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.
Investigating a huge spike in indexed pages
-
I've noticed an enormous spike in pages indexed through WMT in the last week. Now I know WMT can be a bit (OK, a lot) off base in its reporting but this was pretty hard to explain. See, we're in the middle of a huge campaign against dupe content and we've put a number of measures in place to fight it. For example:
-
Implemented a strong canonicalization effort
-
NOINDEX'd content we know to be duplicate programatically
-
Are currently fixing true duplicate content issues through rewriting titles, desc etc.
So I was pretty surprised to see the blow-up. Any ideas as to what else might cause such a counter intuitive trend? Has anyone else see Google do something that suddenly gloms onto a bunch of phantom pages?
-
-
I haven't contacted the forum yet but that's my next step.
Pages indexed: 91k
Blocked by robots.txt: 8.4million
I don't even know how you could create 8.4 million indexable pages from our content.
-
Have you contacted the Google Webmaster Help forums? As that seems to be a glitch in Google.
How many pages are scraped by Mozbot? If the amount that mozbot shows is different, then you should either sit and wait until Google removes those indexed pages or create a conversation on the forums so someone at google can give you a hint of what is going on.
-
Any help out there? Since the original question was posted, I've seen some improvement but even with aggressive canonicalization and noindexing, I'm still seeing a boatload of indexed pages. I am still seeing pages indexed that I've asked explicitly to be omitted by robots.txt (/search.aspx and */filter). I'm guessing it's just going to take a while to deindex what's there. Still, 91k pages indexed is quite a lot when you consider we only have about 3-4k pages and some articles.
Is anyone aware of any significant releases by Google?
-
Quite recent. We were actually seeing a nice downward trend in the huge number of pages indexed and then the number tripled. Crazy is an understatement. I would have thought the number of pages would fall given the number of pages that now use canonicals.
-
How long have you waited since you applied all the rules to avoid duplicate content, as if it was just recently, then Google should be "rebuilding" the index of your site and stats may be a little crazy while that is happening.
If it was over 2 month ago and you are seeing the increase now, then I'd suggest you revise the rules you created to see if your own Website isn't creating all those new pages.
Hope that 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
-
Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only
Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk0 -
Escort directory page indexing issues
Re; escortdirectory-uk.com, escortdirectory-usa.com, escortdirectory-oz.com.au,
Technical SEO | | ZuricoDrexia
Hi, We are an escort directory with 10 years history. We have multiple locations within the following countries, UK, USA, AUS. Although many of our locations (towns and cities) index on page one of Google, just as many do not. Can anyone give us a clue as to why this may be?0 -
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
When creating parent and child pages should key words be repeated in url and page title?
We are in the direct mail advertising business: PrintLabelAndMail.com Example: Parent:
Technical SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach
Postcard Direct Mail Children:
Postcard Mailings
Postcard Design
Postcard Samples
Postcard Pricing
Postcard Advantages should "postcard" be repeated in the URL and Page Title? and in this example should each of the 5 children link back directly to the parent or would it be better to "daisy chain" them using each as parent for the next?0 -
Should i index or noindex a contact page
Im wondering if i should noindex the contact page im doing SEO for a website just wondering if by noindexing the contact page would it help SEO or hurt SEO for that website
Technical SEO | | aronwp0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
De-indexing millions of pages - would this work?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce site with a catalogue of around 5 million products. Unfortunately, we have let Googlebot crawl and index tens of millions of search URLs, the majority of which are very thin of content or duplicates of other URLs. In short: we are in deep. Our bloated Google-index is hampering our real content to rank; Googlebot does not bother crawling our real content (product pages specifically) and hammers the life out of our servers. Since having Googlebot crawl and de-index tens of millions of old URLs would probably take years (?), my plan is this: 301 redirect all old SERP URLs to a new SERP URL. If new URL should not be indexed, add meta robots noindex tag on new URL. When it is evident that Google has indexed most "high quality" new URLs, robots.txt disallow crawling of old SERP URLs. Then directory style remove all old SERP URLs in GWT URL Removal Tool This would be an example of an old URL:
Technical SEO | | TalkInThePark
www.site.com/cgi-bin/weirdapplicationname.cgi?word=bmw&what=1.2&how=2 This would be an example of a new URL:
www.site.com/search?q=bmw&category=cars&color=blue I have to specific questions: Would Google both de-index the old URL and not index the new URL after 301 redirecting the old URL to the new URL (which is noindexed) as described in point 2 above? What risks are associated with removing tens of millions of URLs directory style in GWT URL Removal Tool? I have done this before but then I removed "only" some useless 50 000 "add to cart"-URLs.Google says themselves that you should not remove duplicate/thin content this way and that using this tool tools this way "may cause problems for your site". And yes, these tens of millions of SERP URLs is a result of a faceted navigation/search function let loose all to long.
And no, we cannot wait for Googlebot to crawl all these millions of URLs in order to discover the 301. By then we would be out of business. Best regards,
TalkInThePark0