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!
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
-
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | walletapp0 -
Google indexed wrong pages of my website.
When I google site:www.ayurjeewan.com, after 8 pages, google shows Slider and shop pages. Which I don't want to be indexed. How can I get rid of these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Here's an example: I get a 404 error for this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all But a search for qjamba restaurant coupons gives a clear result as does this: site:http://www.qjamba.com/restaurants-coupons/ferguson/mo/all What is going on? How can this page be indexed but not in the Google cache? I should make clear that the page is not showing up with any kind of error in webmaster tools, and Google has been crawling pages just fine. This particular page was fetched by Google yesterday with no problems, and even crawled again twice today by Google Yet, no cache.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood2 -
Is Google indexing Mp3 audio and MIDI music files? Can that cause any duplicate problems?
Hello, I own virtualsheetmusic.com website and we have several thousands of media files (Mp3 and MIDI files) that potentially Google can index. If that's the case, I am wondering if that could cause any "duplicate" issues of some sort since many of such media files have exact file names or same meta information inside. Any thoughts about this issue are very welcome! Thank you in advance to anyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Should I Allow Blog Tag Pages to be Indexed?
I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0