Indexing/Sitemap - I must be wrong
-
Hi All,
I would guess that a great number of us new to SEO (or not) share some simple beliefs in relation to Google indexing and Sitemaps, and as such get confused by what Web master tools shows us.
It would be great if somone with experience/knowledge could clear this up for once and all
Common beliefs:
-
Google will crawl your site from the top down, following each link and recursively repeating the process until it bottoms out/becomes cyclic.
-
A Sitemap can be provided that outlines the definitive structure of the site, and is especially useful for links that may not be easily discovered via crawling.
-
In Google’s webmaster tools in the sitemap section the number of pages indexed shows the number of pages in your sitemap that Google considers to be worthwhile indexing.
-
If you place a rel="canonical" tag on every page pointing to the definitive version you will avoid duplicate content and aid Google in its indexing endeavour.
These preconceptions seem fair, but must be flawed.
Our site has 1,417 pages as listed in our Sitemap. Google’s tools tell us there are no issues with this sitemap but a mere 44 are indexed! We submit 2,716 images (because we create all our own images for products) and a disappointing zero are indexed.
Under Health->Index status in WM tools, we apparently have 4,169 pages indexed. I tend to assume these are old pages that now yield a 404 if they are visited.
It could be that Google’s Indexed quotient of 44 could mean “Pages indexed by virtue of your sitemap, i.e. we didn’t find them by crawling – so thanks for that”, but despite trawling through Google’s help, I don’t really get that feeling.
This is basic stuff, but I suspect a great number of us struggle to understand the disparity between our expectations and what WM Tools yields, and we go on to either ignore an important problem, or waste time on non-issues.
Can anyone shine a light on this for once and all?
If you are interested, our map looks like this :
http://www.1010direct.com/Sitemap.xml
Many thanks
Paul
-
-
44 relates to the number of pages with the same urls as in your sitemap - it is not everything that is index. Your old site is still indexed and being found, as Google visits those pages and gets redirected to a new page it is likely that number will increase (from 44) and the number of old indexed will decrease.
Google doesn't index sites on a one-off go around because then if may take say 4 months to come back and index again and if you've a new important page that gets lots of links and you don't get indexed and ranked for it because you've not been visited you wouldn't be happy. Also if this was done on every site it would take forever and take much more resources than even google has. it is annoying but you've just got to grin and bear it - at least you old site is still ranking and being found.
-
Thanks Andy,
What I dont get, is why Google would index in this way. I can understand why they would weight the importance of a page based on the number/strength of incoming links but not the decision to index it at all when lead in by a sitemap.
I just get a little frustrated when Google offers you seemingly definitive stats only to find they are so vague and mysterious they have little to no value. We should have 1400+ pages indexed, we clearly have more than 44 indexed ... what on earth does the number 44 relate to?
-
I think that as your sitemap reflect your new urls and this is what the index is based on you are likely to have more indexed from what you say. I would suggest going to "indexed status" under health of GWT and click total index and ever crawled, this may help clear this up.
-
I experienced this issue with sandboxed websites.
Market your products and in a few months every page should be in Google's index.
Cheers.
-
Thanks for the quick responses.
We had a bit of a URL reshuffle recently to make them a little more informative and to prevent each page URL terminating with "product.aspx". But that was around a month ago. Prior to that, we were around 40% indexed for pages (from the sitemap section of WM tools), and always zero for images.
So given that we clearly have more than 44 pages indexed by Google, what do you think that figure actually means?
-
dealing with your indexing issue first - depending on when you submitted depends how soon those pages may be indexed. I say "may" because a sitemap (yes answering another question) is just an indicator of "i have these pages" it does not mean they will be indexed - indeed unless you've a small website you will never have 100% indexation in my experience.
Spiders (search robots) index / visit a website / page via another link. They follow links to a page from around the web, or the site itself. The more links from around the web the quicker you will get indexed. (this explains why if you've 10,000 pages you won't ever get a link from other websites to them all and so they won't all get indexed). This means if you've a web page that gets a ton of links it will be indexed sooner than those with just 1 link - assuming all links are equal (which they aren't).
