Does Google index internal anchors as separate pages?
-
Hi,
Back in September, I added a function that sets an anchor on each subheading (h[2-6]) and creates a Table of content that links to each of those anchors. These anchors did show up in the SERPs as JumpTo Links. Fine.
Back then I also changed the canonicals to a slightly different structur and meanwhile there was some massive increase in the number of indexed pages - WAY over the top - which has since been fixed by removing (410) a complete section of the site. However ... there are still ~34.000 pages indexed to what really are more like 4.000 plus (all properly canonicalised). Naturally I am wondering, what google thinks it is indexing. The number is just way of and quite inexplainable.
So I was wondering:
Does Google save JumpTo links as unique pages?
Also, does anybody know any method of actually getting all the pages in the google index? (Not actually existing sites via Screaming Frog etc, but actual pages in the index - all methods I found sadly do not work.)
Finally: Does somebody have any other explanation for the incongruency in indexed vs. actual pages?
Thanks for your replies!
Nico
-
Thanks - so I have to continue the search for where a tenfold increase in indexed pages (according to Search Console) might possibly come from. Sadly, the rest of your reply misses my problem; probably I have been unclear.
The reason I was asking for a method to know what pages ARE indexed is: I seem to have no problem getting stuff indexed (crystal-clear sitemap with dates; clear link structure &c.) but google seems over-eager and indexes more than there really is. If it is some technical problem, I'd like to fix that - but Google does not show anywhere what pages are actually indexed. There are lots of methods around - but none that I found do work as of now.
I have been well aware of JumpTo-Links, as I stated, and it works nicely. No problem at all with "not enough" indexed pages - really rather the opposite with no idea what causes it.
Regards
Nico
-
I agree with Russ that the anchors are not going to be indexed separately.... but I believe that those anchors are kickass page optimization that is second only behind the title tag. More info here.
-
1. The anchor pages aren't going to be indexed separately. If you are lucky, you might get a rich snippet from them in the SERPs, which would be nice. You can see an example of this if you search Google for "broken link building" and look at the top position.
2. Google likely has a crawl budget for sites based on a number of factors - inbound links, content uniqueness, etc. Your best bet is to make sure you have a strong link architecture, a complete and updated sitemap, and a good link profile.
3. Google can't index the whole web, nor would they want to. They just want to index pages that have a strong likelihood of ranking so they can build the best possible search engine.
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
-
Home Page Being Indexed / Referral URLs /
I have a few questions related to home page URLs being indexed, canonicalization, and GA reporting... 1. I can view the home page by typing in domain.com , domain.com/ and domain.com/index.htm There are no redirects and it's canonicalized to point to domain.com/index.htm -- how important is it to have redirects? I don't want unnecessary redirects or canonical tags, but I noticed the trailing slash can sometimes be typed in manually on other pages, sometimes not. 2. When I do a site search (site:domain.com), sometimes the HP shows up as "domain.com/", never "domain.com/index.htm" or "domain.com", and sometimes the HP doesn't show up period. This seems to change several times a day, sometimes within 15 minutes. I have no idea what is causing it and I don't know if it has anything to do with #1. In a perfect world, I would ask for the /index.htm to be dropped and redirected to .com/, and the canonical to point to .com/ 3. I've noticed in GA I see / , /index.htm, and a weird Google referral URL (/index.htm?referrer=https://www.google.com/) all showing up as top pages. I think the / and /index.htm is because I haven't setup a default URL in GA, but I'm not sure what would cause the referrer. I tracked back when the referrer URL started to show up in the top pages, and it was right around the time they moved over to https://, so I'm not sure what the best option is to remove that. I know this is a lot - I appreciate any insight anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | DigMS0 -
Drop in Indexed Page + Organic Traffic
Hey Moz Community, I've been seeing a steady decrease in search console of pages being indexed by Google for our eCommerce site. This is corresponding to lower impressions and traffic in general this year. We started with around a million pages being indexed in Nov of 2015 down to 18,000 pages this Nov. I realized that since we don't have around 3,000 or so products year round this is mostly likely a good thing. I've checked to make sure our main landing pages are being indexed which they are and our sitemap was updated several times this year, although we're in the process of updating it again to resubmit. I also checked our robots.txt and there's nothing out of the ordinary. In the last month we've recently gotten rid of some duplicate content issues caused by pagination by using canonical tags but that's all we've done to reduce the number of pages crawled. We have seen some soft 404's and some server errors coming up in our crawl error report that we've either fixed or are trying to fix. Not really sure where to start looking to find a solution to the problem or if it's even a huge issue, but the drop in traffic is also not great. The drop in traffic corresponded to lose in rankings as well so there could be correlation or none. Any ideas here?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
Example of Google Indexing my Feedburner Links
As you can see, there are 2 results for the same page. One is the correct page URL, the other has the Feedburner parameters at the end: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/improving-user-engagement-with-the-right-blog-commenting-system.html http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/improving-user-engagement-with-the-right-blog-commenting-system.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Can this cause duplicate content issues? Can I prevent Google from indexing my Feedburner links? My Feedburner settings are already set to noindex, what else can I do?!? 22cfThX.png
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Google is indexing my directories
I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Google Alerts almost never alerts me to my own pages being added.
Hello All, So i have a fairly decent blog http://www.symbolphoto.com/bl*g/ * replace with o. However, i'm posting to it once/twice a week and i never ever see in my google alerts my pages being included. I do include my search terms in my pages "Bston Wedding Photgrapher" yet, my page is never included. What on earth am i doing wrong? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! -Brendan
Technical SEO | | symbolphoto0 -
How to get Google to index another page
Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
How best to set up Google + business pages for clients
I wish to setup a business page on google+ business page for my clients but it requires a personal profile, my clients don't want a personal profile but do want the business page. Currently i have set them up with pages on my personal profile but do can i allow the client to manage it? so i am not sure this is the best way Whats the best way for web developers to setup Google+ accounts for clients?
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb1