Google only indexing the top 2/3 of my page?
-
HI,
I have a page that is about 5000 lines of code total. I was having difficulty figuring out why the addition of a lot of targeted, quality content to the bottom of the pages was not helping with rankings. Then, when fetching as Google, I noticed that only about 3300 lines were getting indexed for some reason.
So naturally, that content wasn't going to have any effect if Google in not seeing it. Has anyone seen this before? Thoughts on what may be happening? I'm not seeing any errors begin thrown by the page....and I'm not aware of a limit of lines of code Google will crawl. Pages load under 5 seconds so loading speed shouldn't be the issue.
Thanks, Kevin
-
Do we know if a quick copy paste from the lower 1/3 of the page into Google returned the page (and copied text) in question? Or, have you ever seen a case where the top portion is findable in the SERPs through a quick copy/paste of a portion of text, but text from the bottom doesn't return anything?
I've seen this happen, and don't really have a good answer for it. Seems like it could be along the same lines? I know Google can't index a portion of the page, but strange how when you copy a sentence from the top of a page with tons of lines of code, you can find it in the SERPs, but doing the same from the bottom yielded nothing.
-
The OP was saying that Fetch/Render was only showing 2/3 of his page, he did confuse that with indexing, which is also why I'm trying to clarify this difference. Indexing partial content is not a thing, seeing partial content in Fetch/Render is a thing.
There is no content (as in on-page content) in SERPs, only a title tag, URL, and meta description. It's literally impossible for Google to index a portion of a page, because that content is what's on the URL. You click that link, and it's out of their control.
-
James,
Search Console's Fetch and Render tool is much different than indexing, it's simply a representation of how Google sees your page. Long-form content is not required for good rankings when the intent of the searcher justifies, I've seen plenty of top ranked pages with shorter content, especially on ecommerce sites.
-
Hi Kevin,
I noticed your site is very image-heavy (if we're talking about your agency's site). It's common to see this in the Fetch and Render tool, especially on pages with a lot of images. Anytime I run a F&R on an ecommerce site's product listing page, the images stop loading at a certain point. I wouldn't worry too much about it, it doesn't mean they're not indexing it (they can't index a portion of a URL), it just means they're not using resources to show you everything they see.
There's a problem with your strategy that you highlighted when you said "quality content to the bottom of the pages was not helping with rankings". If you're putting content in the bottom of pages simply for ranking purposes, your SEO strategy needs a second look. Content needs to be written for people, and in order for it to be useful to people, you need to not bury it in the bottom of a page. Google weighs content differently based on its location, if you put something at the bottom of the page, on a hidden tab, or behind an accordion, it's not going to be nearly as helpful for ranking boosts.
Hope that helps answer your question.
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
-
Google suddenly indexing 1,000 fewer pages. Why?
We have a site, blog.example.org, and another site, www.example.org. The most visited pages on www.example.org were redesigned; the redesign landed May 8. I would expect this change to have some effect on organic rank and conversions. But what I see is surprising; I can't believe it's related, but I mention this just in case. Between April 30 and May 7, Google stopped indexing roughly 1,000 pages on www.example.org, and roughly 3,000 pages on blog.example.org. In both cases the number of pages that fell out of the index represents appx. 15% of the overall number of pages. What would cause Google to suddenly stop indexing thousands of pages on two different subdomains? I'm just looking for ideas to dig into; no suggestion would be too basic. FWIW, the site is localized into dozens of languages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Glossary/Terms Page - What is the best way?
We have a glossary section on our website with hundreds of terms. At the moment we have it split into letters, e.g. there one page with all the terms starting with A, another for B etc.. I am conscious that this is not the best way to do things as not all of these pages are being indexed, and the traffic we get to these pages is very low. Any suggestions on what would be the best way to improve this? The 2 ideas I have at the moment are Have every term on a separate page, but ensuring there is enough copy for that term Leave as is, but have the URL change once a user scrolls down the page. E.g. the first page would be www.website.com/glossary/a/term-1 then once the user scrolls past this terms and onto the next one the URL would change to www.website.com/glossary/a/term-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Only 285 of 2,266 Images Indexed by Google
Only 285 of 2,266 Images Indexed by Google. Images for our site are hosted on Amazons CDN cloud based hosting service. Our Wordpress site is on a virtual private server and has its' own IP address. The number of indexed images has dropped substantially in the last year. Our site is for a real estate brokerage firm. There are about 250 listing pages set to "no-index". Perhaps these contain 400 photos, so they do not account for why so few photos have been indexed. The concern is that the low number of indexed images could be affecting overall ranking. The site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Is this issue something that we should be concerned about? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Google Is Indexing My Internal Search Results - What should i do?
Hello, We are using a CMS/E-Commerce platform which isn't really built with SEO in mind, this has led us to the following problem.... a large number of internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine friendly" or "user friendly", are being indexed by google and are driving traffic to the site, generating our client revenue. We want to remove these pages and stop them from being indexed, replacing them with static category pages - essentially moving the traffic from the search results to static pages. We feel this is necessary as our current situation is a short-term (accidental) win and later down the line as more pages become indexed we don't want to incur a penalty . We're hesitant to do a blanket de-indexation of all ?search results pages because we would lose revenue and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the rankings of our optimised static pages. The idea is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages. Our main focus is to improve user experience and not have customers enter the site through unexpected pages. All thoughts or recommendations are welcome. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iThinkMedia0 -
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page?
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page? If I have 4 or 5 different hashtag link section pages , consolidated into one HTML Page, no chance to get one of the Hashtag Pages to appear as a search result? like, if under one Single Page Travel Guide I have two essential sections: #Attractions #Visa no chance to direct search queries for Visa directly to the Hashtag Link Section of #Visa? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
I have been optimizing this page for a few weeks now and and have seen our page for up from 23rd to 11th on the serp's. I come to work today and not only have I dropped to 15 but I've also had my relevant product page replaced by this page . Not to mention the second page is a pdf! I am not sure what happened here but any advice on how I could fix this would be great. My site is www.mynaturalmarket.com and the keyword I'm working on is Zyflamend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenyonManu3-SEOSEM0 -
Google Ranking Wrong Page
The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords. A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website. Our URL structures now look something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cpapciak
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4 Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city. My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical. Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!0 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0