Total Indexed 1.5M vs 83k submitted by sitemap. What?
-
We recently took a good look at one of our content site's sitemap and tried to cut out a lot of crap that had gotten in there such as .php, .xml, .htm versions of each page. We also cut out images to put in a separate image sitemap.
The sitemap generated 83,000+ URLs for google to crawl (this partially used the Yoast Wordpress plugin to generate)
In webmaster tools in the index status section is showing that this site has a total index of 1.5 million.
With our sitemap coming back with 83k and google indexing 1.5 million pages, is this a sign of a CMS gone rogue? Is it an indication that we could be pumping out error pages or empty templates, or junk pages that we're cramming into Google's bot?
I would love to hear what you guys think. Is this normal? Is this something to be concerned about? Should our total index more closely match our sitemap page count?
-
As well as parameters mentioned you may possibly have heaps of duplicating categories, tags etc. What I would also do is start searching Google with something like site:www.example.com/directory/ or possibly site:www.example.com/category/directory/directory/ so you are tightly narrowing down the results, switch to 100 results per page and manually look for clues.
-
If you have 1.5 million pages and you think your sitemap is comprehensive at 83,000 then yes, your CMS is needlessly generating pages. It's usually not a big deal from a ranking standpoint, but it can make other important issues hard to detect. I would clean it up, but that's a business call you'll have to make.
The first step is diagnosing where are the URLs are coming from. What you do next will depend, but I will give you the best advice I can without knowing what types of extraneous URLs you have and how Google is treating them:
First, I'd start with WMT > Crawl > URL Parameters. Quite often your CMS will generate URLs, and Google usually knows how to handle them. If there are a lot of URL parameters, Google them and see if they're exactly the same as other pages. If they are, make sure you have canonical tags in place to point them to the main version. There's more you can do with parameters, but it'll depend on what you find so I won't go into more detail. As a general rule, though, a CMS should not generate a page unless it is uniquely useful as differentiated landing page or a page for people to link to.
Also check for parameters in your analytics program. They could actually be messing up your pageview data depending on how you report.There's a post on fixing that in GA here:
http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/03/29/remove-url-parameters-from-google-analytics-reports/
Next I'd look at the "Advanced" tab in WMT > Google Index > Index Status . Are there a lot of URLs removed? If so, check on these pages and see why they're removed and why they exist.
I would also run a crawl with Xenu and Screaming Frog to make sure crawlers are finding a reasonable number of pages and that they're not getting stuck in crawl loops. (crawling variations of a page endlessly). These kinds of issues can prevent new pages from being indexed on time because Google is wasting time (your crawl budget) running in circles.
-
Rob,
Your sitemap is but an indication to Google about urls on your domain. The sitemap does not limit google to crawling or indexing only the urls listed on it, nor is it a directive that tells google to remove urls from the index that it has already crawled. As stated in GWT, use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results with the URL removal tool Google webmaster tools under the "google index" link.
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
-
The Bad effect of Submitting Sitemap frequently?
Hi Mozzer... so, i keep thinking of this... what is the bad effect of submitting the sitemap frequently? is it something like google would smell something suspicious and begin to decrease my website's authority? and is there any supporting articles for it? my website is an e-commerce website by the way... so please, help me with this.. Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ricoplaza0 -
Google slow to index pages
Hi We've recently had a product launch for one of our clients. Historically speaking Google has been quick to respond, i.e when the page for the product goes live it's indexed and performing for branded terms within 10 minutes (without 'Fetch and Render'). This time however, we found that it took Google over an hour to index the pages. we found initially that press coverage ranked until we were indexed. Nothing major had changed in terms of the page structure, content, internal linking etc; these were brand new pages, with new product content. Has anyone ever experienced Google having an 'off' day or being uncharacteristically slow with indexing? We do have a few ideas what could have caused this, but we were interested to see if anyone else had experienced this sort of change in Google's behaviour, either recently or previously? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | punchseo0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!? Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonseha0 -
Website Ranks and gets de indexed ??
Hi My website is almost 3-4 months old . Whats strange is that as soon as it get Crawled it ranks for few terms for 1-2 days and all of a sudden gets de Indexed for these same terms or Rank drops like drops from page 5 to page 10 . Nothing shows up in Webmater tools under Manual Action . Assuming its a Algorithmic penalty, How to deal with this kind of stuff. Should I stop working on this site all together ? Or assuming its a New website, google does not want it to rank for medium or high volume keywords ? What keywords I am after have 300 -2k searches per month .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
Domain Authority... http://www.domain.com/ vs. http://domain.com vs. http://domain.com/
Hey Guys, Looking at Page Authority for my Site and ranking them in Decending Order, I see these 3 http://www.domain.com/ | Authority 62 http://domain.com | Authority 52 http://domain.com/ | Authority 52 Since the first one listed has the highest Authority, should I be using a 301 redirects on the lower ranking variations (which I understand how works) or should I be using rel="canonical" (which I don't really understand how it works) Also, if this is a problem that I should address, should we see a significant boost if fixed? Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can help a lost sailor who doesn't know how to sail and probably shouldn't have left shore in the first place. Cheers ZP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr_Snack0 -
Local search vs. Organic Listings
Hi ~ I was interested to see if anyone feels there might be an advantage to keeping a business out of Google's Local Search listing area or at least trying to keep it out of the 7-pack display? It seems to me that sites who are not listed in the 7-pack can often be ranked above the maps/7-pack area in the regular organic listings. Also, is there anyway for a homepage to be listed on the 1st page in both the local search and organic listings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hhdentist0 -
Remove content that is indexed?
Hi guys, I want to delete a entire folder with content indexed, how i can explain to google that content no longer exists?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Valarlf0 -
Sitemaps: Alternate hreflang
Hi, some time ago I have read that there is a limit of 50.000 URLs per sitemap file (So, you need to create a sitemap index and separate files with 50.000 urls each). [Source]. Now we are about to implement the link hreflang in the sitemap [Source], and we dont know if we have to count each alternate as a different url. We have 21 different well positioned domains (Same name, different cctlds, a little different content [varies in currencies, taxes, some labels, etc] depending in the target country) so the amount of links per url would be high. A) Shall we count each link alternate as a separate url, or just the original ones? For example, if we have to count the link alternates, that would make us have 2380pages per sitemap, each with one original url and 20 alternate links. (Always being aware of the 50mb maximum filesize) B) Actually we have one sitemap per domain. Using this, shall we generate one per domain using the matching domain as original url? Or it would be the same if we upload to every domain the same sitemap? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marianoSoler980