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.
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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Having Problems to Index all URLs on Sitemap
Hi all again ! Thanks in advance ! My client's site is having problems to index all its pages. I even bought the full extension of XML Sitemaps and the number of urls increased, but we still have problems to index all of them. What are the reasons? The robots.txt is open for all robots, we only prohibit users and spiders to enter our Intranet. I've read that duplicate content and 404's can be the reason. Anything else?
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
New Title and Desciptions on page is visible does that mean index postion is also
Hi, I have a question, Suppose I change some content on my web page, i.e. Title, Description, some body text. And then several days later I see this changes have been reflected within the contents displayed to me when I do a google search. I also notice that at the same time that these contents have been displayed to me that the position of my site has either dropped or increased by several positions. Is it a reasonable assumption to attribute the position change to the changes I made on the webpage or is there usually a delay in position movement upon changes visibly being displayed? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Robdob20130 -
Page crawling is only seeing a portion of the pages. Any Advice?
last couple of page crawls have returned 14 out of 35 pages. Is there any suggestions I can take.
Technical SEO | | cubetech0 -
Why this page doesn't get indexed?
Hi, I've just taken over development and SEO for a site and we're having difficulty getting some key pages indexed on our site. They are two clicks away from the homepage, but still not getting indexed. They are recently created pages, with unique content on. The architecture looks like this:Homepage >> Car page >> Engine specific pageWhenever we add a new car, we link to its 'Car page' and it gets indexed very quickly. However the 'Engine pages' for that car don't get indexed, even after a couple of weeks. An example of one of these index pages are - http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/car-reviews/Volkswagen/Beetle-New/2.0-TSISo, things we've checked - 1. Yes, it's not blocked by robots.txt2. Yes, it's in the sitemap (http://www.carbuzz.co.uk/sitemap.xml)3. Yes, it's viewable to search spiders (e.g. the link is present in the html source)This page doesn't have a huge amount of unique content. We're a review aggregator, but it still does have some. Any suggestions as to why it isn't indexed?Thanks, David
Technical SEO | | soulnafein0 -
Is there any value to a home page URL adding the /index.html ?
For proper SEO, which version would you prefer? A. www.abccompany.com B. www.abccompany.com/index.html Is there any value or difference with either home page URL??
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
Why is Google only indexing 3 of 8 pages?
Hi everyone, I have a small 8 page website I launched about 6 months ago. For the life of me I can not figure out why google is only indexing 3 of the 8 pages. The pages are not duplicate content in any way. I have good internal linking structure. At this time I dont have many inbound links from others, that will come in time. Am I missing something here? Can someone give me a clue? Thanks Tim Site: www.jparizonaweddingvideos.com
Technical SEO | | fasctimseo0