Problems with to many indexed pages
-
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links.
Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out.
Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories.
I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index?
The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
-
Great! Please let us know how it goes so we can all learn more about it.
Thanks!
-
Thanks for that! What you are saying makes sense, so I'm going to go ahead and give it a try.
-
"Google: Do Not No Index Pages With Rel Canonical Tags"
https://www.seroundtable.com/noindex-canonical-google-18274.htmlThis is still being debated by people and I'm not saying it is "definitely" your problem. But if you're trying to figure out why those noindexed pages aren't coming out of the index this could be one thing to look into.
John Mueller (see screenshot below) is a Webmaster Trends Analyst for Google.
Good luck.
-
Isn't the whole point of using canonical to give Google a pointer of what page it is originally meant to be?
So if you have a category on shop.com/sub..
Using filter and/or pagenation you then get:
shop.com/sub?p=1
shop.com/sub?color=blue.. and so on! Both those pages then need canonical and neither do we want them index, so we by using both canonical and noindex tell Google to "don't index this page (noindex), here is the original version of it (canonical)".
Or did I misunderstand something?
-
Hello Inevo,
Most of the time when this happens it's just because Google hasn't gotten around to recrawling the pages and updating their index after seeing the new robots meta tag. It can take several months for this to happen on a large site. Submit an XML sitemap and/or create an HTML sitemap that makes it easy for them to get to these pages if you need it to go faster.
I had a look and see some conflicting instructions that Google could possibly be having a problem with.
The paginated version ( e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft?p=2 ) of the page has a rel canonical tag pointing to the first page (e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft/ ). Yet it also has a noindex tag while the canonical page has an index tag. And each page has its own unique title (Side 2 ... Side 3 | ...) . I would remove the rel canonical tag on the paginated pages since they probably don't have any pagerank worth giving to the canonical page. This way it is even more clear to Google that the canonical page is to be indexed, and the others are not to be - instead of saying they are the same page. The same is true of filter pages: http://www.vita.no/gavesett/herre/filter/price-400-/ .
I don't know if that has anything to do with your issue of index bloat, but it's worth a try. I did find some paginated pages in the index.
There also appears to be about 520 blog tag pages indexed. I typically set those to be noindex,follow.
Also remove all paginated pages and any other page that you don't want indexed from your XML sitemaps if you haven't already.
At least for the filter pages, since /filter/ is its own directory, you can use the URL removal tool in GWT. It does have a directory-level removal feature. Of course there are only 75 of these indexed at this moment.
-
My advice would be to include a fresh sitemap and upload it Google Webmaster tool. Not sure about time but I will second Donna, this will take time for the pages to get out of the Google Index.
There is one hack that I used for one page on my website but not sure if it will work for 1000+ pages.
I actually removed a page on my website using Google’s temporary removal request. It kicked the page out of the index for 90 days and in the mean time I added the link in the robots.txt file so it gone quickly and never returned back in the Google listing.
Hope this helps.
-
Hi lnevo,
I had a similar situation last year and am not aware of a faster way to get pages deindexed. You're feeding WMT an updated sitemap right?
It took 8 months for the excess pages to get dropped off my client's site. I'll be listening to hear if anyone knows a faster way.
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
Gradual Drop in GWT Indexed Pages for large website
Hey all, I am working on SEO for a massive sports website. The information provided will be limited but I will give you as much context as possible. I just started digging into it and have found several on-page SEO issues of which I will fix when I get to the meat of it but this seems like something else could be going on. I have attached an image below. It doesn't seem like it's a GWT bug as reported at one point either as it's been gradually dropping over the past year. Also, there is about a 20% drop in traffic in Google Analytics over this time as well. This website has hundreds of thousands of pages of player profiles, sports team information and more all marked up with JSON-LD. Some of the on-page stuff that needs to be fixed are the h1 and h2, title tags and meta description. Also, some of the descriptions are pulled from wikipedia and linked to a "view more" area. Anchor text has "sign up" language as well. Not looking for a magic bullet but to be pointed in the right direction. Where should I start checking off to ensure I cover my bases besides the on page stuff above? There aren't any serious errors and I don't see any manual penalties. There are 4,300 404's but I have seen plenty of sites with that many 404's all of which still got traffic. It doesn't look like a sitemap was submitted to GWT and when I try submitting sitemap.xml, I get a 504 error (network unreachable). Thanks for reading. I am just getting started on this project but would like to spend as much time sharpening the axe before getting to work. lJWk8Rh
Technical SEO | | ArashG0 -
New site: More pages for usability, or fewer more detailed pages for greater domain authority flow?
Ladies and gents! We're building a new site. We have a list of 28 professions, and we're wondering whether or not to include them all on one long and detailed page, or to keep them on their own separate pages. Thinking about the flow of domain authority - I could see 28 pages diluting it quite heavily - but at the same time, I think having the separate pages would be better for the user. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap1 -
Indexing Problem
My URL is: www.memovalley.comWe have submitted our sitemap last month and we are having issues seeing our URLs listed in the search results. Even though our sitemaps contain over 200 URLs, we only currently only have 7 listed (excluding blog.memovalley.com).Can someone help us with this? | |
Technical SEO | | Memovalley
| | | | It looks like Googlebot has timed out, at least once, for one of our URLs. Why is Googlebot timing out? My server is located at Amazon WS, in North Carolina and it is a small instance. Could Google be querying multiple URLs at the same time and jamming my servers? Could it be becauseThanks for your help!0 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Too Many On-Page Links on a Blog
I have a question about the number of on-page links on a page and the implications on how we're viewed by search engines. After SEOmoz crawls our website, we consistently get notifications that some of our pages have "Too Many On-Page Links." These are always limited to pages on our blog, and largely a function of our tag cloud (~ 30 links) plus categories (10 links) plus popular posts (5 links). These all display on every blog post in the sidebar. How significant a problem is this? And, if you think it is a significant problem, what would you suggest to remedy the problem? Here's a link to our blog in case it helps: http://wiredimpact.com/blog/ The above page currently is listed as having 138 links. Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks so much. David
Technical SEO | | WiredImpact0 -
"Too Many On-Page Links" Issue
I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page. The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/ Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?
Technical SEO | | BethelMedia0 -
Existing Pages in Google Index and Changing URLs
Hi!! I am launching a newly recoded site this week and had a another noobie question. The URL structure has changed slightly and I have installed a 301 redirect to take care of that. I am wondering how Google will handle my "old" pages? Will they just fall out of the index? Or does the 301 redirect tell Google to rewrite the URLs in the index? I am just concerned I may see an "old" page and a "new" page with the same content in the index. Just want to make sure I have covered all my bases. Thanks!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0