Questions tagged [search-engine-indexing]

The process of recording where particular words occur. In the web context search engines crawl the web and make a list of which pages have particular words - this is the index.

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33 votes
3 answers
7k views

Why aren't search engines indexing my content?

This is a general, community wiki catch-all question and answer pair intended to address any questions concerning the reasons a site or specific site contents do not appear in search engine ...
37 votes
5 answers
3k views

Why isn't my website in Google search results? [duplicate]

It's been sometime and Google has yet to index my site. How can I get Google to index my website?
aneuryzm's user avatar
  • 1,897
15 votes
3 answers
5k views

Number of indexed pages with "site:" search less than reported in Google Webmaster Tools

In Google webmaster tools it shows that I have 309 pages indexed, but when I search using "site:site.com" appear about 180 only (On the first page appears "about 608 results," something near the total ...
FPSxploit's user avatar
  • 165
13 votes
3 answers
6k views

Can you use googleon and googleoff comments to prevent Googlebot from indexing part of a page?

I've seen code like for preventing Google from indexing part of a page: <p>This is a paragraph that will be indexed by Google.</p> <!--googleoff: index--> <p>This is a ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
15 votes
3 answers
3k views

How does Google find a domain with no links to it?

I recently registered a new domain, pointed it to my existing server, and set up a minimal page just saying "test" and nothing else. I just discovered tonight that the page is already indexed in ...
DisgruntledGoat's user avatar
30 votes
4 answers
14k views

Prevent XML sitemaps from showing up in Google search results

How do I prevent my XML sitemap files from showing up in Google search results like this result of a site: search query: I don't understand why Google would choose to show sitemap files in search ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
34 votes
5 answers
89k views

How to prevent a PDF file from being indexed by search engines?

I have a link to PDF document on a public web-page. How do I prevent search engines from indexing this link and PDF document? The only idea I thought of is to use CAPTCHA. However, I wonder if ...
user avatar
23 votes
2 answers
14k views

Do search engines index text contained in SVG elements?

Example: <svg><text>Hello World</text></svg>?
paragooon's user avatar
  • 415
6 votes
2 answers
6k views

Why the number of indexed pages decreased for a "site:" search

Recently I created a website with hundreds of thousands of unique pages. A week ago, Google had indexed about 250,000 pages. It has now decreased to 90k URLs (using a site:domain.com query). What ...
Parthipan Paramasivam's user avatar
5 votes
3 answers
522 views

Does Google index portions of the page that are unique and ignore the duplicate content?

When a page has content on it that is also on other pages on the site but also some unique content, how does Google handle it? Does Google: Index the entire page (including the duplicate content) ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
963 views

sitemap.xml for a website with forum

We have a website dedicated to our ActiveX and .NET components that has been working for more than 12 years. The site consists of 2 parts: the static part (product descriptions and articles) and the ...
TecMan's user avatar
  • 423
17 votes
6 answers
12k views

How to get tens of millions of pages indexed by Google bot?

We are currently developing a site that currently has 8 million unique pages that will grow to about 20 million right away, and eventually to about 50 million or more. Before you criticize... Yes, it ...
Chris Adragna's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
159 views

Preserve search engine rankings while shifting to new domain name

We have to shift our web-site to a new domain due to some unavoidable circumstances. The portal has been up and running there since 2009. It has good index in various search engines and we are ...
Umesh Awasthi's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
3k views

Why doesn't searching for the unique name of my website bring the site up in a top position on Google?

I have a website with a unique name, already indexed and with a perfect SEO. Although there are no websites with the same unique name, when I'm searching on Google I found my homepage listed on the ...
NineCattoRules's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
132 views

Warning after submitting sitemap to Google: "We found that some URLs redirect to other locations"

I noticed that I have three warnings when I submitted my Sitemap. They all say this: When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We ...
Desi's user avatar
  • 31
2 votes
2 answers
314 views

Need Google to recrawl the pages

I've changed the meta description tag in many of my site pages. Should I select Fetch as Google->Fetch->Add to Index->URL and all linked pages in GWT? Will Google recrawl the whole site faster than ...
AgA's user avatar
  • 1,438
21 votes
3 answers
24k views

Google is still crawling and indexing my old, dummy, test pages which now are 404 not found

I have set up my site with sample pages and data (lorem ipsum, etc..) and Google has crawled these pages. I deleted all these pages and actually added real content but in webmaster tools, i still get ...
Ace's user avatar
  • 373
13 votes
5 answers
1k views

Is there any way to have search engines not index a certain section of a page?

I have Blogger setup with the Blog Archive panel shown on every page so that users can easily get to old posts. The problem is that it lists the title of each page in this panel, meaning that the ...
Senseful's user avatar
  • 825
6 votes
5 answers
6k views

Huge drop off in Google "indexed" pages after switching to HTTPS, should I switch back to HTTP?

I did a full redesign of my website to make it responsive (bootstrap), added localization, and also switched the whole website to use HTTPS. My website use to default to http://www.domain.com/ and ...
olimits7's user avatar
  • 213
5 votes
6 answers
684 views

How do you prevent web pages from appearing in the Google search index?

I have some web pages that Google has indexed. I have now added a robots.txt file to exclude them, but should I also add a noindex tag? If so, then how do I do so?
user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
363 views

Why does Google index pages of my blog in seconds, while pages on the rest of the website take longer to get indexed

I have a questions and answers website in Portuguese about a specific subject. My Q&A website also have a blog, on a sub-directory like www.site.com/articles. I had not written on the blog for ...
valter's user avatar
  • 151
5 votes
3 answers
382 views

Why is the number of pages on my website indexed by Googlebot decreasing?

I am monitoring the number of pages indexed by Googlebot for one of my websites . I noticed that since last week, the number of pages has dropped by about 60 or so. Now to be fair, I have not added ...
user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
910 views

Should paginated sites be included in sitemap?

My website is ad listing for boats, boats' engines, boat rentals, etc (www.mynautics.com). There are ads listed on multiple pages. I have finished (not jet seen on link above) pagination: added prev ...
M.V.'s user avatar
  • 177
1 vote
3 answers
58 views

Older post not indexed, new post indexed right away?

I have a post I created yesterday that was indexed rather quickly by Google. However, I have two other post that I created within the past 4 days that are not indexed and I cannot find a trace of ...
Richard.S's user avatar
1 vote
4 answers
1k views

How to remove indexed pages from google effectively

My site was getting traffic and it was on the rise, then I added https and somewhere in that time I also created tons of extra link for google to crawl, thinking this will increase traffic in those ...
TheTechGuy's user avatar
21 votes
13 answers
3k views

How do I get images containing text to be indexed by search engines?

I am building a small portfolio website for a friend, and being in advertising and all, she hates the standard fonts and wants everything written in a custom font. As CSS font-embedding is not really ...
Wookai's user avatar
  • 1,607
8 votes
3 answers
2k views

How do I prevent Google from indexing text that is generated by JavaScript?

Google is executing the JavaScript on my password creator website and indexing the random passwords that get generated by the JavaScript. The random text that is generated could look spammy to Google ...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
2k views

Index the content within an iframe

We have created an web application that gives the client the possibility to use his websites as an online showroom (cars, bikes, etc etc). What is offered is photo's, information about the vehicles ...
Desley Roelofsen's user avatar
6 votes
4 answers
930 views

Will JavaScript (document.write) content be indexed by search engines?

I have an external JS file embedding some content inline in a web page. Basically it just does a document.write("my content") via a script tag and loaded externally with the src attribute. Any ...
Clément's user avatar
  • 163
6 votes
1 answer
1k views

Best way to let Google index page with tabs - SEO

Let' say I have a /pets page with 4 tabs on it: All Dogs Cats Owls The All tab displays all the pets on page load. Each of the 3 other tabs holds a list of dogs/cats/owls, respectively - loaded ...
lesssugar's user avatar
  • 233
5 votes
3 answers
448 views

Do WordPress websites get indexed quicker by search engines than a regular website?

I registered a couple of domains with the names of categories of products we sell. I then installed WordPress in one of those domains and played around with it for a bit, and left it alone for about a ...
riseagainst's user avatar
  • 2,222
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

I used rel="canonical" and hreflang="x-default", but global site is missing and receiving "no return tags" error

Here is a sample of the code <link rel="canonical " href="http://www.kaspersky.com/anti-virus-trial" hreflang="en" /> <link rel="alternate" href="http://usa.kaspersky.com/downloads/free-home-...
Joey's user avatar
  • 43
3 votes
2 answers
819 views

Should I notify 'under construction' websites to crawlers? If yes how?