Spiders are not cyclic in their searching, it's very ad-hoc based on links in your site and other sites linking to you. A spider won't be sent to spider every page on your site - it will do a small amount at a time, this is likely why 44 pages are indexed and not more at this point.
A sitemap is (as i say) an indicator of pages in your site, the importance of them and when they were updated / created. it's not really a definitive structure - it's more of a reference guide. Think of it as you being the guide on a bus tour of a city, the search engine is your passenger you are pointing out places of interest and every so often it will see something it wan't to see and get off to look, but it may take many trips to get off at every stop.
Finally, Canonicals are a great way to clear up duplicate content issues. They aren't 100% successful but they do help - especially if you are using dynamic urls (such as paginating category pages).
hope that helps
-
I see your frustration, how long ago did you submit these site maps? Are we talking a couple of weeks or a couple of days/ a day? As I've seen myself, Google is not that fast at calculating the nr of pages indexed (definitely not within GWT). Mostly within a couple of days/ within a week Google largely increased the nr of pages indexed.
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
-
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
Question about Indexing of /?limit=all
Hi, i've got your SEO Suite Ultimate installed on my site (www.customlogocases.com). I've got a relatively new magento site (around 1 year). We have recently been doing some pr/seo for the category pages, for example /custom-ipad-cases/ But when I search on google, it seems that google has indexed the /custom-ipad-cases/?limit=all This /?limit=all page is one without any links, and only has a PA of 1. Whereas the standard /custom-ipad-cases/ without the /? query has a much higher pa of 20, and a couple of links pointing towards it. So therefore I would want this particular page to be the one that google indexes. And along the same logic, this page really should be able to achieve higher rankings than the /?limit=all page. Is my thinking here correct? Should I disallow all the /? now, even though these are the ones that are indexed, and the others currently are not. I'd be happy to take the hit while it figures it out, because the higher PA pages are what I ultimately am getting links to... Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobAus0 -
Google Webmaster Tools -> Sitemap suddent "indexed" drop
Hello MOZ, We had an massive SEO drop in June due to unknown reasons and we have been trying to recover since then. I've just noticed this yesterday and I'm worried. See: http://imgur.com/xv2QgCQ Could anyone help by explaining what would cause this sudden drop and what does this drop translates to exactly? What is strange is that our index status is still strong at 310 pages, no drop there: http://imgur.com/a1sRAKo And when I do search on google site:globecar.com everything seems normal see: http://imgur.com/O7vPkqu Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeCar0 -
Should I redirect my xml sitemap?
Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Sitemap Issue - vol 2
Hello everyone! I validated the sitemap with different tools (w3Schools, and so on..) and no errors were found. So I uploaded into my site, tested it through GWT and BANG! all of a sudden there is a parsing error, which correspond to the last, and I mean last piece of code of thousand of lines, . I don't know why it isn't reading the code and it's giving me this as there are no other errors and I haven't got a clue about what to do in order to fix it! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Index.php canonical/dup issues
Hello my fellow SEOs! I would LOVE some additional insight/opinions on the following... I have a client who is an industry leader, big site, ranks for many competitive phrases, blah blah..you get the picture. However, they have a big dup content/canonical issue. Most pages resolve with and without the /index.php at the end of the URL. Obviously this is a dup content issue but more importantly they SEs sometimes serve an "index.php" version of the page, sometimes they don't, and it is constantly changing which version it serves and the rank goes up and down. Now, I've instructed them that we are going to need to write a sitewide redirect to attempt a uniform structure. Most people would say, redirect to the non index.php version buttttt 1. The index.php pages consistently outperforms the non index.php versions, except the homepage. 2. The client really would prefer to have the "index.php" at the end of the URL The homepage performs extremely well for a lot of competitive phrases. I'd like to redirect all pages to the "index.php" version except the homepage and I'm thinking that if I redirect all pages EXCEPT the homepage to the index.php version, it could cause some unforeseen issues. I can not use rel=canonical because they have many different versions of the their pages with different country codes in the URL..example, if I make the US version canonical, it will hurt the pages trying to rank with a fr URL, de URL, (where fr/de are country codes in the URL depending where the user is, it serves the correct version). Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeCoughlin0