Sitemaps and Indexed Pages
-
Hi guys,
I created an XML sitemap and submitted it for my client last month.
Now the developer of the site has also been messing around with a few things.
I've noticed on my Moz site crawl that indexed pages have dropped significantly.
Before I put my foot in it, I need to figure out if submitting the sitemap has caused this.. can a sitemap reduce the pages indexed?
Thanks
David.
-
Thanks Eli!
I guess I was wondering if the MOZ Bot only followed pages that were in the sitemap. It was generated by Screaming Frog I have trusted it to include all relevant pages!
I have put in a more detailed description in the response below. Overall I need to investigate further but i'm satisfied that the sitemap has not caused the drop!
-
Thanks Martijn!
I guess I was wondering if the MOZ Bot only followed pages that were in the sitemap. It was generated by Screaming Frog I have trusted it to include all relevant pages!
To elaborate.
There were about 80,000 pages and I used canonical, no index, and redirects to clean up a rather large mess of filter URL's and dup content.
That dropped the pages to about 14k. Then I submitted the sitemap last month and now the crawl only found 4k pages.
Further investigation is needed on my behalf but I wanted to double check that this sudden drop was not because of a sitemap! Thanks for clarifying that!
-
Hi David,
Messing up, Changing or Updating, Deleting a Sitemap is not necessarily something that will decrease the number of ranked or crawled pages. It usually is used a signal to find new pages and figure out if old ones are deleted. But the chances that your sitemap have had a significant impact in what kind of pages went down is something I would find unlikely. It could happen though that you'd see the opposite, an increase in pages indexed/submitted/crawled after you submit a sitemap.
Martijn.
-
Hey David!
Thanks for reaching out to us!
Unfortunately I am not an SEO consultant / Web Developer so I cannot offer specific advice, but I'm sure there are loads of members here who would love to help and have a lot more knowledge than I do! A few things I have picked up which may help are the following:
Try to determine when the drop started, did it drop when you submitted the XML sitemap or when the developer changed certain things? This could help point to the reason for the drop in indexing. There are a variety of reasons as to why Google may not choose to index pages, however some of the common ones are:
-
Check your robots.txt to ensure those pages are still crawlable
-
Check for duplicate content / was there any canonical changes?
-
One of the tools you could use to help keep track of ranking fluctuations is mozcast (http://mozcast.com/). Was there turbulence in the Google algorithm when the indexed pages dropped significantly?
If you want us to have a look at your specific campaign to investigate further could you please pop an email over to [email protected].
Thanks!
Eli
-
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
-
/index.php causing a few issues
Hey Mozzers, Our site uses magento. Pages within the site (not categories or products) are set to display as www.domain.co.uk/page-url/ The hta access is set to redirect all version such as www.domain.co.uk/page-url to a url ending in a / However in google analytics and in moz landing page tracker these urls are being represented by www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php When visiting www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php a 404 is displayed. I know that by default when directed to a directory it automatically finds and displays the index file. So i understand why this is happening to some degree. However, when manually visiting this link does not exist. This poses a problem when trying to view the landing pages information in moz pro. I have 20 keywords being tracked in relation to www.domain.co.uk/page-url/ but because moz is recording it as www.domain.co.uk/page-url/index.php the keywords are unrelated so not showing information in relation to the page. Any ideas?
API | | ATP0 -
Moz Crawl: Can't check page optimization error https
Help needed, when I try to do a page optimization check i get the following error : The URL you entered does not appear to be returning a page successfully. Please make sure that you've entered the URL of valid, working page. But i can do a site crawl, what should be the problem? Checked with frog seo spider and add no problem, robots.txt its also clean. Anyone knows what can be wrong? Thanks
API | | Luis-Pereira0 -
Still not got any index update data.
Is anyone finding that they haven't got the results of the update yet? I have tried some competitors and they are not updated either.
API | | AHC_SEO0 -
Bulk Page Authority Tracking
Hi Is there a way in Moz to identify your page authority by landing page, possibly crawling the site and providing this in bulk so you don't have to go through and check each page? I want to track how my page authority for certain pages moves over time. Thank you
API | | BeckyKey0 -
Mozscape Index
Hello: There was a Mozscape Index scheduled 9/8/2015 and now it go pushed back October 8,2015. There seems to be a lot of delays with the Mozscape Index. Is this something we should expect? Updates every 2 months instead of every month? Thanks!
API | | sderuyter1 -
Does on-page grader have an API ?
Hi, I would very much like to include the on-page grader output into my SEO tools. Is there an API for that? thanks James
API | | KMdayJob0 -
Does Moz's crawlers use _escaped_fragment_ to inspect pages on a single-page application?
I just got started, but got a 902 error code on some pages, with a message saying there might be an outage on my site. That's certainly not the case, so I'm wondering if the crawlers actually respect and use the escaped_fragment query parameter. Thanks, David.
API | | CareerDean0 -
On-Page Reports showing old urls
While taking a look at our sites on-page reports I noticed some of our keywords with very old urls that haven't existed for close to a year. How do I make sure moz's keyword ranking is finding the correct page and make sure I'm not getting graded on that keywords/urls that don't exist any more or have been 301'd to new urls? Is there a way to clean these out? My on-page reports say I have 62 reports for only a total of 34 keywords in rankings. As you can see from the image most of the urls for "tax folder" have now been 301'd to not include /product or /category but moz is still showing them with the old url structure. BTW our site is minespress.com 2KdGcPL.png
API | | smines0