Google indexing wrong pages

localdirectories

We have a variety of issues at the moment, and need some advice.

First off, we have a HUGE indexing issue across our entire website.

Website in question: http://www.localsearch.com.au/

Firstly
In Google.com.au, if you search for 'plumbers gosford' (https://www.google.com.au/#q=plumbers+gosford), the wrong page appears - in this instance, the page ranking should be http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Plumbers

I can see this across the board, across multiple locations.

Secondly
Recently I've seen Google reporting in 'Crawl Errors' in webmaster tools URLs such as:
http://www.localsearch.com.au/Saunders-Beach,QLD/Electronic-Equipment-Sales-Repairs&Sa=U&Ei=xs-XVJzAA9T_YQSMgIHQCw&Ved=0CIMBEBYwEg&Usg=AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA

This is an invalid URL, and more specifically, those query strings seem to be referrer queries from Google themselves: &Sa=U&Ei=xs-XVJzAA9T_YQSMgIHQCw&Ved=0CIMBEBYwEg&Usg=AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA

Here's the above example indexed in Google: https://www.google.com.au/#q="AFQjCNHXPrZZg0JU3O4yTGjWbijon1Q8OA"

Does anyone have any advice on those 2 errors?

DonnaDuncan

Issue #1:

You're right, you do seem to have a "variety of issues at the moment". The thing that stands out the most to me is duplicate content.

When I did a site search (site:http://www.localsearch.com.au/", Google indicates it has more than 5 million pages indexed on the site. When I did a site search for the specific URL in your example (site:http://www.localsearch.com.au/gosford,NSW/Plumbers), it found 2 results, neither of which the page in question. Yet your keywords were replicated in the page URLs, content, meta tags, and internal links. Google is probably having a heck of time figuring out which page to rank for what.

It also looks like you have your entire site replicated because URLs are indexed with and without a trailing "/".

Many of the title tags for Gosford pages are replicated containing "Gosford, NSW - LocalSearch" for example, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Carriers-Light-Transport, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford.../Radio-Communication-Equipment, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Hair-Treatment-Replacement, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Hobbies-Models-Accessories, www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Stone-Masons-Monumental, and so on. Can you see why Google might be confused.

That's probably the first thing you need to fix, duplicate content.

Issue #2:

This is a guess. These might be errors caused by pages that have been renamed or removed from the site and not properly redirected. Google can't find them. I'll be interested to hear if anyone else has any ideas.

localdirectories

Hi Donna, thanks for your reply.

Issue #1
Neither of the results that Google has indexed when executing the site operator are duplicated pages - we also have canonical URLs setup on all pages to avoid duplicated URLs.

With regards to the Title tags; unless there's a crowd of people agreeing with this, nearly everything I have found to try to prove this has fallen through - it seems having slightly similar title tags with brand name / locales included doesn't affect search results.

Issue #2
I don't believe this is the issue either as the actual pages still exist.

Thanks for your help though! Anything else you come up with, I'm open ears.

DonnaDuncan

Issue #1
Neither of the results that Google has indexed when executing the site operator are duplicated pages - we also have canonical URLs setup on all pages to avoid duplicated URLs.

You might not be using canonical tags to your advantage though. From what I can see, the canonical tags on pages just point to themselves as opposed to one master page that should be the catch-all for incoming links and social mentions.

With regards to the Title tags; unless there's a crowd of people agreeing with this, nearly everything I have found to try to prove this has fallen through - it seems having slightly similar title tags with brand name / locales included doesn't affect search results.

Some of the title tags you are using on pages are identical to one another, not "slightly similar". That's why I raised it.

Issue #2

_I don't believe this is the issue either as the actual pages still exist. _

Hm. I see. Those pages appear to be dynamically created, indexed, and canonicalized to themselves. Can you tag them as no-index?

localdirectories

Issue #1
I'm not sure how else we would use them. The example given above (Gosford, NSW) is about 40KM (or around 20miles) from the page that is ranking (Wyong, NSW). In our business model, these are 2 separate markets. We wouldn't be able to canonical 1 to the other as they are completely separate.

Issue #2
I believe the issue could be because we're displaying "search results" as static pages - this is something that I have my team working towards fixing by having "static" proximity based business listing pages (such as root.com/find/plumbers/state/city/suburb/) and having no-indexed search result pages (such as root.com/search?what=plumbers&where=suburb,state).

The above may even fix issue #1, but I wanted to get some more information from a community as 2 minds are better than 1..

DonnaDuncan

Issue #1:

I think what you're doing is fine with canonicals. The problem (I think) might be all the duplicates. The page you're asking about (http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW/Plumbers) isn't indexed, yet ~5 million others are. Google is probably abandoning the site before all the relevant pages get indexed. You should look into removing duplicates like in the following examples:

Issue #2:

Sounds like issue #1 and 2 are closely related. I think you're on the right path though. If it doesn't fix it, come back and ask again. You'll have eliminated some possibilities and can get a different perspective 2nd time round.

Good luck!

Carson-Ward

Issue 1:

I think your intended ranking page is not indexed.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:http:%2F%2Fwww.localsearch.com.au

It's probably because, as Donna indicated, you have so many pages. This happens when you have what are essentially search pages that are indexed. Stuff happens like having a page for plumbing and plumbers in the same city, for example.

In the short term, you can make sure that non-indexed pages are linked to across the site. Long-term you're going to want to think of a way to organize your site to make sure Google and users can find the most important pages. For example, add breadcrumbs back to the city page, and have the city page linking to your most important types of pages (even if they're still searches) for the city. Right now your city pages are just more search pages, which is a big wasted opportunity to layout which pages you most want people to find. Also make sure you figure out what's going on between these two "types" of the exact same page. There should only be one for the same results where possible:

http://www.localsearch.com.au/Gosford,NSW

http://www.localsearch.com.au/Search?where=Gosford,NSW

Issue 2:

Look at the "linked from" and figure out where these bad pages are linked to on the site. Google wouldn't make up a URL if someone wasn't linking to them, and my guess is your site is causing them. With a highly-dynamic site like yours it's usually either a crawl trap or a combination of dynamic URLs through a particular path that the server wasn't expecting.

Alternatively, and maybe more likely, Google has been trying to parse Javascript lately, and doing a rather poor job of it. I've seen Google try to find links in Javascript that were never intended to be links. You can either ignore these errors and wait for Google to get better, or you can dig into the JS with a dev and see what's causing Google to interpret something as a link. There's usually another way to put the code together where Google understands.

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