• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Crawled page count in Search console

        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.

        Crawled page count in Search console

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        2
        9
        2545
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • Bob_van_Biezen
          Bob_van_Biezen last edited by

          Hi Guys,

          I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console.

          History:

          Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this:

          1. Noindex filterpages.
          2. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt.
          3. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages.

          This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day.

          To complicate the situation:

          We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well.

          Questions:

          1. -          Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right?
          2. -          Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages?
          3. -          What am I missing?

          BxlESTT

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • donford
            donford @Bob_van_Biezen last edited by

            Ben,

            I doubt that crawlers are going to access the robots.txt file for each request, but they still have to validate any url they find against the list of the blocked ones.

            Glad to help,

            Don

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • Bob_van_Biezen
              Bob_van_Biezen @donford last edited by

              Hi Don,

              Thanks for the clear explanation. I always though disallow in robots.txt would give a sort of map to Google (at the start of a site crawl) with the pages on the site that shouldn’t be crawled. So he therefore didn’t have to “check the locked cars”.

              If I understand you correctly, google checks the robots.txt with every single page load?

              That could definitely explain high number of crawled pages per day.

              Thanks a lot!

              donford 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • donford
                donford @Bob_van_Biezen last edited by

                Hi Bob,

                About the nofollow vs blocked. In the end I suppose you have the same results, but in practice it works a little differently. When you nofollow a link it tells the crawler as soon as it encounters the link not to request or follow that link path. When you block it via robots the crawler still attempts to access the url only to find it not accessible.

                Imagine if I said go to the parking lot and collect all the loose change in all the unlocked cars. Now imagine how much easier that task would be if all the locked cars had a sign in the window that said "Locked", you could easily ignore the locked cars and go directly to the unlocked ones. Without the sign you would have to physically go check each car to see if it will open.

                About link juice, if you have a link, juice will be passed regardless of the type of link. (You used to be able to use nofollow to preserve link juice but no longer). This is bit unfortunate for sites that use search filters because they are such a valuable tool for the users.

                Don

                Bob_van_Biezen 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Bob_van_Biezen
                  Bob_van_Biezen @donford last edited by

                  Hi Don,

                  You're right about the sitemap, noted it on the to do list!

                  Your point about nofollow is intersting. Isn't excluding in robots.txt giving the same result?

                  Before we went on with the robots.txt we didn't implant nofollow because we didn't want any linkjuice to pass away. Since we got robots.txt I assume this doesn’t matter anymore since Google won’t crawl those pages anyway.

                  Best regards,

                  Bob

                  donford 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • donford
                    donford last edited by

                    Hi Bob,

                    You can "suggest" a crawl rate to Google by logging into your webmasters tools on Google and adjusting it there.

                    As for indexing pages.. I looked at your robots and site. It really looks like you need to employ some No Follow on some of your internal linking, specifically on the product page filters, that alone could reduce the total number of URLS that the crawlers even attempts to look at.

                    Additionally your sitemap http://premium-hookahs.nl/sitemap.xml shows a change frequency of daily, and probably should be broken out between Pages / Images so you end up using two sitemaps one for images and one for pages. You may also want to review what is in there. Using ScreamingFrog (free) the sitemap I made (link) only shows about 100 urls.

                    Hope it helps,

                    Don

                    Bob_van_Biezen 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • Bob_van_Biezen
                      Bob_van_Biezen @donford last edited by

                      Hi Don,

                      Just wanted to add a quick note: your input made go through the indexation state of the website again which was worse than I through it was. I will take some steps to get this resolved, thanks!

                      Would love to hear your input about the number of crawled pages.

                      Best regards,

                      Bob

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Bob_van_Biezen
                        Bob_van_Biezen @donford last edited by

                        Hello Don,

                        Thanks for your advice. What would your advice be if the main goal would be the reduction of crawled pages per day? I think we got the right pages in the index and the old duplicates are mostly deindexed. At this point I’m mostly worried about Google spending it’s crawlbudget on the right pages. Somehow it still crawls 40.000 pages per day while we only got around 1000 pages that should be crawled. Looking at the current setup (with almost everything excluded though robots.txt) I can’t think of pages it does crawl to reach the 40k. And 40 times a day sounds like way to many crawled pages for a normal webshop.

                        Hope to hear from you!

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • donford
                          donford last edited by

                          Hello Bob,

                          Here is some food for thought. If you disallow a page in Robots.txt, google for example will not crawl that page. That does not however mean they will remove it from the index if it had previously been crawled. It simply treats it as inaccessible and moves on. It will take some time, months before Google finally says, we have no fresh crawls of page x, its time to remove it from the index.

                          On the other hand if you specifically allow Google to crawl those pages and show a no-index tag on it, Google now has a new directive it can act upon immediately.

                          So my evaluation of the situation would be to do 1 of 2 things.

                          1. Remove the disallow from robots and allow Google to crawl the pages again. However, this time use no-index, no-follow tags.

                          2. Remove the disallow from robots and allow Google to crawl the pages again, but use canonical tags to the main "filter" page to prevent further indexing the specific filter pages.

                          Which option is best depends on the amount of urls being indexed, a few thousand canonical would be my choice. A few hundred thousand, then no index would make more sense.

                          Whichever option, you will have to insure Google re-crawls, and then allow them time to re-index appropriately. Not a quick fix, but a fix none the less.

                          My thoughts and I hope it makes sense,

                          Don

                          Bob_van_Biezen 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • rickyporco

                            After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?

                            I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco
                            0
                          • jeremyskillings

                            Website Snippet Update in Search Console?

                            I have a company that I started working with that has an outdated and inaccurate snippet coming up.  See the link below. They changed their name from DK on Pittsburgh Sports to just DK Pittsburgh Sports several years ago, but the snippet is still putting the old info, including outdated and incorrect description. I'm not seeing that title or description anywhere on the site or a schema plugin.  How can we get it updated?  I have updated titles, etc. for the home page, and done a Fetch to get re-indexed.  Does Snippet have a different type of refresh that I can submit or edit? Thanks in advance https://g.co/kgs/qZAnAC

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings
                            0
                          • vtmoz

                            Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)

                            We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
                            0
                          • Inevo

                            Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?

                            Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
                            0
                          • abhihan

                            Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities

                            We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan
                            0
                          • Philip-DiPatrizio

                            Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?

                            If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage?  Nothing?  Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio
                            0
                          • SharieBags

                            How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?

                            This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months.  To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search.  When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago).  We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video.  They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index.  Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap.  We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap.  After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages.  That makes sense.  We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail.  However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months.  Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags.  That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags
                            0
                          • Visually

                            Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?

                            For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          • Digital Marketers
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.