Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Search console validation taking a long time?
-
Hello! I did something dumb back in the beginning of September. I updated Yoast and somehow noindexed a whole set of custom taxonomy on my site. I fixed this and then asked Google to validate the fixes on September 20. Since then they have gotten through only 5 of the 64 URLS.....is this normal? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be doing.
Thank you! ^_^
-
You're welcome.
We as a community are here to help.If your issue is now fixed, you could mark this question as answered

Best luck.
GR -
Cool! Thanks Gaston! I'm glad I asked about this! ^_^
-
What sometimes happens is that when some URLs are marked as noindex, googlebot reduces its crawling frequency as they interpret that you really don't want that page to be indexed thus has value or so ever.
What you just did is tell GoogleBot to crawl specifically that page and "force" it to analyze and render that page. So GoogleBot now understood that the noindex is no longer set and that page should be indexed.
I'd wait a few days so that googlebot naturally crawls all your site again and eventually index every page that deserves to be indexed.If that doesnt happen in about 2 weeks, then there is a tool in the old Search Console, where you can tell GoogleBot to Crawl a single page and its links. That is under Crawl-> Fetch as Google. Request an URL to fetched, after a few minutes it a button: _Request indexing_will appear, there you'll have the option to "Crawl this URL and its direct links". This image might came handy: https://imgur.com/a/y5DbUVw
I'm glad it helped previously and hope the last helps you even more.
Best luck.
GR -
Whoooooooaaaaahhhhhh! that fixed it! what's the deal!? lol. why is this method instantaneous and the other method I was pointed to by google is taking months?....do I have to do this with each individual URL?
-
....or maybe that's what it found the last time it was crawled? I clicked the "request indexing" button.....we'll see what happens.
-
hmmm. it says:
Indexing allowed? No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag....but I have the settings in yoast set up to allow indexing.....do you think maybe changes in yoast settings aren't applying retroactively?....
-
Sorry to hear that.
Its possible that googlebot still didnt find out that you've changed noindex tag.
Would you mind checking what does the _Inspect URL _tool report?
To find that, go to the new version of Search Console and enter one of that URL that should be indexed in the textbox.
Then clic on the "test live URL" button. This image could be helpful: https://imgur.com/a/CPvfwifThere you might get a hint of what is going on.
-
They're in google search console, but I have tried searching for a couple of them and they don't appear to be indexed :-(. I tried the method you suggested and that didn't bring up anything either.
-
Hi angela,
Those 5 out of 64 URLs.. Is that a report in Search Console? or only 5 URLs appear when searching in Google?
Search Console usually takes a little longer to update its reports on index status.Have you tried a site: search? Also using _inurl: _parameter.
For example: site:domain.com inurl:/category-noindexed/Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
How long after https migration that google shows in search console new sitemap being indexed?
We migrated 4 days ago to https and followed best practices..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
In search console now still 80% of our sitemaps appear as "pending" and among those sitemaps that were processed only less than 1% of submitted pages appear as indexed? Is this normal ?
How long does it take for google to index pages from sitemap?
Before https migration nearly all our pages were indexed and I see in the crawler stats that google has crawled a number of pages each day after migration that corresponds to number of submitted pages in sitemap. Sitemap and crawler stats show no errors.0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
When doing a site search my homepage comes up second. Does that matter?
When I do a site: search the homepage comes up second. Does this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
For how long does Google honor a 302 redirect?
Greetings! I would love some recent experiences to support our experience which is +/- 1 year old on this question. Based on our experiences around a year ago, I believe that Google will only honor a 302 temporary redirect for a relatively short period - perhaps up to a month - and then it will begin treating the redirect as a 301 redirect and will remove the old page from the index. Have others seen this? Is there an update on what the max "safe" period to have a 302 in place could be? We have a domain that is soon to experience about 3 months of "downtime" with no content on it, but the content will be back after that time. Ideally we would 302 redirect the pages elsewhere just for that downtime period. However, I don't want to do a 302 redirect if there is a risk that the pages will lose all of their accumulated authority and indexing. Basically, is there any safe way to just put the domain on ice for a few months? Please share recent experience only. Thanks for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | g-s-m0 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
Url structure for multiple search filters applied to products
We have a product catalog with several hundred similar products. Our list of products allows you apply filters to hone your search, so that in fact there are over 150,000 different individual searches you could come up with on this page. Some of these searches are relevant to our SEO strategy, but most are not. Right now (for the most part) we save the state of each search with the fragment of the URL, or in other words in a way that isn't indexed by the search engines. The URL (without hashes) ranks very well in Google for our one main keyword. At the moment, Google doesn't recognize the variety of content possible on this page. An example is: http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html#style=vintage&color=blue&season=spring We're moving towards a more indexable URL structure and one that could potentially save the state of all 150,000 searches in a way that Google could read. An example would be: http://www.example.com/main-keyword/vintage/blue/spring/ I worry, though, that giving so many options in our URL will confuse Google and make a lot of duplicate content. After all, we only have a few hundred products and inevitably many of the searches will look pretty similar. Also, I worry about losing ground on the main http://www.example.com/main-keyword.html page, when it's ranking so well at the moment. So I guess the questions are: Is there such a think as having URLs be too specific? Should we noindex or set rel=canonical on the pages whose keywords are nested too deep? Will our main keyword's page suffer when it has to share all the inbound links with these other, more specific searches?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress0 -
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content. They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it. Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter. Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader. Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates? Thoughts appreciated. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0