3 weeks to no avail.
-
Hey Daniel. I agree with Chris. I have also noticed slow indexation recently. Might be a pain in the arse, but maybe you should request each page to be indexed individually in Search Console to add them to the high priority queue.
-
Hi Will, thanks for reaching out! No, not yet resolved. Still struggling to figure this out. I sent you a message on Facebook and Linkedin- would love to connect and try to get this figured out!
-
We keep adding blog posts almost every day, still not getting in the index for some reason. Discovered, yes. Crawled, yes. But not indexed, and no errors or anything.
-
Hi Daniel. Did you get this resolved / did it resolve itself? I'd happily take a look if you'd like if not - just let me know the URL.
-
My advice is, start listing more reviews! It will be picked up by google automaticly. You gotta be a bit more patient. New websites take awefully alot of time to be indexed.
I had a domain of 10+ years of age, replaced it's website, within one day completely reindexed. I have new domains, they can take up to weeks or even a month to be indexed. It's normal.
-
I actually got a quality link 2 weeks ago, but the blog post the link was published in still isn't indexed by Google either. The rest of his site is, just not his newest article for some reason, and it's 2 weeks old now. Another mystery...
-
It's a review website, and only 3 of my 24 reviews are indexed. All are discovered, most even crawled, but only those three in the index. And when I updated them, the search listing in Google results was updated within a few days. So they came back, are aware of the changes, but just not adding the others to the index.
And there are no affiliate links on this site at all. No spam, no links to spam, and I've attached a blog with 500+ word well written articles (about 20 so far) and none of the blog posts are indexed either.
I've never seen anything like this. The content is good, but almost none of it is getting indexed for some reason, despite being discovered and crawled.
-
Get quality links.
-
It's a new domain, no previous ownership, and no issues detected in search console for manual actions or security. There's no robots, noindex or any of that going on. They just won't index a bunch of the pages for some reason and it's very odd.
-
Perhaps the content on those 42 pages or so is alot copy content based? Or pages that really dont matter to be up in search?
-
I'd hold off worrying about it for now. I've heard many people talk about slow indexation lately. In the mean time, aside from the obvious check-for- nofollow- noindex-robots.txt suggestions, have you looked into the history of this domain? By chance was it penalized before you bought it?
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 indexing wrong pages
We have a variety of issues at the moment, and need some advice. First off, we have a HUGE indexing issue across our entire website. Website in question: http://www.localsearch.com.au/ Firstly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | localdirectories
In Google.com.au, if you search for 'plumbers gosford' (https://www.google.com.au/#q=plumbers+gosford), the wrong page appears - in this instance, the page ranking should be http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Plumbers I can see this across the board, across multiple locations. Secondly
Recently I've seen Google reporting in 'Crawl Errors' in webmaster tools URLs such as:
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Saunders-Beach,QLD/Electronic-Equipment-Sales-Repairs&Sa=U&Ei=xs-XVJzAA9T_YQSMgIHQCw&Ved=0CIMBEBYwEg&Usg=AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA This is an invalid URL, and more specifically, those query strings seem to be referrer queries from Google themselves: &Sa=U&Ei=xs-XVJzAA9T_YQSMgIHQCw&Ved=0CIMBEBYwEg&Usg=AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA Here's the above example indexed in Google: https://www.google.com.au/#q="AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA" Does anyone have any advice on those 2 errors?0 -
Web developer won't 301 redirect to my new website....what can I do?
I want to come away from our third party web developer and use a new website with different web developers, however the web developer wont 301 redirect the old url's to the new ones. Is he required to do this by law? Is there away of doing the 301 redirects without him? Any advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks,Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Google suddenly indexing and displaying URLs that haven't existed for years?
We recently noticed google is showing approx 23,000 indexed .jsp urls for our site. These are ancient pages that haven't existed in years and have long been 301 redirected to valid urls. I'm talking 6 years. Checking the serps the other day (and our current SEOMoz pro campaign), I see that a few of these urls are now replacing our correct ones in the serps for important, competitive phrases. What the heck is going on here? Is Google suddenly ignoring rewrite rules and redirects? Here's an example of the rewrite rules that we've used for 6+ years: RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] Now, this 'bottom paint' url has been incredibly stable in the serps for over a half decade. All of a sudden, a google search for 'bottom paint' (no quotes) brings up the jsp page at position 2-3. This is just one example of something very bizarre happening. Has anyone else had something similar happen lately? Thank You <colgroup><col width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamestown
| RewriteRule ^(.*)/xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp$ $1/userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID [R=301] |0 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
How to determine URL Parameters in Google Webmaster
Hi there! I have a new website with so many duplicate meta titles and descriptions because of its expanded features from the e-commerce shopping cart that I am using like mobile website, product sorting, etc. Aside from canonical, is it advisable to use the URL parameters from Google webmaster tools to disallow crawling of mobile website and other parameters like, "parent", "catalogsetview", "pcsid", "pg" "mode". I appreciate and advise. 🙂 Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paumer800 -
Pagination Question: Google's 'rel=prev & rel=next' vs Javascript Re-fresh
We currently have all content on one URL and use # and Javascript refresh to paginate pages, and we are wondering if we transition to the Google's recommended pagination if we will see an improvement in traffic. Has anyone gone though a similar transition? What was the result? Did you see an improvement in traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages
Hey, I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them. I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ". Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem? get_header(); ?> /* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0