Indexing isolated webpages
-
Hi all,
We are running a classifieds website.Due to technical limitations, we will probably not be able to list or search expired ads, but we still can view ad details view page if you landed on expired ad from external page (or google search results).Our concern is, if the ad page is still exists, but it's totally isolated from the website (i.e not found by search option on the website and no following site links) will google remove it from the index?Thanks,T
-
I agree with Hutch42, the isolated pages are what the industry calls "orphan pages". There is some good info about the subject you may want to dive into before you make your final decision.
-
You may want to be careful keeping pages live that are basically useless to visitors, if the ads are expired and it makes people leave your site (bounce) it will hurt your entire site, not just those pages.
-
Thanks Hutch42, I actually want to keep ranking for these expired ads despite not having them displated in the classified ads list since they have decent ranking on some long tail searches and I can't create specific landing pages with fresh content to target these searches yet.
-
It will not remove a page just because the link is gone. Your best bet would be to set up your back end to automaticly add a noindex meta tag into the of ads once they expire.
Example of tag
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
-
How can a Page indexed without crawled?
Hey moz fans,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
In the google getting started guide it says **"
Note: **Pages may be indexed despite never having been crawled: the two processes are independent of each other. If enough information is available about a page, and the page is deemed relevant to users, search engine algorithms may decide to include it in the search results despite never having had access to the content directly. That said, there are simple mechanisms such as robots meta tags to make sure that pages are not indexed.
" How can it happen, I dont really get the point.
Thank you0 -
Why is this site not indexed by Google?
Hi all and thanks for your help in advance. I've been asked to take a look at a site, http://www.yourdairygold.ie as it currently does not appear for its brand name, Your Dairygold on Google Ireland even though it's been live for a few months now. I've checked all the usual issues such as robots.txt (doesn't have one) and the robots meta tag (doesn't have them). The even stranger thing is that the site does rank on Yahoo! and Bing. Google Webmaster Tools shows that Googlebot is crawling around 150 pages a day but the total number of pages indexed is zero. It does appear if you carry out a site: search on Google however. The site is very poorly optimised in terms of title tags, unnecessary redirects etc which I'm working on now but I wondered if you guys had any further insights. Thanks again for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iProspect-Ireland0 -
Defining Canonical First and Later No Indexing
We found some repetitive pages on site which has mostly sort or filter parameters, tried lot to remove them but nothing much improvement Is it correct way that:- a) We are creating new pages altogther of that section and putting up rel canonical tag from old ones to new ones b) Now, after canonical declared, we will noindex the old pages Is it a correct way to let new pages supercede the old pages with new pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Huge Google index on E-commerce site
Hi Guys, I got a question which i can't understand. I'm working on a e-commerce site which recently got a CMS update including URL updates.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn7
We did a lot of 301's on the old url's (around 3000 /4000 i guess) and submitted a new sitemap (around 12.000 urls, of which 10.500 are indexed). The strange thing is.. When i check the indexing status in webmaster tools Google tells me there are over 98.000 url's indexed.
Doing the site:domainx.com Google tells me there are 111.000 url's indexed. Another strange thing which another forum member describes here : Cache date has been reverted And next to that old url's (which have a 301 for about a month now) keep showing up in the index. Does anyone know what i could do to solve the problem?0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fretts0 -
Sudden Index drop, but traffic increased?
Here are the numbers- Pages submitted on sitemap- About 18k Total Pages indexed on 12/30- About 250k Total Pages indexed on 1/6- About 81k We made no site changes in that week, why the sudden drop? Also why is total pages indexed so much higher than sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down. The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet. I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile. Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content? Thanks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Thousands of 404 Pages Indexed - Recommendations?
Background: I have a newly acquired client who has had a lot of issues over the past few months. What happened is he had a major issue with broken dynamic URL's where they would start infinite loops due to redirects and relative links. His previous SEO didn't pay attention to the sitemaps created by a backend generator, and it caused hundreds of thousands of pages to be indexed. Useless pages. These useless pages were all bringing up a 404 page that didn't have a 404 server response (it had a 200 response) which created a ton of duplicate content and bad links (relative linking). Now here I am, cleaning up this mess. I've fixed the 404 page so it creates a 404 server response. Google webmaster tools is now returning thousands of "not found" errors, great start. I fixed all site errors that cause infinite redirects. Cleaned up the sitemap and submitted it. When I search site:www.(domainname).com I am still getting an insane amount of pages that no longer exist. My question: How does Google handle all of these 404's? My client wants all the bad pages removed now but I don't have as much control over that. It's a slow process getting Google to remove these pages that are returning a 404. He is continuously dropping in rankings still. Is there a way of speeding up the process? It's not reasonable to enter tens of thousands of pages into the URL Removal Tool. I want to clean house and have Google just index the pages in the sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0