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.
Indexed pages
-
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers...
- Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages
- Google search using site command: 468 results
- MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs
- Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500)
Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
-
Another option is if the site uses a CMS. If so, then you can create a sitemap for content pages/posts etc,.
Personally, I'm with Krzysztof Furtak on SF. Screaming Frog rocks. It'll find most pages, except perhaps Orphan pages as it wouldn't be able to find a link to crawl to discover the page.
If it's really important to get as many pages as possible, I'd do the following (I've put an Astrix (*) next to ones that some people may think are a tad extreme)
- Run a Screaming Frog crawl
- Grab a sitemap from your CMS
- Check any server-based analytics (AWSTATS etc)
- Check your access_log file & parse out URLs in there**(*)**
- site: queries, with & without www, and also using * as a subdomain (use something like Moz's toolbar to export)
- As Krzysztof suggests, Scrapebox would extract data too, but be careful scraping, you may get an IP slap.(*)
- Export crawl data from Moz & a tool such as Deep Crawl
- Throw the pages from all into Excel and de-dupe.
- Once you have a de-duped list, as an optional last step, go back to Screaming Frog and enter list mode (I have the paid version, not sure if it's possible with the free one) and run a crawl over all the de-duped URLs to get status codes etc
If you're going to do this sort of thing a fair bit - buy a Screaming Frog license, it's an awesome tool and can be useful in a multitude of situations.
-
The site: command is handy for asking Google what pages it knows about, however if Muzzmoz wants to know the number of pages on a site, you'd need more than this.
Also, re: your different ways or querying, I like to use:
site:*.domain.com - This can show other subdomains too, that may otherwise be missed
-
Ok so check with site something under 1000 pages and go to the last results page. You'll see that there'll be different number (in almost all cases).
-
I Will Always Prefer To Check Manually Using Site Command Because, site: operator, which will show us how many pages Google currently has indexed for the domain.
There Will Be Difference Between Index status in search console and current index as search console update the data after few days.
The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because Total indexed excludes URLs identified as duplicates, non-canonical or those that contain a meta no index tag.
Also, Check For Index(Preferred) Version Of Your Site
For E.g-
You can check More About this Here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366?hl=en
-
Hi
Most accurate number is from screaming frog (if you have less than 500 pages or paid version if more than 500).
Google indexes what it wants and if good enough to show in google index. If some pages are similar, got quality issues, blocked by robots etc then it won't show all. BTW don't think number in GSC or google index is good, check it manually because there can be 468 but in fact 200 only.
Moz can have "historical" pages that now don't exists or don't care about quality issues.
The truth is in screaming frog - most accurate number. If you used google user agent then number is the max that can appear in google index. If screaming frog user agent with turned off robots then you'll see bigger number (but google won't show it because of blocks).
If you want to check what's indexed then use tool like scrapebox. First get all urls (maybe without images if you don't care), then check indexed with sb. What's not indexed, can have some issues.
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 -
Japanese URL-structured sitemap (pages) not being indexed by Bing Webmaster Tools
Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Should I put meta descriptions on pages that are not indexed?
I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.
Technical SEO | | Viewpoints0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
How to block "print" pages from indexing
I have a fairly large FAQ section and every article has a "print" button. Unfortunately, this is creating a page for every article which is muddying up the index - especially on my own site using Google Custom Search. Can you recommend a way to block this from happening? Example Article: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/idx.php/11/183/Maintenance-of-Mature-Locks-6-months-/article/How-do-I-get-sand-out-of-my-dreads.html Example "Print" page: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/article.php?id=052&action=print
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0