I am currently developing a website which is going to take some time to finish. I need to move some 'stuff' to production frequently, while maintaining a under construction status. My front page will ...
Jérôme Verstrynge's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
140 views

How should I choose which URLs I want indexed to include in my sitemap?

I am working on a sitemap. I have read it should contain the URLs that you want indexed by Google. But which pages do I want indexed? It seems to me that makes sense to index pages such as the root ...
Bernardo Benini Fantin's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
1k views

Does Google treat different ports as different sites?

I host my website on Azure and I have recently activated a feature to make it possible for me to directly access each server instance in our web farm by a port number. For example http://example.com:...
Olaj's user avatar
  • 286
2 votes
1 answer
224 views

Google is accidently indexing query string URL parameters and causing my website bandwidth increase

Google is currently indexing query strings URLs of my website. Google has currently indexed almost 112k URLs that all are duplicate version of other URLs causing my website to slow down and negatively ...
mehtab fatima's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
236 views

Old pages still appearing in Google?

Many pages that have been deleted for a long time are still appearing in Google? When I then click on them, they obviously can't be found. Am I doing something wrong/forgetting something?
James Hammer's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
286 views

robots meta not blocking indexing

We have a staging version of our website to test changes on at trailheadpaddleshack.ca/staging1. This never appeared in search before. Recently the staging site has appeared on Google and is affecting ...
Cleo Poulin's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
394 views

how to set 301 redirect in wordpress .htacces file

In continuation of my previously asked question preserve-search-engine-index-while-shifting-to-new-domain. The migration is being done in the word-press and we will have same server with same IP.Since ...
Umesh Awasthi's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
425 views

Why won't title attributes get indexed in Google?

When I search for Ride On + my site's name, I see that it's indexed. But when I search for Green Horse + my site's name, I don't see my site appearing in the results anywhere! Here's my code: <td&...
Sam's user avatar
  • 847
2 votes
3 answers
3k views

Is it a good practice to make login, reset password & register page indexable?

I'm working on an audit for an ecommerce and their login, reset password, and register pages are indexable in google. Is it necessary to make them indexable in Google?
P082's user avatar
  • 470
2 votes
3 answers
84 views

How to know that my site is getting index/rank by search engine

As per subject, anyone can tell me how to check that my site is getting index/rank by search engine(e.g. google, yahoo)?
Charles Yeung's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
2k views

Google selecting wrong canonical

This page addresses the question of duplicate content, but does not describe what I'm facing. After first encountering the Google "canonical algorithm bug" 2 months ago, I've made only a little ...
Jeff Brower's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
465 views

How to push google to update data about what I recently change in my page?

I change my page title and meta desc, and also change indexability status to index. Should I wait till google crawl again or change by itself? or I can notify google that I change something and ...
Reza 's user avatar
  • 186
1 vote
3 answers
1k views

How can pages which aren't indexed be reported as landing pages in Google Analytics?

In Google Analytics I have thousands of landing pages reported, however on checking some of them they aren't indexed in Google, this is expected as the have robots NOINDEX tag in the source code. So ...
Max's user avatar
  • 6,117
0 votes
2 answers
3k views

How long does Google Webmaster Tools take to index a website?

How much time does Google Webmaster Tools take to index a page? Analytics took around 24 hours to get info from the site, but since this is indexing, I guess it might take a little bit more than that. ...
codeninja's user avatar
  • 115
28 votes
5 answers
4k views

Page appears indexed in Google but not findable for any search terms?

(Note that I am going to use screenshots here because I suspect writing about this will change the behavior over time.) If you do a Google search for uiviewcontroller best practices either with ...
Jeff Atwood's user avatar
  • 13.9k
16 votes
2 answers
6k views

Indexing for Google scholar, which tags to use?

In the "Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters" for Google Scholar is written under Indexing Guidelines: Google Scholar supports Highwire Press tags (e.g., citation_title), Eprints tags (e.g., eprints....
Peter Smit's user avatar
11 votes
2 answers
3k views

Does Google submit HTML forms?

I have a web page, say http://domain/purchase and in this page, I have a web form. User, on submitting this form (which has validation, both client-side and server side and won't be validated until ...
Saeed Neamati's user avatar
10 votes
8 answers
9k views

How long did it take for your new website to be indexed by search engines [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Why isn't my website in Google search results? I have added my website to the webmaster tools of some major search engines already, and supplied the sitemap for the ...