Why are only a few of our pages being indexed

[Blue-shark]

Recently rebuilt a site for an auctioneers, however it has a problem in that none of the lots and auctions are being indexed by Google on the new site, only the pages like About, FAQ, home, contact.

Checking WMT shows that Google has crawled all the pages, and I've done a "Fetch as Google" on them and it loads up fine, so there's no crawling issues that is standing out. I've set the "URL Parameters" to no effect too. Also built a sitemap with all the lots in, pushed to Google which then crawled them all (massive spike in Crawl rate for a couple days), and still just indexing a handful of pages.

Any clues to look into would be greatly appreciated.

https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auctions/

[TimHolmes]

Has the site recently moved to HTTPS:// and have you also reincluded the https:// version in webmaster tools. This may throw up a few errors.

I have also noticed that if you type in http://www you can still get to the site, might be worth a redirect in your htaccess file.

Maybe also add the following to your wordpress header -

Also check any settings in wordpress are not causing a no index issue.

Hope this helps

Tim

[webmethod]

Hi,

I took a quick look at your site, sitemap and index status and only 25 urls in Google, but very many more in the sitemap.

What I couldn't work out is where your /item-details/ urls in the sitemap are linked to from your website? I can't get to them through buying -> catalogue. It won't help indexing status if they aren't being linked to from anywhere.

The biggest issue you have however is the way canonicals are set up on the problem pages. If you go to this page:

https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/item-details/?ID=2710

It has the following canonical (without the id):

rel='canonical' href='https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/item-details/' />

If you search on Google, that canonical URL is indexed, so if you fix this by adding the id to the canonical they should start to appear in SERPS.

You have exactly the same problem on your auctions pages. e.g. https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auction-items/?id=13&pagenum=51

Another point that will help you rank is to use friendlier / more descriptive URLs for the items.

Hope that helps

George

[Blue-shark]

Thanks for this. The /item-details/ are linked to from the Auction pages (e.g: https://www.wilkinsons-auctioneers.co.uk/auction-items/?id=13)

We've looked into the canonical issue and sorted that out, so fingers crossed on that being the issue. I'm only really familiar with canonical being a pain with ecommerce sites, but I know to keep an eye on it for others sites we have using parameters/custom pages.