Single URL not indexed
-
Hi everyone!
Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index.
We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links.
The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed.
Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......
-
Hi Nick,
first of all, thanx for your responses.
I already did the "fetch as Googlebot" thing 5 days ago. The page was successfully crawled and has been sent to the index successfully, according to Google Webmaster Tools. But in these 5 days, nothing changed.
I like your suggestions with the extra text. We will add some and do the "fetch as Googlebot" again and see what happens.
And you are absolutely right when it comes to the "value" of this page. It didn't send that much traffic, just a little. It is no big deal for us if this page doesn't get back into the index - but as someone doing SEO I want to figure out the problem Google seems to have with this page - just to test and learn for future problems
-
Replying to myself because I just noticed something I was wrong about.
I thought that the first box at the top was an excerpt of the page it links to, but it looks like it IS actually unique.
So you probably don't need to add anything, though expanding on that text in the first box might be a good idea.
Try to get a link to that page and see if that helps.
-
The thing is those words do appear elsewhere on the site, and Google can probably figure out that what is on this particular page is excerpts and links to the originals.
This normally isn't a huge problem, though. Lots of sites and blogs have category and tag pages that fit that description and ARE indexed (though many are not).
Before messing around with adding text which you may not really need to add, try doing a Fetch as Googlebot of the page in Google Webmaster Tools and hit the submit button when the fetch is complete. It may be that the page just got dropped by accident. If it doesn't return to the index after a few days, try adding a little totally unique content. Just a sentence or two about what these links are should be enough. I have done this on a few sites with lots of thin tag or category pages and it doesn't take a lot of text to get them into the index.
Partner link pages are also typically thin, but they may be indexed anyway if the links are useful, or ignored if it is simply a link exchange page that doesn't really have any value other than swapping links (which isn't much value). Like most things related to Google search, there isn't always a specific thing that will make the difference.
What you may want to consider is whether or not you want or need that page to appear in search, and if you think it could or should actually rank well for anything. If it doesn't matter, I wouldn't be too concerned unless there are many pages on the site that are not indexed.
-
Quite strange - I see someone visiting this URL in the Google-Analytics real-time-report.
Traffic source is direct, and Google labels this site as "/empty". Any ideas why?
-
Hi Nick,
I knwo the page is not full of content - but if you count the words, they are almost 300. And we do not have pages with the same content or links on our domain.
It could be a solution to add more text, but what about pages with partner links, for example? They normally have no content and lots of external links - so they should also be seen an "thin pages"?!
-
It may be worth generating and submitting an XML sitemap, with this page relatively high up in the map, and submitting it to Google. This then might prompt Google to crawl the page and index it.
ScreamingFrog is a free tool that generates an XML sitemap for you, while there are also free generators out there as well with just a quick google search.
-
Hi Tom,
well, honestly, we do not have a sitemap...
And no, there are no other pages with similar content on our domain.
As you said it: quite odd!
-
It may have been dropped because it was seen as "thin" content. Since most of the page is excerpts from and links to other pages, it is likely being ignored - especially if there are other pages that have the same excerpts and links. If you can add unique, some descriptive text to the page, it may do better.
And about the PageRank: The PR you can see in the Toolbar or other PR checks is usually very out of date. It could be that prior to your page's disappearance, it had a high PR and really does not now. While the visible PR can be used to get a pretty good idea of how Google ranks a page, I wouldn't give it much thought. Plenty of low PR pages rank very well for whatever search terms they are targeting, and lots of high PR pages don't rank very well.
-
That is quite odd - checked all those things from my end and found the same, but still not indexed.
My only other check at this stage would be to ask if its in the .xml sitemap that you have submitted in Google Webmaster Tools? And whether or not this page features similar content to any other pages on your site?
You've probably checked both already, but thought I'd ask just to be sure.
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
-
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?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
No index
Screaming frog spider does index pages on our website like: wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/assets/js/frontend/jquery-ui-touch-punch.min.js?ver=2.3.9 wp-content/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/assets/css/checkbox.min.css?ver=2.3.2 Is it a bad/good idea to set my parameters in Webmastertools and tell Google not to crawl pages that begin with wp/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Some URLs in the sitemap not indexed
Our company site has hundreds of thousands of pages. Yet no matter how big or small the total page count, I have found that the "URLs Indexed" in GWMT has never matched "URLS in Sitemap". When we were small and now that we have a LOT more pages, there is always a discrepancy of ~10% or so missing from the index. It's difficult to know which pages are not indexed, but I have found some that I can verify are in the Sitemap.xml file but not at all in the index. When I go to GWMT I can "Fetch and Render" missing pages fine - it's not as though it's blocked or inaccessible. Any ideas on why this is? Is this type of discrepancy typical?
Technical SEO | | Mase0 -
How to Find all the Pages Index by Google?
I'm planning on moving my online store, http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ to a new platform, http://www.corecommerce.com/ To reduce the SEO impact, I want to redirect 301 all the pages index by Google to the new page I will create in the new platform. I will keep the same domaine name, but all the URL will be customize on the new platform for better SEO. Also, is there a way or tool to create CSV file from those page index. Can Webmaster tool help? You can read my question about this subject here, http://www.seomoz.org/q/impacts-on-moving-online-store-to-new-platform Thank you, BigBlaze
Technical SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Block url with dynamic text in
I've just ran a report and I have a lot of duplicate page titles, most of which seem to be the review page, I use Magento and my normal url would be something like blah-blahtext.html but the review url is something like blah-blahtext/reviews/category/categoryname So I want to block the /reviews url bit as no one ever leaves reviews and it's not something I will be using in the future. Also I have a dynamic navigation which creates urls that look like product-name.html?size=2&colour=14 these are also creating duplicate urls, anyway to fix this? While I'm asking, anyone any tips for Magento?
Technical SEO | | Beermonster0 -
Page not being indexed
Hi all, On our site we have a lot of bookmaker reviews, and we are ranking pretty good for most bookmaker names as keywords, however a single bookmaker seems to have been shunned by Google. For a search "betsafe" in Denmark, this page does not appear among the top 50: http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe All of our other review pages rank in top 10-20 for the bookmaker name as keyword. What to do if Google has "banned" a page? Best regards, Rasmus
Technical SEO | | rasmusbang0 -
URL Length
What is the ideal length for an item's URL. Theirs a few different options. A) www.mydomain.com/item-name B) www.mydomain.com/category-name/product-name C) www.mydomain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name Please choose A, B, or C and explain why you made that decision. Looking forward to the responses.
Technical SEO | | Romancing0 -
Blog URLs
I read somewhere - pretty sure is was in Art of SEO - that having dates in the blog permalink URLs was a bad idea. e.g. /blog/2011/3/my-blog-post/ However, looking at Wordpress best practice, it's also not a good idea to have a URL without a number - it's more resource hungry if you don't , apparently. e.g. /blog/my-blog-post/ Does anyone have any views on this? Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | atticus70