Good morning Peter
When you come to do this month’s checks, please can you take a look at the Page Indexing in Search Console. We have a rocketing number of not indexed pages.
Digging deeper, it seems that a lot of the recent new Posts and Pages I have added have randomly duplicated themselves up to 23 times.
They all have suffixes of /page/ then a number ???
Actually I’m going to look at this for you right now. 🙂
So, a few things. It appears some of those 400+ redirected URLs of made up /page/# go back to 2021! I know during our time together you redeveloped the site at some point…by any chance was it around then?
Essentially Google is finding those /page/# links somewhere, following them and quite right seeing they’re being redirected to where they should be.
WordPress does that redirect by default, even on my site if I head to a blog post and add, say , /page/19 it will redirect to the correct post URL.
So the trouble with your site is that somewhere something is trying to link to those spurious URLs. It could easily be a theme issue and some problem there.
Some good news though – it really doesn’t matter. It’s untidy which I don’t like myself, but from an SEO point of view Google is simply informing us that there are URLs redirecting to other proper pages. It doesn’t hurt you in any way.
Yes I think the new site went live in spring 2021.
Also in the unlisted section, and Alternative page with proper canonical tag, they all have a suffix of ‘am’.
And in the Crawled – currently not indexed, most have the suffix ‘feed’ which has appeared?!?
Good news though, in the last 3 weeks I’ve added content to 270 of the case study pages and internal links incoming and outgoing so there is content there for google to rank now rather than just four or five images per page.
I have a constant stream of ideas and changes I want to do at the moment, it’s finding the time to do them all. I have built a page cluster around a particular keyword and will follow that with others. Each will have 10 Posts pointing at the main Product page to build topical authority.
Also in the unlisted section, and Alternative page with proper canonical tag, they all have a suffix of ‘am’.
It’s ‘/amp’, which is part of how Google’s own Accelerated Mobile Pages system works. So that’s all doing what it should.
And in the Crawled – currently not indexed, most have the suffix ‘feed’ which has appeared?!?
Some of those date back 8 months – and again this is just how things work with WordPress and Google. There’s no problem though – Google is literally just saying “We’ve found these feed pages that we know you won’t want indexed so we’re not going to.” 🙂
There is something I can do though. The AMP pages we need to leave as is, but if you’re certain you don’t have any posts that are multi page (and would need the /page/#) I can force Google to ignore those in the robots.txt file. Same for feed pages.
It’s purely a cosmetic thing for us though, to make Search Console look as beautiful as possible.
Great news on the case studies – always remember the rule of thumb that you need 300+ words in paragraph format to get indexed.
Your content is really stellar – and you’re one of my few clients who actually commit to it – which is why you do so well!!
Cheers,
Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert