Index bloating issue
-
Hello,
In the last month, I noticed a huge spike in the number of pages indexed on my site, which I think is impacting my SEO quality score.
While I've only have about 90 pages on my site map, the number of pages indexed jumped to 446, with about 536 pages being blocked by robots. At first we thought this might be due to duplicate product pages showing up in different categories on my site, but we added something to our robot.txt file to not index those pages. But the number has not gone down. I've tried to consult with our hosting vendor, but no one seems to be concerned or have any idea why there was such a big jump in the last month.
Any insights or pointers would be so greatly appreciated, so that I can fix/improve my SEO as quickly as possible!
Thanks!
-
in order to determine if your website is hacked this is one of the best tools I know of both to find out and to remove the malware.
In order to determine rather not you have on-site SEO problems on a very technical and granular scale I would use
https://www.deepcrawl.com/ $80 a month you cannot go wrong
another amazing tool and it's free for the first 500 pages and if you want the added features which you do or more pages only about $150 a year is
-
Thank you. These are helpful suggestions.
-
A couple of things to note:
- As Robert mentioned, I would definitely make sure there is no longer an issue on your wordpress site relating to your previous hack.
- Robots.txt disallow does not stop pages from being indexed. It merely tells search engines to stop crawling that page from here out. The meta noindex tag is more applicable for noindexing pages that are already out there.
- I would check your search console crawl errors to see if there's a hefty spike in 404 errors as well, as it may be old spam pages you removed from the site.
- If these pages that are bloating your index are all still old spam filled pages from when you were hacked, you could start by using the search console's "remove url's" tool, which will remove all these url's from the index temporarily. For a more long term approach, instead of them giving off a 404 if they have been removed, making the server give off a "410" response would tell google they are gone forever, and thus they will be removed from the index as time goes on.
-
When I do the search for my main url - the results are clean. Just the pages to my site show up. And the index results for this site still bloated. However, for my wordpress site, which is a subdomain and on a different platform to my main site, there are some issues (it was hacked as Rob noted below). But we have since cleaned up the pages etc, reuploaded the site maps, etc. So I'm a little stumped on my main site (which wasn't hacked - that I'm aware of).
-
What do you see if you do a search for site:yoursite.com ?
-
Hello Julie,
This sounds like you might have a hacking issue on your website. You probably need someone to conduct a full code audit of your site to determine whether any files you have uploaded (plugins, for example) were contaminated. If a site is hacked, new pages can be added that are hidden from view and difficult to detect unless handled by a security specialist.
We recently brought on a new client who had this issue and discovered that his site had 1000's of pages dedicated to testosterone pills, etc. We had to go through GWT and the site logs to determine what new pages were created and it was a complete hack job.
In terms of fixing your SEO, the first step is to determine where/if the hack exists. Once that is decided, you have to clean up the site and restore the site's security.
I would be happy to help you with the next steps if you would like. I am always available!
Thanks and best of luck,
Rob
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
-
Website is not indexing
Hi All, My website URL is https://thepeopeople.com and it is neither caching nor indexing in Google. Earlier the URL was https://peopeople.com. I have redirected it to https://thepeopeople.com by using 301 redirections. I have checked the redirection and everything else is fine and I have submitted all the URLs in search console also, still the website is not indexing. Its been more than 5 months now. Please suggest a solution for this. Thanks in Advance.
Technical SEO | | ResultfirstGA0 -
Sudden Indexation of "Index of /wp-content/uploads/"
Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
App Indexing
Can anyone please check if our app is indexed or not? Also check if deep linking done is correct or not rel="alternate" href="android-app://in.instafresh.app/http/www.instafrsh.com/" /> Website - http://instafrsh.com/ App - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.instafresh.app
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Crawl issues
Hello there, I have found that when crawling my site I have errors regarding the meta description and it says it is missing from few pages. I checked these pages but there is a meta description. I also ran the same report with other tools and it comes up the same issues. What should I do?
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Disavow Issues
Hi We have a client who was hit by Penguin about 18 months ago. We disavowed all the bad links about 10 months ago however this has not resulted in an uplift in traffic or rankings. The client is asking me whether it would be better to dump the domain and move the website to a fresh domain. Can you provide thoughts / experience on this please? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | EffectiveSEOUK0 -
Subdomains Issue
Hi , We have created sub domains of our site to target various Geo´s. For example, geo, uk.site.com, de.site,com and all these sub domains have the same content as main domain. Will it affect our SEO Rankings? How can we solve this if it affects our rankings?
Technical SEO | | mikerbrt240 -
Bing and Yahoo Indexing
I have a young site (6 most) that is almost completely indexed by Google but Bing and Yahoo will only index a few pages. Does anyone have any tips for getting more pages indexed in Bing and Yahoo. The site is registered with Bing Webmaster tools and has a valid XML sitemmap.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Squarespace Duplicate Content Issues
My site is built through squarespace and when I ran the campaign in SEOmoz...its come up with all these errors saying duplicate content and duplicate page title for my blog portion. I've heard that canonical tags help with this but with squarespace its hard to add code to page level...only site wide is possible. Was curious if there's someone experienced in squarespace and SEO out there that can give some suggestions on how to resolve this problem? thanks
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0