vouchercloud provide discounts for thousands of leading retailers and businesses, helping consumers save money when they shop. From restaurants and days out to electronics and fashion, they have vouchers for almost anything you can buy.
As an online-only company, organic search is at the heart of everything that vouchercloud do.
Voucher sites are, necessarily, in constant flux. Every week, hundreds of old vouchers expire, and hundreds of new ones become available – which can create an indexation headache.
vouchercloud face an ongoing challenge to ensure that only the pages they actually want indexed, are the ones Google choose to index. Google’s lack of transparency when it comes to reporting indexation makes this challenge even harder.
Simon Glanville, the in-house SEO manager at vouchercloud, explains how they use URL Profiler to shed some light on proceedings.
How vouchercloud use URL Profiler
URL Profiler is one of our go to SEO tools here at vouchercloud. It has a range of features that are incredibly useful and help save us a lot of time, but one feature that we particularly like is the ‘Google Indexation’ checker.
We use this tool to help us with two main tasks:
- Identifying which pages from our sitemaps are not in Google’s index
- Identifying pages that are in Google’s index that are not included in our sitemaps
Identifying which pages from our sitemaps are not in Google’s index
By submitting our sitemaps in Google Search Console, we can see how many pages are in our sitemaps and how many of those pages are in Google’s index. However, Search Console does not identify which specific pages are not in the index; it just gives us a snapshot.
By identifying these URLs, we can analyse why they haven’t made it into Google’s index. Perhaps they are set to ‘noindex’, are orphaned with no internal links or it could be something else.
Enter URL Profiler. We can easily import each sitemap into the tool in seconds. Once our list of URLs has been added, we simply tick ‘Google indexation’ and let the tool run in the background.
In no time at all, we can see whether or not each individual URL is in Google’s index. Handily, for pages that are in the index, we can also see when they were last cached by Google. This is useful to identify if certain pages aren’t being crawled very often.
Identifying pages that are in Google’s index that are not included in our sitemaps
Whilst we use the above method to identify pages that we want to get into the index, we also use the ‘Google Indexation’ checker to identify pages that we want to get out of the index.
If you search a site:domain query for a domain and notice that the number of pages in the index greatly exceeds the number of pages in the sitemaps, you’ve probably got some legacy content kicking around in the index. That legacy content could be harming your visibility if it’s thin or low quality, or could cause you problems in the future.
Unfortunately, scraping Google’s search results at scale is not really an option, so we can’t easily see all of the pages in the index.
However, if we can get a list together of legacy URLs, we can add them to URL Profiler and identify if they are in the index. Once we have list of legacy URLs that are in the index, we can make actions to speed up their removal.
At vouchercloud we’ve taken steps to control what we have in the index. URL Profiler has helped us to quickly find old content in the index, such as image attachment pages from our WordPress blog, old URLs with little unique content and redundant sub-domains. None of these types of pages are sending us any traffic or benefitting the user so we don’t want them in the index.
Summary
I am yet to find an alternative tool that gives me such valuable insights into our site’s indexation in Google. With a website such as ours which has thousands of pages, it is simply not an option to manually check indexation on an individual URL basis.
URL Profiler does all of this for you, and most importantly it does it extremely quickly, allowing you to use the data to make actions that will actually improve your SEO.
I would have no hesitation in recommending URL Profiler, and especially the ‘Google Indexation’ checker. Just make sure if you are checking a large number of URLs you use proxies!
