How Google Carwler Cached Orphan pages and directory?
-
I have website www.test.com
I have made some changes in live website and upload it to "demo" directory (which is recently created) for client approval.
Now, my demo link will be www.test.com/demo/
I am not doing any type of link building or any activity which pass referral link to www.test.com/demo/
Then how Google crawler find it and cached some pages or entire directory?
Thanks
-
Try putting the URL into Google and see if you find any pages linking to it.
I knew a company that created a test site that was a copy of a live site (made with a specific hosted CMS). Didn't exclude the test site in robots because "we all know we won't link to it so it'll be ok". Site got indexed, and it was because a person at the company was having problems with the implementation of the test site, went to the help forum (which person didn't think would be indexed) and posted the URL to the test site.
I found the above by just putting in the URL of the test site into Google, and I saw the post in the help desk. You might try the same to see if somehow there is a rogue link.
-
Is google crawling our mails?
Is it possible?
-
Yup, correct.
I was certain I'd replied to this
Anyway, you ever notice how the ads in gmail are always relevant to the content of your emails? Google are totally reading them
-
The <conspiracy hat="">side of things was him commenting that Google is sometimes accused of processing everything in Gmail and could have possibly pulled your link to the demo directory from that.</conspiracy>
-
Hi Barry,
Yes, We were used Gmail for reporting.
Is it make any sense??
-
<conspiracy-hat></conspiracy-hat>
Did either you or your client use gmail when you sent him the demo link?
Regardless, Dan's advice to noindex and block the directory from spiders is the future when doing development work.
-
Hi JoelHit,
NO, There is not any single refferal link to "Demo" directory from entire website and also from third party websites.
I am aware about Google Crawling and Indexing Systems.
Thanks.
-
Hi Thetjo,
I know about it.
My question is that how Google Crawl it without any referral link?
Thanks.
-
Hi Dan,
No, i am not exclude "demo" directory from robots.txt for any search engine.
I am not using wordpress its simple stattic HTML website (Not using any type of CMS).
-
Did this actually happen or are we talking about a hypothetical situation here? It could be that there is a link to the demo directory you've overlooked? Has the /demo folder perhaps been used in the past and there were still old links to it?
As a meta-solution to this problem: prevent crawlers and nosy people from accessing the content by adding a .htpasswd login to the area used for client approval.
-
Did you block the /demo/ directory in your robots.txt file? This is step number one to try and ensure they don't get crawled. Also, are you using wordpress? If so, wordpress automatically pings search engines when you add a post and if you use the common sitemap plugin, when it creates the sitemap it submits it automatically to Google, so that's another way Google could have found it.
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
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Home Page Disappears From Google - But Rest of Site Still Ranked
As title suggests we are running into a serious issue of the home page disapearing from Google search results whilst the rest of the site still remains. We search for it naturally cannot find a trace, then use a "site:" command in Google and still the home page does not come up. We go into web masters and inspect the home page and even Google states that the page is indexable. We then run the "Request Indexing" and the site comes back on Google. This is having a damaging affect and we would like to understand why this issue is happening. Please note this is not happening on just one of our sites but has happened to three which are all located on the same server. One of our brand which has the issue is: www.henweekends.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Google is indexing the wrong page
Hello, I have a site I am optimizing and I cant seem to get a particular listing onto the first page due to the fact google is indexing the wrong page. I have the following scenario. I have a client with multiple locations. To target the locations I set them up with URLs like this /<cityname>-wedding-planner.</cityname> The home page / is optimized for their port saint lucie location. the page /palm-city-wedding-planner is optimized for the palm city location. the page /stuart-wedding-planner is optimized for the stuart location. Google picks up the first two and indexes them properly, BUT the stuart location page doesnt get picked up at all, instead google lists / which is not optimized at all for stuart. How do I "let google know" to index the stuart landing page for the "stuart wedding planner" term? MOZ also shows the / page as being indexed for the stuart wedding planner term as well but I assume this is just a result of what its finding when it performs its searches.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mediagiant0 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
Google crawled my rich snippet pages and then excluded them
Hi guysWe have added schema.org mark up a few months ago and it all looked well and showed up then suddenly last month all the crawled pages disappeared from Webmaster tools Structured data (see the screenshot attached). This happened to another site of mine and I cannot figure out what causes it. Nothing has been changed on the pages and you can see by yourself in the HTML code. Any ideas to why this might happened this way?wenR89I.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Walltopia0 -
Linking to local pages on main page - keyword self-cannibalization issue?
Hi guys, Our website has this landing page: www.example.com/service1/ Is this considered keyword self-cannibalization if on the above page we link to local pages such as: www.example.com/service1-in-chicago/ www.example.com/service1-in-newyork/ www.example.com/service1-in-texas/ Many thanks David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0 -
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Is there any delay between crawling a page by google and displaying of the ratings in rich snippet of the results in google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NEWCRAFT0